The Seagulls

WNYC Studios is supported by Apple Card. You'll love Apple Card, it's everything a credit card should be and more. Earn up to 3 daily cash back on every purchase, which can automatically earn interest. When you open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app.

Listener supported.

WNYC Studios.

Oh, wait, you're listening?

Okay, all right, okay.

All right.

You're listening to Radiolab Lab, Radiolab from WNYC.

Yep.

Latif Nasser.

Lulu Miller.

You ready to get wet, wet because we are hopping in a boat.

Okay.

It's cold, it's windy, it's 1972, so in the boat with us is a young, married couple, George Hunt.

Now I'm just an old doofus.

And Molly Warner.

We didn't have white hair back then, we had darker hair.

Oh yeah.

Picture them in flannels, big rubber boots, binoculars around their neck.

Yeah, all those things.

And they're about 30 miles off the coast of Southern California, approaching this big, imposing hunk of rock.

Called Santa Barbara Island.

It's about a mile across Treeless.

Mostly cliff around the edges.

Totally uninhabited.

There's no dock there, so you have to row up to waves on rocks and jump off at just the right time.

And on top of that rock, Molly's gonna spot something that will change the lives of millions of people.

Gulls.

Gulls like seagulls, mm-hmm.

See, George is an ornithologist. And they had traveled all the way out to the island because there was a wild colony out there. He really wanted to study.

Okay.

Only problem was that it was the middle of the spring semester.

And I had to teach.

Back on the mainland at UC Irvine.

So I had to leave Molly out there.

Oh man. After helping her get set up, he hops on the boat back home.

That's a little, that's a little cold.

Yeah, it is not just emotionally cold.

It was cold and windy.

Okay.

So, but, you know, George is a young professor trying to prove himself, and Molly happens to be trained as an anthropologist. Yeah, so she agrees to spend a couple months out there, you know, watching.

Oh, it's amazing to be in a gull colony. And you're just sitting there. And all of a sudden there's a falcon that flies over the entire colony, jumps up into the air and screams and circles.

But what she was really there to observe was, well, mating season.

The female will beg for food going.

Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack.

I don't really remember what the males say.

I think we actually have George doing that.

You probably do.

The male starts making a quack, quack, quack, quack.

Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack.

Waving his wings, he gets on top.

Studies his wobbly legs on her back.

Puts his cloaca next to hers.

Wait, the cloaca is.

The private part, Oh, it's a little opening. Males and females both have them, and to finish the act, the male kisses his cloaca to hers and.

And fertilizes her.

Can you watch a rejection happen versus an acceptance?

A rejection is the female walks away.

She's not subtle.

It's not that different from a lot of places.

So anyway, back to Molly Moon's coming out Stars, Winds, this is her existence is on this island and one morning.

Yeah.

Two eggs, three eggs when she sees this one nest.

That had six eggs in it.

Six, right? Which is way more than these birds usually lay.

It would be like having septuplets.

And as she goes along, two, two, three.

Oh, six.

Oh, six, there was a good chunk of them, oh, six.

Oh, six, she's seeing that about one in 10 of hundreds of nests has way more eggs than it's supposed to have.

Of course, there weren't any cell phones that would have been extremely useful. Yeah, we did have a radio phone thing.

So she radios to George.

The communication was so awful.

Like, there's too many eggs.

You need to come out and see what's going on, and so I did.

And she shows him around the island, all these nests just brimming with eggs.

I was absolutely thunderstruck.

He had never seen or even heard of so many eggs in one single nest.

So then the question was, what's going on?

They figured maybe there was something going on inside the birds that was making them pump out so many extra eggs.

So Molly went and trapped the birds.

One of the couples from the nests with tons of eggs.

I then euthanized them and dissected them.

Ah, thank you for your service to science. That pair. Oh, and they just left six eggs hanging. Yeah, gosh, yeah, that's sad. I didn't even think about that.

Perfectly fine.

So then he takes a look at her mate.

