The Natural History Museum in Switzerland’s capital, Bern, is celebrating animal homosexuality in the exhibition Queer – Diversity is in our nature. The long-running exhibition, showing from April 2021 until March 2023, aims to normalise homosexuality by reminding us that we’re not the only species to be intimate with the same sex.
“There are men, and there are women. Men love women, and vice versa. For hundreds of years, we thought and acted using these categories. But the old certainties are now crumbling,” the exhibition’s website reads.
“Again and again, we hear the question: What is natural?”
Homosexuality is everywhere in nature. “Examples of same-sex behavior in the natural world are plentiful, and animals like dolphins and rams have been known to not only engage in same-sex activity, but also form long-lasting same-sex partnerships,” reported The Hill.
“Same-sex behavior has been observed in at least 1,500 species and is likely present in all social vertebrates…These relationships can be immensely useful in fortifying social bonds.”
In fact, homosexuality is an integral part to many species’ social dynamics. For example, Australian researcher Krista Nicholson, Murdoch University, discovered groups of dolphins engaging in socio-sexual homosexual behavior, “[including] mounting and genital contact between individuals,” according to Mandurah Mail. “Homosexual behavior, as identified here, has been described for dolphin populations elsewhere.”
The homosexual behavior recorded in dolphins at Shark Bay wasn’t just a bit of fun. “Male dolphins [can] form life-long alliances,” Krista Nicholson said. “Socio-sexual interactions between males are more common than between females or between the sexes.”
Christian Kropf, a biologist at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and the exhibition’s scientific curator, found a similar behaviour in European rams. 6% of rams mate exclusively with other males.
“Although they have the choice, they aren’t interested in females. Male sheep have intense contact, lick their genitals and have anal intercourse,” he said, according to Swiss Info.
“The reasons for homosexual relationships are not always clear, but we do know that they strengthen social bonds and can contribute to group unity.”
This is true of bonobos, who engage in sex, including homosexual sex, to ease tensions and resolve conflicts.
Parenting isn’t heteronormative in the broader animal kingdom, either. “In nature, Kropf points out, gender roles are not always defined and cases of same-sex parents are widespread. Among Laysan albatrosses, a marine species native to Hawaii, some females brood and raise their chicks together. The opposite happens among black swans, where the egg laid by a female is guarded by two males.”
Kropf hopes that the exhibition will lead to greater acceptance of gay and lesbian people. It may have already contributed to a huge breakthrough for equality in Swiss society; the exhibition coincided with the people of Switzerland voting in favor of same-sex marriage.
“I don’t know if [the exhibition] contributed to the acceptance of the new marriage law in Switzerland,” Kropf said. “But it certainly had an impact on my father. He is 87 years old and has never spoken well of homosexual people. But since he came here he has changed. He realized that same-sex behavior is absolutely normal,” he said
Despite how natural homosexuality is in many animal species, “sixty-nine UN member States continue to criminalize consensual same-sex activity,” according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).
