Lesbian Seagulls with Lulu Miller

Fly with us, lesbian seagull. This week Radiolab’s Lulu Miller brings us a story of queer nature and scientists in denial, featuring seagulls, penguins, rams, swans, dolphins, and—maybe the gayest animal of all—humans.

To learn more about the seagulls, and hear much more of Lulu’s story, check out Radiolab’s amazing new episode.

You can find Lulu on Twitter here. 

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Links:

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Transcript

Sarah: I'm so excited to learn what the gayest animal is.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are talking with Lulu Miller about lesbian seagulls. We start off this episode talking about gay penguins, but this is a journey through the animal kingdom. And I also feel strongly that if in life you have the option to call a podcast episode ‘Lesbian Seagulls’, you just take it.

This is an episode we are releasing in conjunction with a RadioLab episode called, The Seagulls. and if you want to learn more and have an amazing time doing it, you should go listen. Here at You’re Wrong About, we like to celebrate Pride all year round. That's because that’s what happens when you make either a show about moral panics or a show about history. But we have some extra special episodes I think for you this month. And this one with Lulu is such a joy. I hope you experience the joy that we felt making it. This is one of our rare episodes that isn't a giant downer in one way or another. Savor the flavor. It won't happen for a while. 

Over on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions, we have some really fun bonus episodes for you. We have part two of our story of the Life and Times of Vicki Morgan, with our guest the irreplaceable Eve Lindley. And coming up later this month, we're going to talk about the Gay Agenda with Chelsey Weber-Smith. That is everything you need to know. Have a wonderful time on this joyride. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being queer. 

Welcome to an episode about those gay penguins. Lulu, hello. 

Lulu: Hello. As you know, I've listened to, I think every episode. I adore your show, which is like a no-brainer to everyone else who adores it.

Sarah: And there's just something crazy to me about this. Because truly, when I started caring about podcasts, it was like, you were the producer who I most knew by name and it was like, someday. Obviously never, but you were my like icon of what the medium could do. And now you're like, I like your show. And I'm like, oh my God. No, you don't, you're confused.

Lulu: No, I love it so much. You have done so many dishes with me. You have accompanied me during so many walks and runs and just, yeah. I don't know. I'm happy to be here. 

Sarah: Me and my pals have helped you wash so many dishes. And now today, Lulu. 

Lulu: I'm going to help you wash a big stack. Yes. Okay. So, gay penguins. What do you think of when you think of gay penguins? 

Sarah: So I think maybe the Central Park Zoo had two male penguins who hatched an egg together, and there was a kill children's book written about it called I think, Tango Makes Three. Is that right? 

Lulu: That is totally right. Yeah. Perfect. So in the late nineties there was this pair of chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo that began to take an interest in each other. They were both males, and they would hang out together. There was a year where one of them tried to incubate a rock, and they just kept pairing off. And so as Zookeepers thought, let's give them an egg from another couple, and they did. They incubated it, they cared for it, it hatched, they raised it. 

The zookeepers named that chick, Tango, and they were this great little family, and they were wonderful dads. And it captured many people's hearts, and it freaked many people out. And about five years later, in 2005, this couple, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, wrote a book called, ‘And Tango Makes Three’. Basically that story. It's filed as a nonfiction children's book, even though it's illustrated. And then so it became beloved, it won all these awards. It was also, according to the American Library Association, one of the most banned or contested books for about five years in our country. 

Sarah: Which is incredible, right? Because when you think about a banned book, now we all know what it means, but there was a time when you would be like, oh yeah, what books would a library not want to expose kids to? I don't know, like Mein Kampf or whatever. That's probably a good idea. No. The whimsical Penguin dads.

Lulu: Yeah. Yeah. I think for a lot of people this was the gateway story into an awareness of homosexual animals. For me, it definitely was. Now, I have to admit that my understanding of it when I heard about it was, oh, this is probably because of captivity. There probably aren't enough females, and the zoo probably turned them gay. 

And I was realizing I was queer right around the time this story came out. On one hand, I had a lot of affection for it. I loved it. But I also, while celebrating it in my heart, I immediately discounted it as not actually something that would occur in the wild. 

Did it strike you in any way in terms of your understanding of animals in general? Did it seem like a surprise? I'm just curious. 

Sarah: First of all, I think I have a pretty unscientific brain. I'm very much a sort of storyteller Bard type, and that's going to be my role when society collapses in about two years.

Lulu: You're going to be on like a plush ottoman with a necklace and a story to tell? 

Sarah: Yes. Or I'm going to be like Paul Bettany when he gets introduced in a Knight's Tale, just like walking naked because he's been robbed of all his clothes or something.

Lulu: Okay. Yeah. 

Sarah: One of the two. 

Lulu: But it's going to be useful. I'll try to find you. 

Sarah: Yeah. So that thought never occurred to me, and I remember when the story was in the news, and I think I heard about it in probably an NPR story about the book being banned. I felt like it connected in a great way as proof positive of, of course there should be gay marriage, a thing that seemed like this legal horizon that would be impossible to actually reach at the time because, look at the penguins. 

Doesn't it just make sense because you don't want everyone to reproduce, because that would just be a strain on resources. That was my theory, biologically. I don't know. It makes sense for nature to streamline it so that you have helpers as well as breeders. I don't know. 

Lulu: Yeah, some extra parents. Totally. That is a wildly great take. I love that. And it's interesting you brought up not having a quote unquote “scientific mind”, although I would argue you probably do. 

But I really did. I have a scientist father. If I was truly born into the religion of science, every explanation is scientific. And I think that in this case was a hindrance for me to understanding homosexuality's role in nature. Because in this very odd convergence of beliefs, the Darwinian perspective really bolstered this old religious idea that homosexuality was a quote, “crime against nature”. 