I opened the second bird and we can see the ovaries.

It's another female.

I turned to Molly and said, Are you sure these two actually came from the same thing?

Like, this couldn't have been a nesting pair.

Yes, they were.

You know, she was really quite indignant because she's a very careful scientist, and she said, I'm absolutely sure. So at that point, we knew we had two females incubating eggs in the same nest.

So they go back and check all those other nests with six eggs. They find a way of identifying the sex without euthanizing them, and discover they are all, all of them females. And as they watch them, they realize that they aren't just roommates.

The females will mate with each other.

Really, they are having sex with each other. Wow.

One of the females.

Steady her legs and kiss the cloacas.

Wow.

Now they're not actually making babies this way. They'll have to go get fertilized by a male somewhere else. But after that happens, the two females come together and incubate the eggs together.

The chicks are very cute when they're hatching these little fuzzy things.

And when a chick does hatch, these two ladybirds take turns.

Throwing up their fish for the little guys to eat.

Giving them the nice baby food.

Giving them the nice baby food, so the smaller gulls that.

All in all, George and Molly found that about 10 of the nests on Santa Barbara Island had two moms inside.

And that was a oh my goodness, this is something new.

All right, bias alert, Latif, my friend, you may recall that I, too, am a female-female paired vertebrate.

Okay, you sold me all right? Okay, I'm in, let's go.

Yeah, so to get us there, I guess, first off, you have to know that. At the time, George and Molly discovered these gulls. The scientific establishment's official stance on homosexuality was that it was unnatural, not really a part of the natural world, not a part of the animal kingdom. And that is a belief that, as best as I can tell, was born back in the 1200s.

Wow, we're going way back, all right.

So come with me there for a brief moment, we're gonna meet a man named Thomas Aquinas, the famous philosopher-priest who wrote in one of his most famous works that homosexuality was a quote. Crime against nature, and this idea, this phrase, this belief. It spread like wildfire all over Western Europe. A lot of the laws that banned homosexuality explicitly used that phrase crime against nature. But then, with the rise of science in the 17th and 18th century, you also see how this belief gets embedded there, too. Because whenever scientists did stumble across same-sex mating in animals, which they did, they would either not publish on it. And you can actually see records of the notes that people sat on, or accounts that got flat-out rejected from publications. Or, if they did write about it, they'd explain it away as, like a quote, perversion or aberration, or even abomination.

Scientists using that language.

Yeah, totally. And then, when Darwin comes along in the 1800s, the ideas of evolution end up kind of bolstering the notion that homosexuality shouldn't appear in nature. Basically, if the whole point of life is to reproduce, why would you have a creature that can't reproduce, you know? And then, instead of perverse, it would get labeled with words like evolutionary, outlier or fluke or mistake.

Right, and in what other scenario are, like, Darwin and the priests, like, pulling in the same direction, you know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. And this sort of strange alignment made it so like when a scientist would see a thing in nature, they could still manage to label it as unnatural.

Even though I just saw it in nature.

Yeah, yes, 100. And, in fact, when George and Molly first tried to publish on the seagulls in the 1970s, the Ornithological Journal, they sent it to rejected it.

They said, Well, this is so unusual. We want more data, so we said, sure, we'll go get more data, we got more data.

So they did year after year, they kept collecting data, they took photos, they got more and more research assistants to help, and finally.

It was sufficiently mind-boggling to us that we said, Why don't we send this to science?

George finally submits a paper to the Journal Science, and in June of 1977, a paper is released called Female-Female Pairing in Western Gulls Loris Occidentalis in Southern California. And basically.

The world goes crazy.

It sets off this media frenzy.

The phone doesn't stop ringing.

George remembers newspapers calling from all over the world Can I speak to George Hunt? please? wanting to interview him?

The London Times, The Melbourne Times, Hi there, I'm calling from India, all over this country.

Because in documenting these islands full of homosexual gulls, George and Molly hadn't just challenged a central belief of science. They had clumsily detonated that centuries old justification that people were still using to try to keep homosexuality a crime.

