You're Wrong About - Lesbian Seagulls with Lulu Miller

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

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. Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://radiolab.org/podcast/seagullshttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

I'm so excited to learn what the gayest animal is. Welcome to your drawing 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 take it, you just take it.

This is an episode we're releasing in conjunction with a radio lab episode called The Seagulls, and if you wanna learn more and have an amazing time doing it, you should go listen. Here at Eurong about, we like to celebrate Pride all year round. That's just 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. So, you know, savor the flavor. It won't happen for a while. Over on Patreon and Apple Plus 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 Evelyn Lee. And coming up later this month, we're going to talk about the gay agenda with Chelsea 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. 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. And there's just like something crazy to me about this because truly like when I started a door, your show, which is like a no brainer to everyone else who doors it. And there's just like something crazy to me about this because truly like when I started caring about podcasts, it was like you were the producer who I like most knew by name and was like, someday, obviously never, but someday like I was just like you were my like icon of like what the medium could do. And now you're like, I like your show and I'm like, oh my God, that's, no, you don't,

you're confused. No, I, 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 like just, yeah, I don't know. I'm happy to be here. Me and my pals have helped you watch so many dishes and now today, Lulu.

I'm gonna help you watch a big stack. Yes. Okay. So gay, gay penguins. What do you think of when you think of gay penguins? So I think maybe the Central Park Zoo had two male penguins who hatched an egg together and there was a children's book written about it called I think Tango Makes Three. KITU. Is that right? That is totally right. Yeah, perfect. So in the late 90s, there was this pair of chin strap penguins in the Central Park Zoo that began to take an interest in each other.

They were both males. And they were kind of like 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 you keepers thought, you know, 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 Antango Makes Three. You know, basically that story. It's filed as a nonfiction children's book even though it's illustrated.

Oh wow. And then so it became beloved. It won all these awards. It was also one of the most, like according to the American Library Association, one of the most banned or contested books for about five years in our country. Which is incredible, right? Because it's like, when you think about a banned book,

I mean, now we all know what it means. But there was a time when you would be like, oh, yeah, what books would a library I don't want to expose kids to. I don't like mine comp for whatever. That's probably a good idea. No, the whimsical penguin dance. Yes.

Yes. I think for a lot of people, this was the gateway story into an awareness of homosexual animals. If 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 captivity.

Like, there probably aren't enough females and the zoo probably turned them gay. And I think even as, and this was right around, I was realizing I was queer right around the time this story came out. So on one hand, I had a lot of affection for it. I loved it. But I also, while celebrating it in my heart,

I kind of like 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 or I'm just curious? I mean, well, first of all, I think I have a pretty unscientific brain. I have very much a sort of storyteller bard type and that's gonna be my role

when society collapses in about two years. You're gonna be on like a plush ottoman with like a necklace and a story to tell. Yes, well, or I'm gonna be like Paul Bettany when he gets introduced in a night's tale, just like walking naked because he's like been robbed of all his clothes or something. Okay, yeah. One of the two. But it's gonna be useful. I'll try to find you. Yeah, so that thought never occurred to me. And I remember when this 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 like proof positive. Like, well, 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 like, look at the penguins. Yeah. Doesn't it just make sense? Because like, you don't want everyone to reproduce

because that would just be kind of a strain on resources. That was kind of my theory biologically. I don't know. It makes sense for nature to streamline it so that you have like helpers as well as breeders I don't know. Yeah, some extra parents totally. Well, I love that. That's, there's a wildly. Well, I love that. There's 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 like truly born into the religion of science, every explanation is scientific. And I think that 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 kind of took hold, while in so many ways, those ideas like ruptured old understandings of hierarchies and nature and how we all got here, in this weird way, it kind of like confirmed that idea because it was like, well, if they're not having pro-creative 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 like, I took that on and I was just like, well, it might be fine in human society, but like 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. I mean, 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, you know, a study that was like, disavowed by the scientists 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 way they organize is into family units. Like the alpha male is the dad. Wow. Okay, so that's kind of like, personally my starting place of understanding same sex, mating and pairing

and behavior in nature was kind of there. And the story I want to tell is basically, like, it's about gay penguins, but it's also about, it's really 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 are willing to take with me?