And when Darwin took hold, while in so many ways, those ideas ruptured old understandings of hierarchies and nature and how we all got here. In this weird way it confirmed that idea because if they're not having procreative sex and they can't pass on their genes, there'd be no reason for that trait to stay along. 

And so I think as a kid with a loose, evolutionary thinking, I weirdly took that on and I was just like, it might be fine in human society, but it doesn't make sense in nature. That just doesn't make sense. And so to see it in a zoo, I was like, that is wonderful, but that's got to be a byproduct of captivity.

Sarah: I do think it's a reasonable thing to wonder, generally. And then also that reminds me of one of the very early episodes we did on Alpha Males. Which is based on a study that was disavowed by the scientist who I think originally put forth this theory. Because it turned out that the alpha male effect observed in captive wolves is a feature of captivity. And also that the way they organize is into family units. So like the alpha male is the dad.

Lulu: Wow. Okay. So that's personally my starting place of understanding same sex mating and pairing and behavior in nature was that. And the story I want to tell is basically about gay penguins, but it's also about the story of a belief that is patently wildly untrue. And so that's really the story. And that belief is that there is no homosexuality in nature. So is that a journey you're willing to take with me? 

Sarah: Oh my gosh, yes. Let's do it. Where are we going?

Lulu: Okay, we're obviously going to the 13th century.

Sarah: Of course. Love it. Let's get some ale.

Lulu: And we're going to just look at the birthplace, arguably, of the belief. Which is with Thomas Aquinas.

Sarah: Classic.

Lulu: He wrote that homosexuality, which was called Unisexual Love at that time, obviously was a sin. Everyone's calling it a sin for a long time. But it was a special sin because you did not find it in nature. And he is really the one who began at this idea that it was unnatural, that it was a vice or a crime quote against nature. I think of him as someone who brought nature or animals into the equation as backup. 

Sarah: This is also such a wild standard to me. Because for example, bunnies eat their own young if you so much has look at them funny.

Lulu: Oh, yeah. We're so fractured when we see nature as pure and something to emulate, versus something to set ourselves. I know. Yeah. But I think the idea is like, this kind of Noah's Ark idea of this isn't just about beliefs, even the animals obey this rule. It's so sacred. 

Interestingly, before Aquinas, you do see science minded people talking about same sex pairing in nature. So Aristotle talks about it in pigeons, and Isidore of Seville in seventh Century talks about it in partridges, and there were observations because people were looking at the world. But once Aquinas declares this against nature thing… 

Okay, so on one hand, Thomas Aquinas says this, that phrase, ‘crime against nature’ is very catchy. It catches like wildfire. And that's when you see it go into laws all over Europe and within 50 years, Sodomy goes from being basically legal everywhere, if not frowned upon, but legal, to a crime that is punishable by death. So from 1250 to 1300. And often the term ‘crime against nature’ is how homosexuality, again, mostly talking about male-on-male sex, because who cares about women having sex. That's not even valid enough to regulate. But again, that phrase goes into the law. 

But the really interesting thing is it also slips into science. Yeah, so there's like about 400 years where you don't really see anything, the observations of same sex behavior and nature stops. Then you see in the 1700s, there's this one guy who notices it maybe in some birds. In the 1800s, there's a bunch of German people noticing it in this one species of beetles, May beetles. 

Sarah: Animals continued to have same sex relationships for hundreds of years. But anyone who saw it was just like, I assume, better not write that down. That's not a thing. I'm seeing it, but it's not a thing. I think we really underestimate how beliefs at the time can dictate our understanding of science. 

Lulu: Yeah. And so basically, this goes on and on, such that by the 1970s, the scientific record basically still confirms Aquinas's random declaration that homosexuality is absent from the natural world. 

And I do want to geek out for a second, if you'll have this, on what I'm thinking about like the taxonomy of suppression. 

Sarah: Oh my God, yes. 

Lulu: Okay. So what does that really mean? How do we go from the 1200s to the 1970s, 700 years.

Sarah: From Gregorian Chants to the Hustle. 

Lulu: Yeah, exactly right? Yeah. Oh, God. See, now if this was Radiolab, we could score just that line and it would be great, but it would go…. *sings the Hustle*

Sarah: There you go. We did it. We did it. 

Lulu: Yeah, so how does that actually happen? And now is where I pay blessed homage, you're going to hear the size of this book. *slam* This is a book, I want to pay homage to this guy Bruce Bagemihl, who published this book in 1999. Best book. It's called Biological Exuberance. And there's a very flirty little peacock with a blue face looking at you on the cover. And then it's called, Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. And he is this scientist who did this methodologically, utterly perplexing thing. How do you find out why things aren't on the record if you don't have any records? 

So bless him, bless his work, and also bless this newer book called, Queer Ducks by Elliot Schrefer, which is basically the YA version of that book, updated for today. It's an easy reader for a kid’s book that just came out about the natural world of animal sexuality. So bless the two of them. 

Okay, so the four things. So number one is what I'm calling the Noah's Ark bias. Which is basically, some animals look really different by sex, like peacocks, right? You've got the showy male or lions, the males got the mane. 

Sarah: A lot of males with like big, ornaments that make them look wider.

Lulu: Yeah, exactly. Or ducks, the mallard with his fancy green head. So totally, that's called fancy head sexual dimorphism. That's when you look very different based on your sex. But a ton of animals are what's called monomorphic. They look the same, sexually monomorphic, squirrels, seagulls, chipmunks, bunnies, they look the same. Maybe if you can go get your finger in their parts and you're a scientist, you might be able to know. But if you've been told they're all heterosexual, you notice them mating as an everyday person or a scientist, you're probably going to just assume that they are heterosexual. So it might be happening in front of your face, but then you don't document it as such because you can't see it. You just don't notice because you're assuming, and you don't bother to check. Okay. So that's number one. 