That it was a quote crime against nature.

This is historian Lillian Federman, we have heard you referenced multiple times as the mother of lesbian history.

I won't call myself that, but if you want to introduce me as that, I don't object.

She lived through this era and said that.

1977 was a very charged moment than the fight for LGBTQ rights.

On one hand, there had been all these strides.

There were the first gay pride parades.

The medical profession had declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

And more and more people started coming out of the closet.

And winning rights.

Yes.

But in response to all that momentum, there came a voice Oh, come along with me to my little corner of the world ♪.

She did like the orange juice commercials, right?

Exactly, she was the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission.

Yeah.

Come to the Florida Sunshine tree. And a spokesperson for the anti-gay movement, she called her organization.

Save our children.

Save our Children against Homosexuals incorporated.

With the argument that homosexuals, they're very dangerous.

And to try to convince people of this, she would often point to nature, saying stuff like.

Not even barnyard animals do the disgusting things that homosexuals do, that is, homosexuality is so much against nature that it's not to be found, even among animals.

She was a notoriously great organizer, like she could really mobilize people.

Hugely. And this tactic of pointing to the supposed empirical wrongness or deviance of homosexuals, oh man, did it work.

It was a decisive end.

To Dade County's homosexual controversy, just two weeks before George and Molly's study dropped. She pulled off her first victory and it was a big one. She successfully organized voters in Miami to come out and vote. To strip away legal protections for gay folks, they wanted no part of a law which protects homosexuals. And so right on the heels of that, when this scientific report on some pretty natural looking homosexuality comes out.

We got some really quite nasty letters about our work that, you know, this was bad. We were undermining proper beliefs.

There were editorials slamming George's work, and even Congress jumped in.

Really, yeah.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Yeah, he had received government funding from the National Science Foundation, and some conservative congressmen were so upset about this.

That Congress held up the NSF budget.

Wow, a tiny tangent, I don't know. For me, at least still kind of feels. That. Public opinion over the morality of gay relationships or marriages has changed so drastically in the last few decades, at least in this country. It's like, genuinely hard to put your mind back to understand. Like the Anita Bryants or the people who can't stomach even a scientist documenting this in seagulls.

I don't think it's hard to go back there. No, I mean, the Anita Bryants are alive and well. They're banning books, they're trying to dial back queer rights based on a really similar argument.

Right, right.

But the thing I feel like, I need to confess that I didn't even realize until working on this story is that I held a version of this belief of Aquinas. Old belief, too. Really, yeah, I mean, I didn't grow up with religion. I woke into a world where I realized I was queer at a time where there was so much more acceptance.

Right?

But if I did grow up with anything, it's like my scientist father evolution. I absolutely believed it was unnatural and I would hear every so now and then. I grew up outside of Boston, there were gay swans in Boston Common, and I was like, Oh.

I was absolutely thrilled.

That's Lillian Faderman again.

Gay periodicals all over the country picked up on this immediately.

They published cartoons of Like the Gay, the Lesbian seagulls like pooping in Anita Bryant's eye.

Yes.

Here's one. There were songs Come With Me, Lesbian, Seagull and Plays. One Show actually had two women in Seagull outfits.

I went to it and afterward I went up and introduced myself to the director, who just about fell over.

There were boat rides out to go see the gulls.

I gave up a couple of Sundays to lead trips out to the islands.

We got on a boat. This is Edgar Sochil, a queer ecologist who went out to the island to just commune. It was super loud with his queer avian elders. It was like, Ah, ah, ah.

Yeah.

Right?

Yes.

Amazing.

But in the anti-gay movement, the Gulls did not have an effect. Anita Bryant only went on to have more wins in the following years, getting more discriminatory practices in place in other cities and in the 80s. When the question of homosexuality finally reaches the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick, the justices vote against legalizing homosexual sex for the whole country. Again, calling it unnatural in the opinion. But if you turn, if you mosey on over to the halls of science, you see that. The seagull study ushered in a flood, or, pardon me, a parade of queer animals tromping through onto the scientific record.