Oh my gosh, yes, let's do it. Where are we going? Okay, well, we're obviously going to the 13th century. Of course, love it. Let's get some ale. And we're gonna kind of like just look at the birthplace arguably of the belief which is with Thomas Aquinas classic. He wrote that homosexuality which was called unisexual love at that time was you know obviously is a sin ever

and 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 adding this idea that it was unnatural, that it was a vice or a crime quote against nature. I think of him as someone who kind of brought nature or animals into the equation as backup. This is also just such a wild standard to me because for example, bunnies, etheron young, if you so much has looked at them funny. Oh, yeah, we're so fractured on when we see nature as pure and something to emulate

versus something to set ourselves. I know, yeah. But I think the idea is this kind of Noah's arc idea of, this isn't just about beliefs, even the animals obey this rule. It's so sacred, you know? Like interestingly, before Aquinas, you do see science-minded people talking

about same sex pairing in nature. So like Aristotle talks about it in pigeons and Isadora of Sevilla talks, like seven century talks about it in partridges and like 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 against nature, crime against nature is very catchy. It catches like wildfire and that's when you see it kind of going to 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. Like so from like 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 like, it slips into science. Yeah, so there's like about 400 years where you don't really see anything. Like there's just the observations of same-sex behavior in nature stops. Then you see in the 1700s, there's this one guy who like notice it, that maybe in some birds in the 1800s, you see like,

there's a bunch of German people noticing it in this one species of beetles, may beetles. Animals continue to have same sex relationships for hundreds of years, but anyone who saw it was just like, I assume, just like, well, better not write that down. That's not a thing. Like I'm seeing it, but it's not a thing. And just, you know, in the way, like I think we really underestimate how beliefs of the time can dictate our understanding of science.

Yeah, and so that you basically, like this goes on and on and on, such that by the 1970s, the scientific record basically still confirms Aquinas' 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 of the taxonomy of suppression. Oh my God, yes. Okay, so what does that really mean?

How do we go from the 1200s to the 1970s, 700 years? From Gregorian chance to the hustle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, oh God. See, now if this was Radio Lab, we could score just that line, and it would be great. But it would go, bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo And now is where I pay, like, blessed homage, you're gonna hear the size of this book. This is a book I wanna play homage to this guy, Bruce Bagamille,

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 like did this methodologically utterly perplexing thing. Like how do you find out why things aren't on the record if you don't have any record? So bless him, bless his work, and also bless this newer book called Queer Ducks by Elliot Schreffer,

which is basically the YA version of that book, updated for today. It's like an easy reader for kids book that just came out about the natural world of animal sexuality. So bless the two of them. Okay, so the four, 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 got the showy male or the lions, you know, the males good, the mane and yeah, a lot of, a lot of males with like big, you know, ornaments that make them look wider. Yeah, exactly, or ducks, you know, the mallard with his fancy green head.

So like totally that's called sexual dimorphism. That's when like, you look very different based on your sex. But a ton of animals are what's called monomorphic. They look the same. Like sexually monomorphic. They just squirrels, seagulls, chipmunks, bunnies. Like, they kinda look the same.

Maybe if you can like, go get your finger in their parts and you're assigned as you might bun, you know, bunnies, like they kind of look the same. Maybe if you can like go get your finger in their parts and your scientists, you might be able to know, but like if you've been told, they're all heterosexual, you notice them mating as an everyday person or a scientist, you're probably gonna just like assume that they are heterosexual. So that's, 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 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 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 wanna write it down. You're like, I don't want everyone to call me nuts.