Number two is what you mentioned, which is basically self-suppression. You're a scientist. You definitely see it. You don't want to write it down. 

Sarah: You're like, I don't want everyone to call me nuts. I'm not going to talk about this.

Lulu: There's a few cases that Bagemihl was able to write about and find out about. So one is really famous and striking one is this guy Valerius Geist, who actually only died about a year ago. He was a researcher, big in the sixties, on wild sheep. So rams with the lovely ram horns. They were so gay. They were just mating all the time. And also, requisite science reporter note on language. I'm saying gay. I might use lesbian, you should not use that. Those are human terms, we should not apply them to animals. And generally speaking, I don't. We say things like ‘same sex mating’, ‘same sex pairing’, ‘same sex behavior’, ‘homosexuality’. But this is a colloquial show and it's fun to say, so I'm saying it. There you go. But you all understand.

Sarah: We're having like our after-class beer talking about all this.

Lulu: Yeah. Yes. Okay. So footnoted. Okay. But yeah, the rams. And not just every now and then. The amazing thing he saw is that about 8%, so 1 in 12 rams, will only mate with males. 

Sarah: Aw. Broke Back Rams.  

Lulu: He wrote this honking publication about their behavior and left that out.

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Lulu: Yeah. And he said to some other scientists it just was seeing such magnificent beasts doing something so terrible, I just couldn't. So he later, toward the very end of his life, admitted that he just completely omitted it because it was basically so disgusting or unfathomable to him.

Sarah: Can I say too, like this is a weird bit of anthropomorphism or whatever? But like when I think about being a ram up high in the Rockies, the wind in my wool, my big horns curling around, I am having sex with whatever other ram wants to have sex with me. 

Lulu: Yeah, so that, yeah, so that's, I think one move was like, I can't defile this creature. I just can't. 

Sarah: So it's totally the human cultural bias of it would be terrible to say that the rams are doing what they're actually doing. And it's like, the rams don't care.

Lulu: Exactly. So that's one case where the person lived long enough to fess up to it. Then again I keep just invoking him because he's so amazing, this guy Bruce Bagemihl, for his book. Which is basically the first ever kind of collection back in the nineties of everything that was known to science in terms of homosexuality. The way that he found a lot of it was by just cold calling scientist after scientist and just being like, “Hi, have you ever actually seen homosexual behavior you never published on?” And tons of them said yes, but they just, they hadn't because either there was such resistance, or they were young researchers and they thought people would doubt them. 

And so a lot of it for the living studies, he just got by literally cold calling them and be like, “Are there any notes?” And it was just dozens upon dozens. So that makes you think about history, all the people we can't know. But then also earlier, in the 1700s, 1800s, and earlier than that. Like, the anti-sodomy laws were so terrifying. You could be punished by death. You could go to jail for your life if you published on this. 

And there's a few times where people did either have public accounts of it, lectures at a zoological society or publish it with this kind of mysterious behavior, kind of couching, people would question you and there'd be outcry. What is your unnatural interest in this? And if you would push it too hard, it could be very dangerous for your career, especially if you were single or young.

Sarah: It's like the Red Scare, it feels like.

Lulu: Yeah. Yeah. Like its own little rainbow scare version. Yeah. Yeah. So that's number two in our taxonomy: self-suppression. Number three: overt suppression, just people saying no. So there's tons of story. Again, some of these we can't know because someone tried to publish, a publisher said no, and we never know. But there's a few ones where they've been caught. 

So Levick was this famous British explorer. In 1911 he goes to Antarctica and what does he look at? Penguins. And what does he see them doing? Lots and lots of homosexual sex. Males mounting with each other, raising chicks together. Not in a zoo, in the wild on the tundra. He dabbles in self suppression. He is so puzzled and shocked that he writes his observations in Greek so that he wouldn't traumatize the young researchers. He's like, depraved behavior. And so he writes it in Greek. 

A couple years go by and then he intends to talk about it and publish a little pamphlet. He publishes this pamphlet on the behavior of these Adelie Penguins, and he wants to present this before the Natural History Museum in England. And these two editors, these curators of different exhibits there look at it and say, we will have this cut out. And the researchers found that he intended to publish it and then they were just like, you can't, it will be too scandalizing. And they literally found the document that was scratched out and it said, stamped not for publication. And then that keeps happening. Again, I don't know all the examples, but Bagemihl was able to find this one of a report in the 1980s on homosexuality in killer whales, and the US government redacted those sections. Yeah, it was like a government funded report and they redacted those sections.

Sarah: They were like, it's fine for the killer whales to be kept in tiny tanks performing little tricks until they're driven into a homicidal frenzy. But the kids can't know that they’re gay.

Lulu: Yes! Okay. So now we've got the assumption it's happening in front of your eyes, Noah's Ark, but you don't even bother to think it is. You got self-suppression: I see it, but I don't want to tell anyone. You've got overt suppression: I'm feeling courageous. I've got to report on it. Publications are like, nope, we won't publish it. 

And then finally, the fourth part of this is you get through all of that, and you get to publication. And I don't have a catchy name for this, but maybe you can help me think of one. I'm calling it like the judgey Mc Judgey magic trick vanishing act where you use such judgmental language about what you're seeing. You're literally using words like unnatural, abnormal, aberrant, perverse, you use language which magically keeps the belief intact. And so I'll give you a very quick rundown of a few of my favorite article titles. 1896, ‘Sexual Perversion in Male Beatles’, 1908 ‘Sexual Inversion in Animals’, 1922 ‘Disturbances of the Sexual Sense in Baboons’, 1972 ‘Aberrant Sexual Behavior in the South African Ostrich’. Really picturing ostriches having sex. 

