GLR January-February 2025

tersex, changeable sex, asexuality, bisexuality, bacteria-de pendent and temperature-dependent sex determination— which puts us a long way from the view dating back to St. Thomas Aquinas (the source of so many teachings of the Catholic Church) that homosexuality is neither reasonable nor natural. What is natural is astounding. Consider, for instance, the spotted hyena, a species that would seem to be a poster child for how not to procreate: the female has a clitoris so long and thick it resembles an erect penis, but being able to penetrate the male with it surely cannot make up for the painful fact that she gives birth through the same appendage. Consider the common pill woodlouse, which hosts a bacterium that insists for some reason on eliminating all male chromosomes, so that only females sur vive to mate with one another. Or the mangrove killfish, self fertilizing hermaphrodites that reproduce by themselves, or the Chinese shell ginger, which changes sex according to the time of day, or the common cockchafer, which looks like a cockroach with white fuzzy hair on its back and shoulders—a not inaccu rate description, no doubt, of what older gay men look like to younger ones. The latter forced l9th-century European entomol ogists to admit that two males were indeed having sex with one another. Or consider the male giraffes that live in same-sex colonies, or the forty percent of male Guianan cock-of-the-rocks (a bird so spectacular it must be gay), who engage in homosex ual behavior. Then there are the apes (the chimpanzees and bonobos), the domestic sheep, or the Western gulls, the Euro pean eels, the Green sea turtles (whose sex is determined by the

following weeks, and a re-examination of the photograph he had taken, he noticed two large black knobs at the base of the swans’ bills, which revealed that the two birds were both male. The picture that Ritchie took is now thought to be the first con firmed photograph of queer animals.” Finally, in 1956, a Canadian zoologist named Anne Innis Dagg “made history. At the age of 23, she became the first per son we know of to study wild animals in Africa scientifically.” After studying 125 mammalian species, she concluded that “adult homosexual behavior is widespread among male and fe male mammals.” In some populations of giraffes, over 94 per cent of observed behavior was homosexual. Not only did male giraffes literally neck, but they licked the genitals of their part ners, mounted them and ejaculated. Skeptical scientists argued that the giraffes’ dalliance was about dominance, not sex (though surely sex is often about dominance, at least among humans). A Little Queer Natural History is made up of short chap ters laced with tales of scientific discovery like these; but, along with some spectacular photographs, it mostly consists of descriptions of the reproductive strategies of various living species, from the European eel to the African yew tree to pen guins, apes, sheep, mushrooms, barklice, and flowering plants like the Chinese shell ginger. By the time we reach the latter, we are so far from human reproduction that one finds oneself wondering: “Just what is sex, anyway?” That’s because the creatures discussed—moss mites and cane toads, lizards and killifish, ash trees and fungi—are as foreign to us as creatures from another planet. While the book begins by drawing paral lels between human and animal homosexuality, it ends with forms of reproduction that cannot be compared to anything we do. That homosexuality occurs in other mammals is the least of it; we are living in a universe of insane complexity. The or ganisms chosen illustrate, among other things, parthenogene sis (virgin birth), androgenesis (male chromosomes only), environment-dependent sex determination, temporal sex, in

MARKED BY STR OF QUEER SUICIDE A A MOVING JOURNEY g justice for the .. “Stunnin , ele ant LISA DIEDRICH suicide.”— p g in its documenting of the , “Incredibly movin Patrick Anderson examines t have died by suicide. Author emotional tribute to those w blend of historical analysis an is aunique The Lamentations emotional, and embodied re the ho nd l d b di d i adwh g queerde i h grieve in the wake of lives go light the stories of those left and case studies, and brings newspaper articles, obituarie compiling narratives from history of queer suicide, one to to es, grief and queer survivial in t death; it’s a narrative of quee more than a meditation on is The Lamentations too soon. he er s i https://bit.ly/TheLamentati wake of profound loss.

RUGGLE AND BEAUTY AND A TRIBUTE TO LIVES THROUGH THE SHADOWS persistent narrative trope of queer beautifully written, and importan r nt

i ” ho came b ore through ethica , ef l a meditation about how to do .. LÁZARO LIMA epair.”—

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January–February 2025

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