Who are you calling unnatural? Even if Florida teachers don't say gay, science sure does

I was once a gay kid in Florida.

Realizing I was gay was surreal and almost absurd. Up until then, nothing put me outside the mainstream (aside from my general nerdiness, which I was finding manageable). But as soon as puberty hit, as soon as I had hair on my legs and odors from my armpits, I was sexually attracted to guys. It was swift and it was utterly clear.

Here was the absurd part: “gay” was something weird outsider people were, and yet it was also me. A teacher in my school was fired for it. The lunchroom solution, which the kids returned to over and over, was to send gay people to some island and left to die. That Matthew Shepard had it coming, he didn’t have to come onto those guys. I nodded and agreed and said to myself: Why the hell did this unnatural thing rise up in me? How can I get rid of it before someone kills me for it?

Kids by the thousands are having these feelings in lunchrooms across Florida, now. No amount of legislation will alter the truths that are occurring inside them.

Because I lived it during those closeted years, because I expressed these same talking points while I pretended to my friends and family that I was straight, I’m intimately familiar with the logic that leads to anti-gay speech and anti-gay laws. It goes something like this: It is our culture that has brought us to this moment of sexual crisis. Homosexuality is not a natural state. Just like for the rest of the animals, men were meant be with women, Adam was meant to be with Eve, and this recent trend of people desiring people of the same gender, or wanting to change their gender entirely, is a momentary artifact of our culture. To be queer is to be unnatural, and we should not embrace the unnatural. Society must hold firm against it.

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Many assume – because why should they not? – that the intended state for human beings is heterosexuality. Any other state is the sign of a human culture that has gone off the rails. Creatures wouldn’t evolve to desire creatures of the same sex. Otherwise they’d go extinct!

This is a case, though, in which culture has lagged behind science. Most animals are sexually monomorphic, meaning males and females are identical to human eyes, so we assumed that centuries of observed matings were all heterosexual. Now that sexing animals is more common practice in the wild, scientists have found same-sex pairings throughout the animal kingdom. The number of animal species with confirmed substantial same-sex sexual behaviors, a recent study in the journal Nature reports, is 1,500 and growing.

Sometimes same-sex sexual behavior in the natural world makes for stronger social alliances, as with male bottlenose dolphins. Sometimes it’s to minimize conflict and tension within the group, as with the frequent bisexual sex of the bonobos (who also happen to be our closest animal relative). Sometimes courtship and lifetime pair bonding occur between same-sex pairs that also have heterosexual sex outside the union, like in penguins or the Laysan albatross.

With no value judgments or cultural prohibitions blocking non-human animals from pursuing it, same-sex interaction flourishes in the animal world. Sexual fluidity increases the sheer quantity of sex that occurs within a species as a whole, which has an evolutionary benefit.

As that same study in Nature argued, an “ancestral condition of indiscriminate sexual behaviors directed towards all sexes” – that, bisexuality, not heterosexuality, as the base condition of the tree of life – incurs little cost to a species' fitness and has many rewards. Eggs will still be fertilized, young will still be raised, while animals can also reap the social benefits of same-sex behaviors.

Bad policies flow from faulty assumptions

I understand the logic behind the "Don’t Say Gay" legislation in Florida, or the banning of LGBTQIA+ content in schools: If we can wall out this topic, then our students won’t have to deal with it. They can stay safely heterosexual. But that logic rests on a faulty assumption. Same-sex desire rises from within and occurs naturally within all animal populations, including human ones.

Those young people in Florida who are being told their sexuality or gender identity is so wrong that it can’t even be mentioned are not going to simply decide not to be gay or trans or bisexual. Instead they’re just going to be struck down even harder by a cudgel that calls them unnatural. That cudgel is deadly: a recent survey by the Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQIA+ youth “seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.”

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The assumption of unnaturalness is the root of anti-gay legislation across the world, from sodomy laws that existed in the United States until 2003 through current criminal statutes in other countries, some of which carry the death penalty.

I wish I could tell every queer young person in Florida who is currently internalizing the fact that they are too awful to even discuss about the irrefutable explosion of peer-reviewed research into same-sex sexual behavior in the animal kingdom. It establishes one thing with complete clarity: homosexual behavior is natural.

Eliot Schrefer is the author of "Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality," publishing in May from HarperCollins / Katherine Tegen Books. Follow him on Twitter: @EliotSchrefer.