Sarah: Like this ostrich, he's going around sending unsolicited dick pics to coworkers.

Lulu: Yeah. Cloaca pics. And then finally the one that takes the cake is a note on the apparent ‘lowering of moral standards in the Leopard Adoptera’, which is a butterfly. 

Sarah: Oh my God, come on. 

Lulu: It's hilarious. But it's a real muscular use of language. 

Sarah: You and I have both spent probably too many hours of our life reading academic articles. And that's such an interesting style of writing because there are real rules for how you put forth an idea. It's not normal writing, it's not the way you would write for an audience of people who are not forced to be reading this as part of their studies or their community. It would seem that there's a limited amount of bias or subjectivity you can convey. But I think what you realize, the more comfortable you get with it is that you can express all the bias you want. You just have to cloak it in the right kind of vocabulary and verb tenses.

Lulu: Absolutely. Yeah. It's this secret reality of science, which really tries to shatter beliefs and use language and methodologies that help scientists to see through the beliefs of the day towards something approaching reality. But it's loaded with all these beliefs, and you can use the jargony term and you can say all these things that make it look quote unquote “objective”. But these papers were just dripping with judgments. And I don't know if it's a desire or just an impulse or whatever, but to preserve this idea that fell out of an Italian Friar’s mouth. People bending over backwards with their language to preserve it. 

My interest in this whole topic, which my wife eye rolls about, she calls qu-animal. She's like, why do you just love queer animals? Everywhere I look, there's qu-animal books around. And I've been just fallen down this rabbit hole for the last two years because again, I just had a belief about it. Didn't think it happened in nature. And then I started to see that it did, and my mind was privately blown. 

But anyway, my interest in looking into this came about because I guess I just wondered if you have so many laws all over the world, and many of which are still standing that prohibit homosexuality based on the explicit idea that it's a quote “crime against nature”, does an awareness of homosexuality in nature threaten those laws? Does it have any effect? Just to have that justification so clearly refuted. 

And so there was a group of people who were also thinking about that back in the 1890s. And there was this kind of collection of German scientists, led by Magnus Hirschfeld, who maybe you've heard of, maybe not. But he was this doctor who was gay, and he did all this radical organizing. And he was like a Kinsey, pre-Kinsey. He founded this place in Berlin called The Institute for Sexual Science, where he studied the range of human sexuality in humans. But then he also had a library that looked at nature. And it was just this place where he was like, what do people actually do? And he was gay, and he was a big proponent of the idea that human sexuality exists on a spectrum. Being gay should not be a crime. There's nothing wrong with it. It happens. And he based his ideas on science, and he was a hugely political figure. He did tons of organizing to try to get more and more people to abolish the anti-sodomy laws, which was called, Paragraph 175. And his catchphrase, his mission statement was ‘justice through science’. 

So his whole idea was like, look, we can't call this stuff unnatural if it's natural, if it's found in every human population, every culture, in all animals, in making the case that homosexuality was natural and not a medical issue, not a sin, not a mental illness, whatever. He was an early person saying there's a biological basis. And so in his institute, which also was like an early trans clinic, there was a library, there were lectures, and there was actual medical treatment. He did some great things. He prescribed community to trans people who were lonely, come hang out. I love that. That's forward thinking. But he also dabbled in this horrific experiment where he basically was like, there were some gay people who said they didn't want to be gay, so he helped arrange some testicle transplants from straight people to gay. Put on some straight balls.

Sarah: Which seems, aside from everything else, also very dangerous. 

Lulu: Yeah. No, that was bad, justice through science can lead you down some really horrific places. So like Magnus Hirschfeld is a complicated person, but he was revolutionary in terms of being outspoken. But a lesser-known guy in his kind of posse for a while, but his name is Ferdinand Karsch and he was the director of the Zoological Museum in Berlin. He was an entomologist. He studied spiders and gall wasps. He was basically the first person to make a collection of all these footnotes. And that thing we were talking about, about the suppression and the marginalization, he was the first person to do what I think was like a real act of activism via collection. So he published this odd little pamphlet in 1900 that was called, Päderastie und Tribadie Among Animals based on Literature. [Päderastie und Tribadie bei den Tieren auf Grund der Literatur]

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Sarah: Which is basically homosexuality among animals based on literature. And he did this huge lit review. He used his scientific fluency. He'd just been a science-y scientist for 20 years, and he looked back at all those footnotes and all those accounts, accounts where missionaries were describing it as monstrous or horrible. And he insulated himself against critiques that he was making it up or he had an unnatural interest, like they was nothing he observed. 

But all things other people had said. And he put out this pamphlet with like almost 70 examples from, again, bugs, butterflies, rams, all the entire animal kingdom. I feel like the pamphlet itself was this technicolor reputation against the idea that it's a crime against nature. He was like, it is in nature, it is in every species. 

And he put this out, and Magnus Hirschfeld published it and brought it into his organization. And in a lot of ways they were really successful. They got a petition going to abolish the anti-sodomy law. Really famous people like Einstein and Thomas Mann signed it. They made all this headway. And into the 1920s, it was looking like Parliament was going to abolish the bans on gay sex. And then, I don't know if you're aware of anything that happened in Germany in the early thirties. 

Sarah: For a while it was Liza Minnelli and Michael York hanging out. And then the political situation really escalated. 

Lulu: And so then the Nazis take over. On May 6, 1933, they come to the Institute for Sexual Science where all these papers, many of them unpublished, all these studies on human sexuality, on the animal kingdom were housed, they burned the whole thing down. And so we lost, there are some things that remain, but there are people today who are looking for this lost archive of this kind of OG archive of homosexuality in nature. And so much of it was just lost. 

Okay. So now I'm going to take you to the study that finally broke through all this muscular suppression. 

