GLR January-February 2025

temperature of the sea), the microscopic moss mites, which reproduce asexually, or the most abundant of all organisms on earth, the fungi. By the time we have met all the many species that Davis introduces, we under stand that nature includes numerous meth

lines that humans do, I know no more about why I instinctively bonded with my aunt and uncle growing up. In the final scene of Fellini’s LaDolce Vita , everyone leaves the house party and walks out onto the beach, and the young queen, dressed as an angel, informs Mar

A LITTLE QUEER NATURAL HISTORY by Josh L. Davis University of Chicago Press 128 pages, $16.

ods of reproduction that are, to put it mildly, impossible to anthropomorphize. Indeed, somewhere between the Chinese shell ginger and the last chapter‘s barklice, the mind has so glazed over that one finds oneself reading sentences three or four times to understand what they’re saying. This book, while entertaining and brief, is not quite written for the lay reader. Al though the entries are brief and the English clear—and the pho tographs are a joy—one feels a bit thick when reading passages like the following. Sexual reproduction and mating comparability in fungi is largely controlled by the genes found at a point (known as a locus) on the genome known as the “mating type,” abbrevi ated to “MT.” These genes can produce different variations of a protein, meaning individual mating types are needed for suc cessful sexual reproduction. Roughly speaking, this can be thought of in similar terms to the genes on the X and Y chro mosomes in mammals, and so mating types are, to a certain extent, analogous to sex. One feels like Katharine Hepburn listening to Cary Grant in ologists determine, in the case of barklice, that it’s the female that penetrates the male by inserting a tube into the male’s lit tle package of sperm and nutrients, which the male allows the female to suck out after he ejaculates? I STARTED reading Davis’ book thinking it might bring a sort of comfort or reassurance that we’re not alone in the universe, or even shed light on the reason some of us are homosexual. However, as Davis writes: “This book is not a justification for queer behaviors—animal or otherwise—because these behaviors require no jus tification.” It’s more a cabinet of curiosities, or a l9th-century style traveling fair in which the bearded lady is used to entice the yokels into the tent. It shows us some of the incredible, mind-boggling sexual strategies in the known universe—queer in the original sense of the word—a long way from skirts and jockstraps. The moss mite, which reproduces asexually (which seems to the lay person a lot like cloning), has been doing so for 400 million years. But it sheds no light on the cause of homo sexuality. It doesn’t explain why the parents of my friend from Worcester produced four homosexual children, or why I think my favorite aunt (on my father’s side) and my favorite uncle (on my mother’s side) were gay. Having perused this extraor dinary collection of creatures that do not reproduce along the Bringing Up Baby . The general reader may even come to the conclusion that what he or she really needs to do is read Darwin, for it is evolution itself that one may not un derstand—a concept most of us think we get the gist of but whose details remain sketchy. Then, too, there is simply the drama of the scientific method. How did bi

cello Mastroianni that by the year 2000 everyone will be gay. That, obviously, has not happened—so why is homosexuality still seen by some as a threat to humanity? Two things, I suspect: people still think, like St. Thomas Aquinas, that homosexuality is neither natural nor reasonable, and, on a more visceral level, most people are repelled by sex that they themselves do not en gage in or desire. A Little Queer Natural History shows two things: a) that we are not the only animals to have homosexual sex; and b) that our version of sex is hardly the only one in na ture. The book begins with creatures that probably will encour age an anthropomorphic fondness in the reader and ends with organisms with which we cannot possibly identify. We’re like giraffes, gulls, bonobos, penguins, swans, other large apes, and sheep, but we do not resemble the Chinese shell ginger or the bluegill surf fish, the splitgill mushroom or, heaven help us, the Dungowan bush tomato. Sociobiologists have explained us as uncles and aunts who can help the younger generation, and thus further the interests of the heterosexual pair that founded the family, or even theo rized that homosexual behavior among the larger apes reduces about these matters—but there is a limitation to all this research. As Davis points out, we cannot ask the Bluebill sunfish or the common pill woodlouse how they feel about the sex they have, or whether domestic sheep consider themselves gay, or if there is pleasure or comfort in their orgasm. All of these questions are made more fraught by the current culture wars over trans rights, public bathrooms, and puberty blockers. Is the trans movement a harbinger of some sexual evo lution that we cannot foresee? A thousand years from now, will we have sex like Jane Fonda and John Phillip Law in the movie Barbarella , by simply touching fingertips? Are we still evolv ing in the matter of sex? Why does a man in 2025 have sex in essentially the same way as did a man 2,000 or more years ago? To religious conservatives, homosexuality is a dead end, a sign of decadence. Might it, and might the trans phenomenon, be something else? Sex research always seems to be finding new things, and, as Davis points out, scientific findings often have a political dimension. One finishes this book no nearer to an “explanation” for homosexuality, but one feels comforted and somewhat awestruck to know that we are not alone. As Cole Porter so wisely pointed out: “Electric eels, I might add, do it,/ Though it shocks them, I know./ Why ask if shad do it?/ Waiter, bring me shad roe!” their tendency to fight and kill each other, but we still don’t know why three or more percent of homo sapiens, or eight percent of rams, or most giraffes and domestic sheep exhibit same-sex desire. It may comfort us to know that male bonobos and giraffes have lots of sex—a certain mammalian loneliness was surely one reason for my desire to know

That homosexuality occurs in other mammals is the least of it; we are living in a universe of insane complexity.

TheG & LR

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