I'm not gonna talk about this. Right. There's a few cases that Bagamille was able to write about and find out about. So one 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 60s on wild sheep, so rams with the lovely ram horns. They were so gay, they were just mating all the time and also, oh yeah, requisite science reporter note

on language, okay. I'm saying gay, I might use lesbian, I'm using, 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, we're having like our after class beer talking about all this. Yeah, okay, so foot noted, okay? Okay, so 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. Ah, broke back Rams. He wrote this like honking publication about their behavior and left that out. Oh, wow. Yeah, and he said to some other scientists like it just was seeing such magnificent beasts doing something so terrible, I just couldn't. So he laid or toward the very end of his life admitted that he just completely omitted it because it was like basically so disgusting or unfathomable to him. Can I say to, like, this is a weird bit of like anthropomorphism or whatever, but like,

when I think about being a ram up high in the Rockies, the wind and my wool, my big horns curling around, like, I am having sex with whatever other ram wants to have sex with me. Um, yeah, so that, yeah, so that's, I think, one move was like, I can't defile this creature. I just can't. So it's totally the human cultural bias of like, 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. Exactly. And like that, so that's one case where like, the person lived long enough to fess up to it. Huh. Then again, this, I keep just invoking him because he's so amazing. This guy Bruce baguamel. So he

For his book, which is basically the first ever kind of collection Back in the 90s 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 Scientists after scientists and just being like Hi, have you ever actually seen homosexual behavior you'd never published on? And tons of them said yes. But they just, they hadn't because either there was such a, like, there'd be such resistance where 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, you know, are there any notes? And it was just dozens upon dozens. So that's kind of, okay, so that makes you think about in history, all the people we can't know. But then also, earlier, you know, in the 1700s, 1800s and earlier than that, like the anti-sotomy laws were so terrifying. You could be punished by death. You could go to jail for your life. Like, if you published on this and there's a few times where people did either have like public accounts of it lectures at a, you know, zoological society or publish it with this kind of like mysterious behavior kind

of couching. People would question you and there'd be outcry, like what is your unnatural interest in this? Why are you, and if you would push it too hard, like it could be very dangerous for your career, especially if you were single or young. It's kind of like the red scar it feels like. Yeah, like it's own little brain-boss scar version. Yeah.

So that's number two in our taxonomy, self-suppression. Number three, overt suppression, just like people saying no. So there's tons of story again, like 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 so levic was this famous British explorer. 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, like not in a zoo, in the wild, on the tundra.

So like 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 researcher. He's like, the depraved behavior. And then, so he writes it in Greek, a couple of years go by, and then he intends to talk about it and publish a little pamphlet. He publishes this pamphlet on the, you know, 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. Jesus. And then that keeps happening.

Again, I don't know all the examples, but Bagamot was able to find this one of a report in the 1980s on homosexuality in killer whales. And the US government redacted those sections. What? Yeah, it was like a government-funded report and they like redacted those sections. They're like, it's fine for the killer whales

to be kept in tiny tanks performing little tricks Yeah, until they're driven into a homicidal frenzy, but the kids can't know Okay, okay, so now we've got the assumption it's happening in front of your eyes No, it's dark, but you don't even bother to think it is you got self suppression I see it, but it won't tell anyone you've got a bird suppression. I'm feeling courageous I've got a report on it publications are like nope. We won't publish it and then finally the fourth part of this is like, 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 Judgy MacJudgy Magic Trick Vanishing Act, where you use such judgmental language about what you're seeing. You're literally calling it using words like unnatural, abnormal, aberrant, perverse. Like you use language which magically keeps the belief intact. And so I'll just, I'll give you a very quick rundown of a few of my favorite article titles. Oh my god. 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 like picturing ostriches having sex like this ostrich is going around sending like unsolicited dick pics. Yeah, a horde curse. Yeah, Khloika pics. And then finally the one that takes the cake is a note on the apparent lowering of moral standards in the lepetodoptera, which is a butterfly. Oh my God. Come on.

It's hilarious, but it also does this. It's a real muscular use of language. You know, you and I have both spent probably too many hours of our life reading academic articles. Yeah. And that's like a section interesting style of writing because it's like there are real rules for like how do you put forth an idea? Like it's not normal writing. It's not the way you would write for like 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. Absolutely. Yeah, it's like, you know, this secret reality of science, which really tries to like 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 like, you know, it's loaded with all these beliefs and you can use the jargonny term and you can sail these things that make it look quote unquote objective. But right, these papers were just dripping with judgments and like with a, I don't know if it's a desire or just an impulse or whatever, but to preserve this old, you know, a quiet this idea that fell out of an Italian friars mouth.