Sarah: I'm so excited to learn what the gayest animal is. 

Lulu: Okay. So I don't know that it's truly the gayest animal, but it is a very gay one. So any other guesses besides bonobo?

Sarah: Is it a mammal? 

Lulu: No. 

Sarah: Huh? Okay. Is it a fish? No, I'm just kidding. Fish don’t exist.

Lulu: Yeah. Nice. Okay. Here's a hint. Yeah. Guard your french fries on the beach.

Sarah: Oh my God. Is it seagulls? 

Lulu: Yes. Yeah.

Sarah: That's so great. 

Lulu: Yeah. So basically this is like what the Radiolab piece is mostly about. And I talked to this sweet couple they're not a couple anymore, but they were a married couple at the time, Molly Warner and George Hunt, and George was a seagull ornithologist and Molly was his wife between anthropology jobs, so she joined him on this expedition.

Sarah: Was the expedition just to a parking lot? Because that's where I always see seagulls. 

Lulu: Basically. It was an island that was a parking lot. It's Santa Barbara Island, 30 miles off the coast of. Southern California that basically is a rock. There's no trees. It's just this barren hunk of rock. And there's a wild gull colony out there, the Western Gull, larus occidentalis. 

George is a young ornithologist. He goes out there to study this colony and he's been studying gulls on the east coast for a long time, 10 years, maybe at this point. The funny part is he has to teach his class because he'd just been hired at UC Santa Cruz. So he's like, Molly, can you stay on this rock in the middle of the ocean for three weeks, by yourself and do my job for me? And she's like, I guess. 

So she's out there taking observations on when they may and who's laying eggs with who. And in short, she sees that a bunch of the nests, about 10% of the nests have way too many eggs in them, double the amount of eggs. She radios to George. She's like, there's something really weird going on out here. He comes out and they look at the birds and they realize, which you can't tell because seagulls are sexually monomorphic, they have to do an actual dissection on the original pair to confirm it, but they are both females. 

Sarah: Wait, is this what the song Lesbian Seagull is about? 

Lulu: Yes. You know that song?! I have that queued up in a document for you to play! Yes. Okay. Wait, how do you know that song? 

Sarah: One of my best friends' moms was a big Beavis and Butthead fan. 

Lulu: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. So Beavis and Butthead adapted the original 1978-ish song by Tom Wilson. But yes, that's where this comes from. Basically, they realize that 10% of the birds on this island are female-female paired. They're mating, they're going through the whole courtship, mount, kiss the cloacas. They then build their nest together. They take turns incubating and raising the eggs. And it's just like one in every 10 nests is two moms. And that's just what they're rocking and rolling. 

And so George and Molly, they freak out. George is so excited. He loves seabirds. He's never seen anything like this. It's so wild. And again, there was nothing on the scientific record, like he's a dutiful scientist. So he's really excited to just publish on something so surprising. So they collect their data, they write up their paper, they submit it to an ornithology journal called The OC. And remembering what you learned about history, does the journal accept it? 

Sarah: Of course not. And I love how innocently he was like, “Oh my gosh, you guys, what a leap forward for science. Everyone will be so excited to hear about the lesbian seagulls!” And of course they're like… because we talk a lot on the show about pseudoscience, which is its own nightmare. But then with science-science, you're like it comes down to whatever the people in power are willing to believe based on the particular social agenda that they have been instructed to reproduce. And people who tend to be in charge are often white men who are scared of everything. So, yeah.  Straight ones, too.

Lulu: Yeah. So they're basically, they say we would need so much more data to publish this. I'm sorry. 

Sarah: How much data do you need on the seagulls?

Lulu: George is like, oh, okay. I'll get more data. So they go back and spend the next three years collecting data. They discover it's happening on the next island over, which isn't just next door, it's 40 miles away on Anacapa Island. 

Sarah: It's not just the lesbian seagull neighborhood.

Lulu: It's not just one Isle of Lesbos Gulls, it's two. So now, at this point, they've had research assistants help them. They've got photos, they've got thousands of these nests that are paired female to female. And so he's like, screw the fringy Ornithological journal, I'm submitting to the big boy. So he submits it to Science and Science, the magazine, accepts it and it's a big paper. It drops and like the world goes crazy. So George, he's like a sweet bumbling or mythologist and he's maybe I should have expected it, but I didn't. 

Sarah: I feel like this needs to be a movie, but who would you cast?

Lulu: Honestly, Robin Williams with a beard would've been a good George. He has that look. Kind of a young Sigourney Weaver. So I don't know who today’s Sigourney Weaver is. 

Sarah: But this is if you were to make this movie in like 1989. 

Lulu: In the eighties, it's Robin Williams and Sigourney Weaver. 

Sarah: That's perfect. 

Lulu: So July 1977 is a very interesting, charged, particular moment for the gay rights movement in the United States. A woman near and dear to your heart has just had her first big win in Miami Dade County, Anita Bryant.

Sarah: Yeah. And to be clear, by ‘near and dear’ we mean that I talk about her in live shows and then I'm like, “Do you guys know she's still alive? Shouldn't she be dead yet?” 

Lulu: She is still alive. And I'm sure you talk about this; her granddaughter married a woman.

Sarah: I haven't been talking about it, but carry on, you warrior.

Lulu: Okay. So anyway, so Anita Bryant, she had been a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, orange juice, and then she would become the spokesperson and sort of galvanizer of this huge anti-gay lash back and it was like a lash back in response to some pretty decent strides that had been made in the seventies. The declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, more and more anti-sodomy state laws coming down, city ordinance is going up to give gay people protections, gay pride parades, like whatever. It had been a good moment. 

