iN THE EARLY 1990s, a young scientific illustrator named John Megahan got a call to work on a secret project: an encyclopedia of all known scientific observations of homosexuality in nature. The book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, was the masterwork of biologist Bruce Bagemihl, who had spent years combing through scientific studies, textbooks, scientists’ personal journals, and archives, and cold-calling hundreds of living wildlife biologists in search of well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world. His list grew so long, he had to limit his book to just mammals and birds. Very few of the observations included photos (some had been documented before the invention of the camera), so Bagemihl wanted one of the nation’s finest zoological illustrators to bring the described behavior to life.
That’s when John Megahan got the call. Megahan would go on to spend years on the project. He made hundreds of drawings, black-and-white technical illustrations detailing everything from female gulls that mate, nest, and raise chicks together to gray whales engaging in “penis intertwining.”
Thumbing through the book’s pages, it’s hard not to giggle. This is the Noah’s ark you never heard about. There are male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.
But awe creeps in too. Somewhere around page 453 maybe, with the kangaroos, or page 476 with the bats, or nearing page 700 after the umpteenth species of warbler. How were we not told?
The deeper I’ve fallen down this rainbow-colored rabbit hole, the more I’ve come to understand that my shock at the breadth of queerness in nature is a symptom of a horrible miseducation, of centuries of science bullying the abundance of