Like, they're just people bending over backwards with their language to preserve it. My interest in this whole topic, which my wife, like, I rolls about, she calls Qu animal. She's like, why do you just love queer animals? Like there's every time I look, there's Qu animal books around. And I've been re just falling 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 you know, started to see that it did and my mind was privately blown. But anyway, my my interest in like looking into this came about, 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 idea,

the explicit idea that it's a quote crime against nature, does an awareness of homosexuality and nature have any, like does that threaten those laws? Does it have any effect? Like just to have that justification so clearly refuted. And so there was a group of people who were also thinking about that back in like the 1890s.

And there is 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 kind of 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 he basically, it was just this place where he was like, what did people actually do?

And he was gay and he was a big proponent of the idea that like, human sexuality exists on a spectrum. Being gay is not necessarily, you know, it should not be a crime. There's nothing wrong with it. It happens. And he based his ideas on science. And he was hugely political figure. He did tons of organizing to try to get more and more people

to abolish the anti-sotomy laws, which was called paragraph 175. And his catchphrase, his like 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, like in making the case that homosexuality was natural and not a medical issue, not a sin, not a mental illness, whatever. Like he was an

early person of like, there's a biological basis. And so he in his institute, which also was like an early trans clinic, there was like, there was, there was a library, there were lectures and there was actual medical treatment. He did some great things like he prescribed community to trans people who were lonely, like, come hang out, like I love that. That's for thinking. But he also dabbled in this horrific experiment where he basically was like, there were some gay people who said they didn't wanna be gay, so he helped arrange some testicle transplants from straight people to gay,

like put on some straight balls. Which is, you know, aside from everything else, also very dangerous. Yeah, so no, that was like a bad, that was like justice through science can lead you down some really horrific place. So like Magnus Hershfeld 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 Karsh. 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 kind of 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 a real act of activism via collection. So he published this odd little pamphlet in 1900 that was called Pedalasty and Tribody among animals based on literature, which is basically like homosexuality among animals based on literature.

And he did this huge lit review. He used his scientific fluency. He'd just been like a science scientist for 20 years. And he looked back at all those footnotes and all those accounts, accounts where missionaries were describing it as like monstrous or horrible. And he kind of insulated himself against critiques that he was making it up

or he had a natural interest like there were nothing he observed, but all things other people said. And he put out this pamphlet with like almost 70 examples from again, all like bugs, butterflies, ramp, like all the entire animal kingdom. Like I feel like the pamphlet itself was this technicolor refutation 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 like, it is in nature, it is in every species. And he put this out and Magnus Hirschfeld published it and like brought it into his organizing. And in a lot of ways,

they were like really successful. They got a petition going to abolish the anti-Satami law, really famous people like Einstein and Thomas Mann signed it. They like made all this headway. And it into the 1920s, it was looking like Parliament was going to abolish the Banzagasex. And then I don't know if you're aware of anything that happened in Germany in the early 30s. Well, I mean, for a while, it was Liza Manelli and Michael York hanging out.

And then the political situation really escalated. Yeah. And so then Nazis take over., on May 6, 1933, they come to the Institute for Sexual Science, where all these papers, like 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, like, there are some things that remain, but there are people today who are looking for this lost archive of like this kind of like OG archive of homosexuality and nature. And so much of it was just lost. Okay. So now I'm going to take you to the study that finally like broke through all this muscular suppression. I'm so excited to learn what the gayest animal is. 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 Pinobo? Hmm. Is it a mammal? No. Huh, okay. Is it a fish? No, I just kidding. I just don't exist.

Yeah, nice. Nice. Okay, here's a hint. Yeah. Guard your French fries on the beach. Oh my God, has it seagulls. Yes. Yeah.