And Anita Bryant, she has this moment where she's like, “I don't think we should be so comfortable with all these homosexuals’ gaining rights and protections.” And so she starts ‘Save the Children’, her campaign to save the children from homosexuals. And so she started this organization, and she's a phenomenal organizer, and she galvanized people to come out, sign a petition to get that off the city ordinance, and then they come out in a vote, two to one against gay rights and gay protections. 

But one of the cornerstones of her argument is this idea of reminding people about the unnaturalness of homosexuality. So she's known to say, “Even barnyard animals don't do the disgusting things homosexuals do”. She again and again one of her big lines, and this is the seeds of the parental rights argument that is dangerous for the children, she invokes this weird Darwinian evolutionary thing that's like, “You don't see it in animals. This isn't just non-beliefs, animals obey it. And also because homosexuals can't reproduce, they have to recruit.” It was really effective at this moment when a country was starting to change its mind about the place of gays in society and queer people in society, and it really worked. It was really effective. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. Do you feel like we're in a similar moment now where there was this brief period, specifically for trans people and trans kids, the brief moment of increased visibility and rights, and then the backlash against that is so much bigger.

Lulu: It's so similar and the arguments are the same. The question in voters' hands was the LGBTQ community deserves protection. They deserve protections from being discriminated against. And then she's saying no, not only do they not deserve protections, we need to be protected from them. This just invoking the danger, danger to children, and then just this sober sounding like they are scientifically gay, animals don't do it. Nothing against them, but because they can't reproduce, they got to recruit. So they're coming for your children. There was this almost science-y flavored assertion, and that's Aquinas.

Sarah: And we love the flavor of science. 

Lulu: Yeah. The flavor of science is great and it's powerful. And at that point, the scientific record confirmed her assertion, still in ‘77. So she had just won, and two weeks later, George and Molly's study drops showing some pretty natural looking evidence of homosexuality in nature. So the gay community freaks out. They see this, they rejoice. 

Sarah: Is this the kind of thing where it's like the AP is like, “new study shows that 10% of seagulls are lesbians”?

Lulu: Yeah, in a way that an ornithological study isn't usually, it becomes a news story. Time does a thing on it. It's on TV news. Again, just because it so went against the beliefs of the day. It wasn't just one creature, it was two islands, it was hundreds of birds.

Sarah: I’m just picturing all the lesbian seagulls flying to Washington being like, “You can deny one of us, or even a dozen of us, but not all.” And they're seagulls, so they're very rude.

Lulu: *Squawk* Can I send you something by email? 

Sarah: Yeah, please do. 

Lulu: Okay. There's a couple of them. There are a couple different ones, but they're these cartoons of seagulls pooping in Anita Bryant's eye. So this one was in the Boston Globe. And the bottom says, ‘news item research team finds 14% of female seagulls off California coast are homosexuals’. 

Sarah: The gulls are alright. Yeah, so this one, the Boston Globe one, we have Anita Bryant having a glass of Florida orange juice and scowling at a seagull that is innocently flying away, but she's got her hand on her eye. So it's interesting that we know that the seagull shit on Anita Bryant's face, but perhaps the paper felt that it was unwise to depict the actual shit. And then the caption says, ‘news item - research team finds 14% of female seagulls off California coast are homosexuals’. So really, this is a politically motivated thing for the seagull. I love that. The seagull is protesting.

Lulu: And so I think you see this little moment where the seagull becomes like a mascot in the gay pride movement just for a second. 

Sarah: That's so amazing. 

Lulu: There are plays written about the lesbian seagulls?

Sarah: Really?

Sarah: Yeah. Pamela Gray, who's a very legit screenwriter. She'd go on to do Music of the Heart, which is a Meryl Streep film. She, in her early days, wrote this play inspired by it, which was about a group of lesbians who go out to see it and commune with the seagulls. She called the play Super-Normal Clutches, which is the scientific jargon for when a nest has an extra amount of eggs. And she said when she heard that term, she was like, that defines a lesbian relationship. 

Sarah: This also reminds me that one of the classic things about rats, that to me shows how advanced their society is, female rats when they're living in a community together, they will naturally synchronize their cycles. So that when they have babies, they put them in a big communal nest and take care of them together.

Lulu: And just share the childcare labor. That’s so great.

Sarah: Which I've always thought of as them being like communist rats. But now I'm like, how gay are those rats? 

Lulu: Yeah. It's pretty gay of them. They're gay communists. Even better. 

Sarah: We want to claim historically, scientifically that humans need to organize themselves the way we see in the natural world. But really we're picking and choosing the stuff that supports capitalism, and monarchy, and Christianity, and whatever. And then if we actually were to take more cues from the natural world, it would be like, what if we had more communal child rearing? Because what we have now is just a nightmare for most people. 

Lulu: Totally. I think, yeah, we cherry pick the examples we want to confirm our beliefs.

Sarah: We love monogamous animals. The whole mate for life. Yeah. Animals. The Jack Donahue line, “Irish Catholics mate for life, like swans, like drunk, angry, swans.”

Lulu: Okay, so that's the happy reaction. Now on the other side, you scanned through a couple of these, there are all kinds of nasty editorials. George said he got calls from around the world, like in India. Because there's so many laws still standing in the legal code at that time, even in the States, over 30 U.S. states still had anti-sodomy laws that were classified in the legal code as a crime against nature. And so to see such an extensive example of queerness in nature was what people wanted to talk about. And so he got angry calls, people questioning his intentions and his interest in this. He thinks, and a number of queer historians I've talked to, think that the fact that they were a straight, married couple helped insulate them maybe against worse. 

Sarah: I'm sure. Yeah. Or increase the level of credibility they had at the outset. 

