As far as LGBTQIA people are concerned, what is old is new again. Recent pushes to restrict classroom representation of sexuality and gender identity, to intimidate libraries out of queer-friendly programming, and to legislate away the right to choose gender reassignment might appear new on the surface, but they reflect anxieties that have been part of Western culture for centuries, and that have everything to do with what we consider natural.

The last time sexual anxieties in the USA ran this high was in the 1990s. Back then, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the military instituted its controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and a “gay gene” was falsely reported as having been discovered in fruit flies. In that decade RuPaul’s gorgeously Amazonian presence made a lot of heterosexual men wonder about their sexuality, and Ellen DeGeneres came out, only to see her sitcom promptly canceled. Amid all this, under the guise of “protecting family values,” in 1991 the US government shelved an $18 million survey on teen sexual health, and another study of adult sexual diversity. 

It amounted to a moratorium on all government-funded research into sexual identities and desire, with one notable exception. The governmental agency that was permitted to continue its research on homosexuality was … the Department of Agriculture. They’d been looking into what was known among farmers as the “dud stud” phenomenon: 8.5 percent of rams would choose only other males as sexual partners, time and again. He might be healthy and virile and have plenty of sperm to spare, but without any desire for females a “dud stud” wouldn’t sire lambs, and the farmer would be out of their investment (from $350 for a cheapie to $4,000 for a prize stud). 

Bovid homosexual desire has long been familiar to ranchers, who watch out for females mounting other females as a simple way to determine when they’re in heat, and use steers to arouse bulls before artificially extracting their semen. Valerius Geist, a prominent mammologist, realized in the 1960s that wild bighorn sheep live in “essentially a homosexual society,” the males and females coming together only during the relatively brief rutting season. That means spending the rest of their lives in sex-segregated herds, where they engage in homosexual sex—not just quick mounting but full-on intercourse. He didn’t publish the research at the time, noting later that it was too difficult to “conceive of those magnificent beasts as queers.”

Geist probably assumed he was encountering an anomaly, but homosexual behavior in animals had been befuddling observers for centuries. Some ancient Greek thinkers believed hyenas had a special orifice for homosexual encounters, and in the 7th century, theologian Isidore of Seville was troubled by the homosexual activities of partridges, “for male mounts male and blind desire forgets gender.” 

Reports of such homosexual behavior didn’t stop Thomas Aquinas from arguing, in the 13th century, that homosexuality was unnatural precisely because it did not occur in animals. His rhetoric about the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality, historian John Boswell notes, was politically useful and aligned with another moment of sexual anxiety: a surge in anti-gay legislation throughout Europe between 1250 and 1300, in which the death penalty for sodomy was introduced in country after country.

The assumption that homosexuality doesn’t exist in nature has led to very real consequences, such as the Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court case of 1986, which upheld the conviction of two men for sodomy, whose sentencing had cited the “unnaturalness” of their behavior. (The last sodomy law in the US was struck down only in 2003, and it remains a criminal, and sometimes capital, offense in parts of the world.) 

During the last gay panic in the 1990s—and certainly back in the 13th century—we lacked today’s mainstream scientific acknowledgment of animals’ same-sex encounters. It’s been an important three decades for zoology. As a recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution pointed out, the number of animal species with substantiated same-sex sexual behavior is 1,500 and counting. 

For our near relative the bonobo, female-female genital rubbing is the most frequent sex act, one that takes place amid a matriarchy of sexually connected mothers. Shorebirds like albatross, gulls, and terns have same-sex parents in up to a third of nests; male bottlenose dolphins bond for life, cementing their union through frequent, and acrobatic, sex. Overturning long-standing assumptions that homosexual behavior was an evolutionary dead end, a growing scientific openness to animal bisexuality has resulted in compelling new theories. Foremost among these is the idea that oxytocin-producing sex is a powerful tool for reconciliation and alliance formation, whether that sex is hetero- or homosexual. 

During my closeted teenage years in the 1990s, I would covertly look up “homosexuality” in encyclopedias, only to discover that it was a psychological failure of humans with bad parental attachments, without analog in nature. That echoed the rhetoric of otherwise kindly adults around me, who were grateful the “gay plague” of AIDS was getting rid of a social problem. I made it to the other side of my shame by coming to accept and even love my “unnaturalness.” It was only years later that I discovered the diversity that had been in nature all along. In writing my most recent book, Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality, I chose to make it accessible to teen readers, for whom internalized messaging about “unnaturalness” can be a life or death concern. (A survey last year by The Trevor Project found that 45 percent of LGBTQIA teens have seriously considered suicide.) 

 I made it to the other side of my shame by coming to accept and even love my “unnaturalness.” It was only years later that I discovered the diversity that had been in nature all along.

I had these concerns on my mind when I spoke to a young wildlife ecologist, Logan Weyand, who, while working with various bovid species, has observed plenty of same-sex mounting, intersex animals, and individuals that eschew sex altogether. Though Weyand was assigned female at birth, he never felt comfortable in his body and transitioned to male during his freshman year of college. He’s still on a journey around his gender identity, selectively closeting himself, especially at his research site in Idaho, where passing can be a safety concern. 

Amid the need to navigate others’ judgments about LGBTQIA identities, Weyand finds himself longing for the times when he spends weeks away from civilization, “with the animals totally by myself, and not being judged. When I’m watching animals, I can go sunrise to sunset and not take my face away from the scope for hours.” Out there in the field, mud up to his ankles, Weyand worries only about getting good data. The sheep and moose he studies don’t care one bit about his sexual identity. 

It’s a recurrent theme for many of the LGBTQIA scientists I’ve spoken to for my research. In a world where queer humans are often asked to identify or explain themselves, the radical acceptance of nature is a relief. In the animal world, everything just is.