That's so great. Yeah. So basically this is like what the radio lab piece is mostly about and I talked to this sweet couple. Well, they're not a couple anymore, but they were married couple at the time. Molly Warner and George Hunt and George was a se got you know ornithologist and Molly was his wife between anthropology jobs so she joined him on this this expedition. It was the expedition just to like a parking lot

because that's where I always see sequels. I mean basically it was an island that was a parking lot. It's just I know totally it was it's Santa Barbara Island 30 miles off the coast of you know southern California That basically is a rock. There's like no trees. It's just like this barren hunk of rock and there's a wild Gal colony out there the western Gal Loris oxidant Alice George is a young or anathologist. He goes out there to study this colony and he's been studying goals on the East Coast for a long time, like 10 years maybe at this point. In short, he, the funny part is he, like, he has to teach his class because he's 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? Like, buy yourself

and do your, 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 the, a bunch of the nests, about 10% of the nests have way too many eggs in them, like double the amount of eggs. She, like, 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. Wait, is this what the song Lesbian Seagulls is? Yes, you know that song.

I have that cute up in the document for you to play. Yes, that's so yes. Okay, how do you know that song? One of my best friends, mom's, was a big Beavison Butthead fan. Yeah. That's amazing. Yes, so Beavison Butthead adapted the original 1970s

A-Dish song by Tom Wilson. But yes, that's where this comes from. So basically, they realize that 10% of the birds on this island are female, female paired. They're mating, like they're going through the whole like, Hort ship, mount, kiss the cloacas, they then build their nest together, they take turn like incubating and raising the eggs And it's just like one and every 10 nest is two mumps and that's just what they're rocking and rolling and so George and Molly They freak out. They're so like George is so excited Like he's just 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 beautiful scientist, he's never, 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 Ock, and remembering what you learned about history does the journal accept it? Of course not. And I love how how innocently he was like, oh my gosh you guys, this is what

it leap forward for science. Everyone will be so excited to hear about the lesbian seatle. Yeah. And of course they're like, because we talk a lot on the show about pseudo science, which is like its own nightmare. But then with like science science, you're like, well, it comes down to like whatever the people and power are willing to believe based on the like particular social agenda that they have been instructed to reproduce. And like people who tend to be in charge

are often white men who are scared of everything. So yeah, straight ones too. Yeah, so basically they say like we would need so much more data to publish this. I'm sorry. So much data do you need on the seagulls? Right. Well, George is like, okay, I'll get more data. So they like go back, they 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 like 40 miles away on Anna Kappa Island. It's not just the lesbian, she called neighborhood.

It's not just one aisle of Lesbos, gals. It's two. So they now at this point, they've had research assistants help them. They've got photos, they've got like thousands of these nests are are paired female to female. Like it's just yeah. 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 the world goes crazy. Wow. Yeah, so George, he's like a sweet, bumbling, or an ethylogist. And he's like, maybe I should have expected it, but I didn't know if this needs to be a movie.

But who would you cast? Honestly, Robin Williams with a beard would have been a good George. She kind of has that look. Kind of like a young Sigourney Weaver. So I don't know who today is Sigourney Weaver is. But this is like if you were to make this movie in like 1989. In the 80s, it's Robin Williams in Sigourney Weaver.

It's perfect. 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 of New York. A need of Bryant. Yeah.

And to be clear, by a 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? Should we she be dead yet? She is still alive. And her, I'm sure you talk about this. Her granddaughter is made a woman.

We haven't. I haven't been talking about it, but like, carry on, you'd warrior. 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, you know, it was like a lash back in response to some pretty decent strides that had been made in the 70s, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness,

you know, more and more anti-sautomies, state laws coming down, city ordinances going up to give gay people protections, gay pride parades, like whatever. It had been a good moment. And Anita Bryant, you know, 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 kind of save the children from homosexuals. And so she starts this organization and she is a phenomenal organizer. And she galvanizes 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. And 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 discussing things homosexuals do. She again and again one of her big lines and this is like 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-veliefs, 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 gaze and society and queer people in society. And it really, it worked. It was really effective. Oh yeah, well, and it feels like, I mean, do you feel like we're in a similar moment now where there was this brief period of increased,

like specifically for trans people and trans kids, like a brief moment of increased visibility and rights, and then the backlash against that is so much bigger. It's so similar. And the arguments are like the same. Yeah. Like the question in voters' hands was, these, you know, the LGBTQ community deserves protection.