Lulu: Yeah. And increase their ability to just double down, get more data. They did get a divorce shortly after. It had nothing to do with that. They're still friends. But anyway. And there were reverberations all the way up to Congress. So shortly after this was published, he got a grant from the NSF to keep studying it because he was really interested, and conservative Congressman freaked out. 

And you can see there's this congressional assembly in 1978, shortly after. I looked through the transcript and like all these big, fancy senators or congressmen are talking about this tiny gull study. The gay gulls. And the infighting, the resistance to him getting funds to study this was so intense that they held up the NSF budget for 10 days. They held up the release of funds. 

Sarah: There's a lot of blue-sky projects out there that cost like millions and billions of dollars. And we can't learn about the seagulls?

Lulu: The funds eventually were released to George. And I think that represented a huge moment for science. Because when he was allowed to keep studying this, he got the cred in science, he got the cred in the funding. And again, his paper, if you noticed the title, there was nothing like “weird, aberrant female gulls”. It was just “female gulls”. And I think it was the first time that the scientific establishment really took homosexuality in nature seriously, endorsed the study of it, and you really see in its wake, this was the open the floodgates moment. This was the study that turned the key and allowed homosexuality to be studied. 

And in its wake, now it's been nearly 50 years, there've just been thousands of scientifically verified accounts of homosexuality in nature across all species, all kinds of things. The gay penguins, males will mate with males and pair with males, females with females. And one of the ideas is that that is actually super advantageous to the colony. Because let's imagine you have a little colony and some seal or polar bear comes and eats seven of them. If you then have a bunch of creatures that will like, pair with anybody that's going to increase the survival of the offspring. 

Sarah: I love that. And also bisexuality feels famously erased as a concept. It's something that Sex and the City didn't believe in, not that we look to Sex in the City for advanced queer theory, but it was very influential and it was considered very scandalous in its time. And I don't know, I feel like there's this view of bisexuality as fundamentally greedy. And really it's no, it's actually about being a switch hitter in the game of life.

Lulu: It's actually about openness to all forms of charm and beauty. We're currently at this understanding where a lot of animals will just do it for pleasure, but then there sometimes are other evolutionary gains like the hunting alliances. It might help you hunt better, but chimps also will have homosexual sex, the males will engage in fellatio with each other when things are tense, and it helps resolve conflict, which I love. 

And also in bonobos, like it can help resolve conflict resolution during resource scarcity. So let's say a little bit of honey shows up. You might fight to the death for that. But instead a little bit of honey shows up, they all have sex with each other. They're flooded in an oxytocin bath. And then in their post-coital, calm, bonded feeling, they pass the honey around and share. So it helps them share better, which again, helps the strength of a colony. If you're not all tearing each other apart and you're all chill and you're able to cooperate, that's really good for fitness. 

One of the researchers who noticed same sex in chimps, her name is Christine Webb. She said the hardest part about all this has been confronting the idea that sexual behaviors always have to have some kind of reproductive function. So again, she kept confronting other scientists saying, this doesn't make sense, it's a paradox. And she said it reflects the dominant model of evolution that emphasizes selfish competition and the survival of the fittest. But what about cooperation? Social bonds are really important for wellbeing, too. Managing conflicts, managing stress and tension are really important for fitness. We've been fixated on one side of the story. 

But what's interesting now though, is when you take all this stuff in cumulative, and again, there doesn't have to be, but the scientific understanding right now is that there is a bisexual advantage because it's basically like there are all these gains to be had at almost no cost. In humanity there's a cost because we made up these barriers and these social prohibitions. But in the natural world, there's very little cost to swinging both ways. 

And so the belief now is that there is an advantage to being bisexual. It might not help with reproduction, the moment of reproduction, but it will help afterwards for a colony, for the rearing of offspring. And so why not? This was revolutionary to me in the last couple years, and it's been a paradigm shift from my understanding of literally where I fit in nature. Which has been really cool. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that you're like part of nature. And also this idea of that we don't have to lean too hard on this argument that like queerness is a morally meaningful position and helps hold society together because you shouldn't have to help hold society together to have human rights. But on the other hand it is true. 

Lulu: Exactly. Yes. And that I go back to like my unsung German guy, Ferdinand Karsch, who, he's not a perfect person, but that guy who did that initial compilation showing how it's part of nature. His whole thing was like, and I don't need a reason why. You don't need an advantage. You don't need a reason. It's a part of being here. 

And I see the sort of wrongheaded-ness of my satisfaction of seeing evolutionary advantages. But I don't know. There's something really fun about being like, homosexuals can be good parents. They're often better parents. They're for the good of the community. Which I think is a retaliation of the low thrumming message otherwise. Don't say gay. Don't let your children see a gay. There's all this messaging otherwise, and so there's something very validating about being able to scientifically point to the wrong headedness of that. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Completely. Yeah. And then the natural conversation to follow that up with is like, well, on the one hand, if you have to convince people of your humanity, then you will never convince them of your humanity, because if they need to be convinced… They should just know that already. But on the other hand, maybe the point of this is that it's not for them, it's for you and it's for you. People who for whatever reason, needed to be told they were good for society. 

Lulu: I love that. And actually again, my wife, Grace, the whole time she was watching me fall down this rabbit hole, that was her opposition. She was like, I'm worried. I think that the fact that you're so jazzed about this is because you still want to convince them. And don't even engage in that fight. Don't even go there. 

There's a niceness as Elliot put it, Eliot Schrefer, he was like, there can be loneliness, a feeling of loneliness to being LGBTQ, and there's something nice to see that it's part of our biological heritage and future. Nature is so much wilder than our beliefs and rules for it. What else don't we know? What else haven't we seen because we haven't looked? 

