Chapter One: Doodlebugs
DOODLEBUGS
It takes a lot of backbone to come out. Or does it?
August Kelch had a suspicion about what he was seeing, and he was not happy about it. The German schoolteacher and zoologist had come across what appeared to be two doodlebugs in the middle of doing the dirty. That was unseemly enough in 1834 Germany. It only got worse from there: Kelch thought it looked like two male doodlebugs. The insects probably would have preferred some privacy to finish up their sexy times, but Kelch seized them right up and brought the still-attached insects around to his various colleagues. We donât know what the exact words he used were, but it was probably the nineteenth-century German equivalent of âdude, are these two guys?â
(I was once in Central Park with my boyfriend, in New York City. Weâd had a big picnic lunch and fallen asleep on the blanket, bellies filled with pasta salad and arms wrapped around each other. I woke up when I heard a big group of high schoolers clomp by, chattering about their upcoming Michigan soccer championships. When they neared me and my boyfriend, still entwined on our blanket, their chatter went silent. Once they were past us, I heard one of them say, in a loud whisper, âDude, that was two guys.â Iâm very proud of that day. Iâm sure we made the top five stories of their school trip.)
Those doodlebugs were indeed two guys. The scientists carefully parted the twoâand the one in backâs junk promptly fell off inside the one in front. Horrors. You can imagine the German scientists, wincing with their hands over their mouths. âSorry, buddy!â
It turns out, by the way, that doodlebug sex tends to be much safer for the receiver. That makes sense when you remember that thereâs an exoskeleton involved. You try sticking your thing into some sharp plates of barbed chitin and see how it comes out. (Donât actually do that.)
This was a significant day for those doodlebugs, not only because one of them had his doodle snapped off. Those doodlebugs thought they were just having some hanky-panky, but it was an important day for science in general, because Kelchâs realization turned into the first modern scientific account of animal homosexuality.
Kelch didnât know at the time that he was witnessing something that would go down in history. He just knew that this was nothing he thought God ought to be allowing in the natural world.
Male bugs were not meant to doodle other male bugs.
Right?
Kelch couldnât help but look closer. He noticed that the mounting bug, the one who lost his penis in the parting, belonged to a larger subspecies, the common cockchafer, and had mounted a smaller forest cockchafer. (âCockchaferâ really is another name for doodlebugs, I kid you not.) Kelch concluded that the âstronger of the two had forced itself on the smaller and weaker one, had exhausted it and only because of this dominance had conquered it, so to speak.â The only way he could conceive of same-sex intercourse was as an act of rape. No male bug should give himself willingly to another male, obviously!
This question of âanimal perversionâ had been a hot topic among scientists for centuries, and still holds swayâconsciously and subconsciouslyâover many of them today. There was no term âhomosexualâ in German or English back in 1834, when Kelch discovered the mating males. Human homosexual acts were recognized, however, and were considered illegal, because they fell under the umbrella of âunnatural behavior.â Someone found to be consorting with a person of the same sex could be accused of indecency, or acting against Godâs will, or unnaturalness. These criminal categorizations for people accused of same-sex sex relied on the belief that only male-female sex was natural, and all else was perversion. This has remained a fundamental assumption of the white European world in particular. The majority of human societies throughout history were more welcoming to same-sex sexual behaviorâit has been tolerated or embraced in 64 percent of them, in fact, as noted by a recent study.
Weâll talk more about the history of human sexuality in chapter 4, but itâs worth noting now that this hard line against queerness in dominantly Christian societies was not always the case, but the result of a rapid rise of intolerance as Europe emerged from the comparatively accepting Dark Ages. The idea that some neighbors were worthy of loving and others worthy of murder has always been part of human nature, but spread especially within the Christian worldview in the half century between 1250 and 1300, when the leaders of the nations of Europe drew power from exclusionary âus versus themâ thinking. Homosexuality went from fully legal throughout Europe in 1250 to a death-penalty offense in most countries by 1300, all because doing so was politically useful when conformity was the rule of the day.
In the midst of this thirteenth-century crackdown, Thomas Aquinas, philosopher and priest, argued for the unnaturalness of homosexuality precisely because it didnât occur between animals. Gilles de Corbeil, court physician to the king of France, wrote that âthe most ferocious beasts are better than man because they have intercourse and reproduce according to what is in their natural function.â
Given that, you can see why witnessing male doodlebugs mating would have given Kelch a crisis. If two male animals can have sex, then itâs harder to claim that two male or two female humans having sex are unnatural. The issue wouldnât be going away anytime soon, either: now that entomologists had started looking out for them, more and more accounts of male doodlebug copulations started rolling in.