You know, they deserve protections from being discriminated against. And then she's saying, no, not only do they not deserve protections, like we need to be protected from them. Like it was such a, this just invoking the danger, danger to children and then just this sober sounding, like they are scientifically gay, animals don't do it. They have to, nothing against them,

but because they can't reproduce, they got a recruit. So they're coming for your children. Like, there was this almost sciencey-flavored assertion, and that's a quietness. And we love the flavor of science. Yeah, the flavor of science is great, and it's powerful. And at that point, the scientific record

like confirmed her assertion still in 77. Now, so she had just one and two weeks later, George and Molly study drops showing so pretty natural looking evidence of homosexuality and nature. So, so the gay community freaks out. Like they see this, they rejoice. How is this like initially, is this the kind of thing where it's like the AP is like new study shows that 10% of Seagulls are lesbians, okay, great. Yeah, right, in a way that an ornithological study isn't usually, like it becomes a new story.

Time does a thing on it, it's on TV news again, just because it so went against the beliefs of the day. Like it wasn't just one creature, it was two islands, it was hundreds of birds. I guess picturing like all the lesbian seagulls flying to Washington being like, you can deny one of us, or even a dozen of us, but not all of us seagulls. So they're very rude.

Wow! Can I send you something on email? Yeah, please do. Okay, there's a couple of them. There's a couple different ones, but there are these cartoons of seagulls pooping in a need a Brian's eye. So this one was in the Boston Globe. Nice.

And the bottom sets news item. Research team finds 14% of female seagulls off California because they're homosexuals. The goals are all right. 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 kind of innocently flying away, which she's got her hand on her eye. So it's interesting that we like, we know that the seagull shit on a need of Bryant's face, but perhaps the paper felt that it was unwise to depict the actual shit.

Yeah. And then the caption says, news item, research team finds 14% of female seagulls off California coasts are homosexuals. So really, it's like the Seagull is also, this is a politically motivated thing for the Seagull. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I love that. So the Seagull is protesting. And so I think you know, and you see this like little moment where the Seagull becomes like a mascot in the gay bread movement, just for a second. That's so amazing. There are plays written about the

Lesbians. Yeah, the Pamela Gray, who's like a very legit screenwriter, she'd go on to do a music of the heart, which is a Meryl Streep film. She in her early days wrote this play, Inspired by it, which was about like a group of lesbians who go out to see it and commune with the, she called the play, Super Normal Clutches, which is the scientific jargon for when a nest has an extra amount of eggs. And so that was like, yeah. Then she said when she heard that term,

she was like, that defines a lesbian relationship. This also reminds me that like 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. And just share the child care labor of this. Yeah, which I've always thought of as them being like communist rats, but now I'm like,

how gay are those rats? Yeah. It's pretty gay of them. They're gay communists, even better. We want to claim kind of historically scientifically that like humans need to organize themselves the way we see in the natural world. But really it's like we're picking and choosing the stuff that supports, you know, 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, well, what if, you know, what if we had more communal child rearing? Because what we have now is just a nightmare for most people. Totally. I mean, I think, yeah, we cherry-picked examples we want to confirm our beliefs. And we love monogamous animals, right?

The whole like, mate for life. Yeah. Animals, the Jack Donoggy line. Yeah. Irish Catholics mate for life. Like swans, like drunk, angry swans. So. So. Okay. So that's like the happy reaction. Now, on the other side, you scanned through a couple of these.

There are all kinds of nasty editorials. George, I mean, George said he got calls from around the world. Like in India, like because there's so many laws also still standing where in the legal code, at that time even in the States, over 30 US states still had anti-sautomy laws that were like 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 it. And so he got angry calls, people kind of 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. I'm sure, yeah. They like increase the level of credibility

they had at the outside. And increase their ability to just like, 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 he 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 like congressional assembly in 1978 shortly after where they like sped just I looked through the transcript and like all these big fancy senators and or congressmen are like talking about this tiny girl

study the gay goals the gay goals. And they 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 like held up the release of funds. 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. The funds of, eventually were released to George and I think that's like, 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 it was final, and again, his paper, if you noticed the title, there was nothing like weird, aberrant female goals. It was just female goals. And I think it was kind of the first time that the

scientific establishment really took homosexuality and nature seriously endorsed the study of it. And you really see in its wake, like 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, in now it's been nearly 50 years, there have just been thousands of scientifically verified accounts of homosexuality and nature across all species, all kinds of things. Yeah. The gay penguins, like the males will mate with males

and pair with males, females with females. And one of the ideas is that like 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 eat seven of them. If you then have a bunch of creatures that will pair with anybody, that's going to increase the survival of the offspring. I love that.