And a happy coda, just a funny one… So Anita Bryant back in the eighties, the fact of the gull study, as fun as it felt for the queer community, didn't really have any impact on her. She was asked about it in an interview in Playboy, the journalist gotcha-ed her and was like, “You say gayness is unnatural, but they're animals in nature that are gay.” And she was like, “I've never heard of that. And I still know it's a crime against nature because homosexuals can't procreate. So nature still doesn't want it to be, and it's an abomination and an empirical perversion.” So it didn't really stop her, if anything. She had more successes, there were more cities that dialed back their protections. 

And then in Bowers v. Hardwick, judges voted 5-4 to keep homosexuality criminalized, and they still invoked the unnaturalness of it. So it didn't really have an effect right away. But over time, the more and more there was science, in Lawrence v. Texas, there was a brief filed by the APA (the American Psychological Association) which said this should not be a crime against nature. This is a part of every human culture, every civilization, and the entire animal kingdom. And then the book they cited was this one by Bruce, which has a huge section on the seagulls with illustrations. And whether or not a single judge ever saw that, read that, cared about it, probably not. The case was won on very different things. I love knowing that like the seagulls were there that day, cheering, they were there. 

Now the scientific coda to all this, I was trying to get Radiolab to actually pay for me to go out to Santa Barbara Island and take my wife and kids and go camping there. So we could be nesting under their broods with our brood and their brood and the community. And then George was like, the same sex pairing has died off and now it's a heterosexual island.

Sarah: No! That's so terrible. 

Lulu: Yeah. And he thinks, he doesn't know, he's not positive, but his theory is that back in the seventies, DDT and DDE was getting into the gull. The females were able to flush it out through their eggs, but the males weren't, so they were dying off. So the females had to pair with each other. AKA, it actually may have been a gay for the stay fluke. But it opened the door, but it actually may have been a fluke. Anyway, and so that's like the wild ending. 

Sarah: That is a last second twist. That's amazing. 

Lulu: I know. When I found I was so deflated and humbled, but then I also realized, okay, thou shalt not find their worth or belonging based on animals. So I try now to celebrate them, but not derive too much of my own spiritual belonging from them because they should just be allowed to be animals and I need to not do exactly what the other side was doing, which was pointing to them as proof of an argument. Bringing them into an argument that they don't have to be a part of.

Sarah: You're like, I'm a seagull. I would like a french fry.

Lulu: Anyway, so that's my penguin story. Happy Pride. 

Sarah: Ah, Happy Pride, happy penguin story. I feel moved by the spirit for whatever reason, because the journey of my sexuality in the show has been very interesting. Because I think that for years I never have identified as asexual, but I just did not have sex with or date anyone for a really long time. Just didn't want to do it. And on the show and especially in the early years, or when I was on Twitter, I would occasionally be like, “I'm a straight woman”, as a straight woman, like straight women do. They always mention it. 

And it's not true you guys. And you all knew before me. You knew years before me. Everyone for this whole time has been like, “That Sarah seems pretty gay.” And I've been like, no, it's no. So I’m allowing myself to see myself and exist as a bisexual woman, and it has felt really good. And I also as a joke at the start of this year was like, I'm on strike and I'm not going to think about cis straight men at all. And that really accelerated things, because it turns out I don't miss them very much. And like we all know, I've got my feelings for particular guys like Gene Siskel. Both the doors are open. But it's just like…

Lulu: Both the doors are open. 

Sarah: No one will be surprised, but you should just tell them. And this is my moment, I'm telling you. And it's because of the seagulls. And Lulu, thank you for making this nest for me to be hatched in.

Lulu: I didn't know that. I didn't know that until this moment. And I feel lucky to get to know. But, welcome to the out queer island, to the party. 

Sarah: I love it here. 

Lulu: And yeah, I guess you just joined your ranks as the most average natural thing in nature. Which is just pretty much everyone be bi. 

Sarah: We're two bi seagulls. 

Lulu: Oh my God. That's awesome. That's a beautiful way to end a chat. That's really cool. 

Sarah: What a day. Lulu Miller, by the way, where else can we find more of you?

Lulu: Mostly over at Radiolab. I am the co-host over there. 

Sarah: Ever heard of it? 

Lulu: It's a podcast that is like a sonic trip. It used to be only science, but now it's really curiosity and trying to bring in all their kinds of expertise. And the team is incredible. The team is so cool. I'm really proud of this stuff we're doing and that we actually, right now, this month we have two, we have a double rainbow of deep dives into the nature of queerness. What science has said about it, what it’s gotten wrong, how that hurts or helps politics. The kind of dangerous entwining of politics and science around queerness. 

And then if you have little ones or if you just want a sonic nature walk, I also have a podcast out of Radiolab called, Terrestrials. That's a nature show for kids. And so there's that, too. 

And I do just, if it's okay, I want to give the hugest shout to the two producers who have just helped me do all the research on this seagulls and penguins stuff, Sara Qari and Becca Bressler. They're amazing. They are a part of this whole rant I just spun your way. We've been learning together for a year and they're just so special. So shout to them.

Sarah: Thank you so much to the three of you for going on this journey so we can hear about it.

Lulu: Yes. Come play. Come check out Radiolab. And thank you for having me, Sarah.

Sarah: It's so great. It's like one of the great joys, and I hope everyone gets to feel this. Help do dishes for the person who helps you do dishes, and we just keep doing each other's dishes.

Lulu: Yeah, I really hope that encrusted oatmeal is finally off by the end of this. 

*Carolyn Covering Lesbian Seagull* 

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you to Lulu Miller for taking us on this ride today, storytelling-wise and knowledge-wise. And for helping to take me on the bigger ride of getting to talk to you all for a living. Thank you, Lulu, for everything and everything you do. 

Thank you Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. And thank you to Carolyn for giving us this version of Lesbian Seagull. Thank you for being here. Thank you for everything that you are. Happy Pride. See you in two weeks.