This caused a crisis at the foremost bug publication at the time, Entomologische Zeitung. Anyone who was anyone in the German-speaking bug world subscribed to Entomologische Zeitung. The magazine couldnât not report on these cockchafing shenanigans. Although it reported news of the male-male copulations, the journalâs language went through verbal acrobatics to avoid mentioning the sex of the bugs, saying only that this particular sex act represented âa curious physical form of penetrated parties.â
After a heated back-and-forth in the entomology mag, a scientist named Doebner decided to settle once and for all this issue of what he thought was probably mistaken identity: females that amateur entomologists had misidentified as males (âfraglichen Weibchenâ). He was bound for a disappointment, though. Once heâd taken a good look at the sets of doodlebug genitalia, he had to confess that heâd found what he called âperfectly formed, free-hanging male genitalia projecting right outward, pushed out of the way by the insertion of the penis . . . into the anus.â
Eventually, someone even drew it up and published a picture of the two males in the act. Itâs the first known printed image of nonhuman same-sex sex. This position looks intense. I assume they worked their way up to it, because I doubt these bugs could have pulled it off on their first go.
The stakes kept getting higher and higher. If bugs could have homo sex, then it was harder to call homo sex unnaturalâwhich meant there were a lot of people being executed for sodomy that should be, well, alive. (Sodomy criminalization wouldnât be going anywhere soon; it stayed a capital crime in England up until 1861. It remains a death-penalty offense in Ugandaâwhich, by no coincidence, is a former British colony that inherited its penal code from England. Here in the United States, two men were convicted of sodomy in the famous Bowers v. Hardwick case as recently as 1986, and the âunnaturalnessâ of their act was a crucial component of their sentencing. Those sodomy laws stayed on the books until 2003, when Texas judges ruled them unconstitutional . . . citing in their decision the waves of research that had come out in the meantime documenting same-sex sexual activity in the natural world.)
The roots of this ruthless judgment of âunnaturalnessâ in Western culture are as ancient as the Old Testament in the Bible, in which Adam and Eve enjoyed a pure and innocent existence until their human flaws dragged them down into sin. In the nineteenth century, the big cultural bogeyman in the papers was âdecadenceâ (literally âthe fall downâ), which was basically all the ways human society had introduced sin into our lives. Nature is pure and good, human civilization is corrupt and evil. Thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that we should look to the behavior of animals as our role model. Just look at all those creatures dutifully walking up into Noahâs ark in their hetero pairs, after all.
Those animals had to be hetero. Otherwise this argument about the âunnaturalnessâ of same-sex sexual behavior would fall apart.
Truth is, thereâs always been hand-wringing in the scientific community around the âperversionsâ of animals. Hyenas had been called out by Greek thinkers as suspect because they were believed to change sex, and a few hundred years later, Isidore of Seville wrote that partridges were suspected of unnatural acts because âmale mounts male and blind desire forgets gender.â
The roster of immoral animals only gets longer as the centuries pass. Goats came to be seen as promiscuous, and since they had already fallen into sin, some conveniently argued that there was no extra sinning if humans then had sex with them. As a result, itâs said that in the sixteenth century the Duke of Nevers brought thousands of goats along with his soldiers into war, to satisfy their sexual needs. We wonât look at any pictures of that in this book.
So if partridges and hyenas and doodlebugs andâdefinitelyâgoats are on the naughty list, where are the upstanding, moral, ânaturalâ animals? Interestingly enough, even though modern zoologists now know that homosexual activity is common in elephants, the Christian theologian Augustine once admired them because he thought they experienced no lust on their own, and had to eat mandrake root as an aphrodisiac in order to be attracted to one another. As scholar Joyce Salisbury frames it, âas they lacked lust, their intercourse approached the ideal described by Augustine for humans: intercourse totally without passion.â Sounds awesome.
I think itâs no accident that the first case of animal homosexuality to be reported and printed was between insects; itâs much harder to accuse a scientist of getting his jollies out of his studies when heâs looking at doodlebugs and not, say, sexy goats. When what a scientist is interested in could lead to accusations of the capital offense of sodomy, itâs not hard to see why those who observed homosexuality in nature might choose to stick those results in a drawer. The Germans who broke the story of the doodlebugs were either brave or well-connected enough to survive accusations of their own âunnaturalness.â
Scientists have historically published accounts of same-sex animal behavior only by shrouding it in the very condemning words that had been used to describe those behaviors in humans: terms like perverse, deviant, and unnatural. In Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl tracks the language historically used around the reporting of same-sex animal behavior:
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