And I also feel like bisexuality feels, you know, famously erased as a concept. It's something that sex in the city didn't believe in, which, like, not that we look to sex in the city for advanced queer theory, but it was very employing that one was considered very scandalous in its time. Yeah. And, I don't know.

And I feel like there's this view of bisexuality is like fundamentally greedy. And really, it's like, no, it's actually about being a switch hitter in the game of life. It's actually about openness to all forms of charm and beauty. Yeah. We're currently at this understanding

where a lot of animals will just do it for pleasure. But then there are sometimes our other evolutionary gains like the hunting alliances. It might help you hunt better. But chimps also will like have homosexual sex. The males will engage in folatio with each other when things are tense and it helps resolve conflict, which I love. And also in bonobos, it can help resolve conflict resolution which I love. And also, and I know, and also in bonobos, like it can help resolve conflict resolution

during resource scarcity. So let's say like 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 like flooded in an oxytocin bath, and then in their post-coidal calm bonded feeling, they like pass the honey around and share.

So it helps them share better, which again helps the strength of a colony. Like if you're not altering 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 reproduction function. So like again, she kept confronting other scientists saying, this doesn't make sense. It's a paradox. And she said, it reflects a dominant model of evolution that emphasizes selfish competition and the survival of the fittest. But what about cooperation? Social bonds are really important for well-being 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 like 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 the cost, it's basically like there are all these gains to be had at almost no cost. Like 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 like revolutionary to me in the last couple of years. And it's been like a paradigm shift for my understanding of like literally where I fit in nature, which yeah, has been really cool.

And that you're like part of nature. And also this idea of like that, you know, we don't have to like lean too hard on this argument that like queerness is a morally meaningful position and like helps hold society together because like you shouldn't have to help hold society together to have human rights, but on the other hand, it is true. Right, right, yes. And that, I go back to like my like unsung German guy for Dan Kars who he's not a perfect person,

but that guy who did that initial compilation showing how it's in a 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 just, it's a 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 just, it's a part of being here. And I see the sort of like wrong head in this of my satisfaction of seeing evolutionary advantages. But I, I don't know, there's something really fun

about being like homosexuals can be good parents. They are often better parents. They're for the good of the community. Me, which I think is a, this retaliation of the like low-thrumming message otherwise. Don't say gay. Don't don't don't let your children see a gay. Like 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. Oh my god, completely. Yeah, and then the whole, you know, 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. Dangerous. Be sure to be convinced, yeah, then like they're not, like they should just know that already. But on the other hand, it's like maybe the point of this is that it's not for them. Like it's for you and it's for people who, for whatever reason, like needed to be told, they were good for society.

I love that. And actually, again, like my wife Grace, the whole time she was watching me kind of 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 like, because you still want to convince them and don't even engage in that fight.

Don't even like go there. There's a niceness to, as Elliot put it, Elliot Shreffer, like he was like, there can be a loneliness, a feeling of loneliness to being LGBTQ and like there's something nice to see that it's part of our biological heritage and future. Yeah.

Nature is so much wilder than our beliefs and rules for it. Like what else don't we know? What else haven't we seen? Because we haven't looked. And a happy Koda is just funny one is that. So Anita Bryant back in the 80s, the fact of the goal study as fun as it felt for the queer community didn't really have an any impact

on her. She was asked about it in an interview in Playboy. The journalist kind of gotcha at her and was like, you say gayness is unnatural, but there are 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 she didn't really like stop her. If anything, you know, she had more successes. Like there were more cities that dialed back their protections and then in Bauer's V-Hardwick. Judges voted five to four 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 that 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, those 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 one on very different things.

I love knowing that like the seagulls were there, that like cheering, like they were there, you know? Oh. Oh. Now they'll scientific, Koda, to all this. I was trying to get Radio Lab to actually pay for me to go out to Santa Barbara Island Now they'll scientific Coda to all this. I was trying to get radio lab 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 like nesting under their broods, with our brood and their brood and the commute. And then George was like the same sex pairing has died off and now it's a heterosexual island. No, that's so terrible. Yeah, and he thinks he doesn't know he's not positive, but his theory is that back in the 70s, DDT and DDE was getting into the goals.

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 flu. But it opened the door, but it actually may have been a whole anyway. And so that's like the wild ending. Not as a last second twist. I know, which when I found I was so deflated and humbled, but then I also

realized like, okay, I can't that shall not find their worth or belonging based on animals. So I, 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, I need to not do exactly what the other side was doing, which was pointing to them as proof of an argument, you know, bringing them into an argument that they don't have to be a part of. They're like, I'm a seagull.

I would like a French fry. Anyway, so that's my Penguin story. Happy Pride. Ah, happy Pride, happy Penguin story. I feel moved by the spirit for whatever reason. Because like the journey of my sexuality in the show has been very interesting. Because I think that for years, my like, I never have identified as a sexual, but I just like, did not have sex with our date anyone for a really long time, just didn't want to do it. Yeah. And on the show, and like, especially in the early years, I, and when I was on Twitter, I would

occasionally be like, I'm a straight woman. As a straight woman, I'm a straight, like, straight woman do. They always like mention it. And it's not true, you guys. And you all knew before me. You 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. No. I still am like allowing myself to see myself

and exist as a bisexual woman. And it has felt really, really good. And I also, like, kind of 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 Jean Siskel, like that, both the doors are open, but it's just like, no one will be surprised, but like, you know, you should just tell them. And this is my moment.

I'm telling you. It's because of the seagulls and it's really like thank you for making this nest for me to be hatched in. I didn't know that until this moment and I feel lucky to get to know and but welcome to the out queer island to the party. I love it here. And yeah, I guess you just join your ranks as like most average natural thing in nature, which is just pretty much everyone beat by. Yeah, we're just right.

Yay! We're wrong. Alright, we're two by seagulls. Oh my god, that's awesome. That's a beautiful way to end a chat. That's really cool. How did I? Well, a Miller.

By the way, where else can we find more of it? I mean, mostly over at Radio Lab, I am the co-host over there. We are teamers. I've never heard of it. It is a podcast that is kind of like a sonic trip through, 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 kind of a double rainbow

of deep dives into the nature of queerness, what science has said about it, what's gotten wrong, how that hurts our health's politics, the kind of dangerous entwining of politics and science around queerness. And yeah, and then if you have little ones or if you just want a sonic nature walk, I also have a podcast out of radio lab called terrestrials. That's kind of a nature show for kids. And so there's that too.

And I do just, if it's okay, like I wanna give the hugest shout to the two producers who have just helped me do all the research on this, Seagulls and Penguin stuff. Sara, Kari 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. That's so great. Thank you so much to the three of you for going on this journey. So we're talking about it. Yes, come play, come check out Radio Lab and thank you for having me Sarah. It's so great. It's like one of the great joys and I hope everyone gets to feel this. This is sort of help do dishes for the person who helps you do dishes and we just keep doing each other's dishes. Yeah, I really hope that encrusted oatmeal is finally off by the end of this right? Life's sending me flowed, dinged down to land. She proudly rips her voice, a sound her maiden call,

And soon a maid responds by singing. Come with me, I've been sighing Settle down and rest with me Fly with me, that's when you belong with me, and oh I can't be strong when you're with me, with me. 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 Sequel. Thank you for being here. Thank you for everything that you are. Happy Pride. See you in being here. Thank you for everything that you are. Happy Pride. See you in two weeks. Go by your mind, your mind, your mind

Just you and me, let's be unseagull Side by side with me, tell me, tell me, tell me, yeah You and I, we can make it if we try My love will keep us flying high until day, we can make it if we try my love will keep us flying high until we die Thank you.