Jims Bonobos Gorillas Orangutans.

That's Elliot Schreffer, who just came out with a book on the science of queer animals.

Bonobo females having sex will get face-to-face to do it, they will rub their clitorises against each other to have loud, rapturous orgasms. Ooh.

Heading underwater.

We have the clownfish.

This is Christine Wilkinson, she's a biologist and ecologist.

And the Amazon River dolphin?

Is that the pink one?

Yeah, they're pink, they love cuddling, which I think is very sweet.

Oh, that's nice.

There's also like whales.

Seals, manatees, bottlenose dolphins.

Nails will bond for life. And a study put it at 2.4 times an hour on average that the males are having sex with each other.

That's so much.

It sounds exhausting.

Just when I thought I'd covered all of them rattlesnakes.

Hyenas.

Marsupials.

Hedgehogs, rodents.

They just kept coming bats.

Having oral sex with each other in flight upside down.

Oh, I love it. And you have birds, geese, swans and ducks, swallows, warblers, finches, sparrows, blackbirds and crows, birds of paradise, other birds. But the animal that really took the cake for me is this striped little lizard.

Called the New Mexico whiptail lizard, this entire species is made up of females.

You can have a species with no males.

Turns out you can.

These lezzy lizzies actually simulate copulation with each other, which increases their fertility.

They then reproduce asexually, but instead of popping out a clone.

They produce twice the number of chromosomes, which get recombined to form more genetically diverse offspring, just like they would in a fertilized egg. No, yes.

No.

Never heard of that before?

So they're freaking gonna persist.

What the last nearly 50 years of scientific study has revealed is that there is not a single.

Banana, Slug, Corner, Earthworm.

Of this planet where animals are not being super freaking weird.

Wow.

Right, and I do want to just say that I'm focusing on same-sex mating. But the story of sexual fluidity in nature, animals being multiple sexes at once, or changing sexes over a lifetime. That has been discovered to be such a deep part of nature, too, but for the same-sex mating thing? As scientists looked closely and measured oxytocin levels, or counted offspring survival rates, or done the science thing on it, they're seeing all these benefits, like evolutionary benefits. The same-sex mating can strengthen hunting alliances, it can help resolve conflict during resource scarcity.

Huh, how?

So my favorite example of this is in white-tailed deer, males will mate with one another, and they're these societies, these all-male societies of deer. Called velvet horns that roam the forest in packs of like two to seven. And they don't have full-on big antlers, they have these little velvet ones so they don't fight. And so that leaves them healthier than the other ones because they're not getting injured.

There can be a loneliness to being LGBT that in a kind of broad existence sense.

Elliot Schreffer again.

That we are a blip of a strange time of human culture that created us. And that, without foundation in the past and without future, that this kind of it can feel annihilating.

I would love to end the story right here, but I can't. Because after a short break, I have a lesson to learn about the dangers of finding your belonging in nature.

Stick with us, we'll be back.

We'll be back. Available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility, Apple Card and savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch member FDIC terms and more at Applecard.com.

RadioLab is supported by BetterHelp. We all like to try to set our non-negotiables, whether it's hitting the laundromat every Wednesday or hitting the gym x times a week. These goals can start to slip when schedules get packed and the mind gets cloudy with stress. But when you're starting to feel overwhelmed, a non-negotiable like therapy is more important than ever. Therapy can help you keep your cup full by giving you the tools you need to get back into balance.

Latif Lulu, Radiolab Galls. And where are we going next?

Pit stop in Washington, D.

But, you know, the female-female pairing died out.

Wait, what?

What?

So there aren't, they're still seagulls, but the island is hetero now. How did that happen? Well, George's theory is that back in the 70s, chemicals like DDT were getting into the birds. But, for some reason, were more toxic to the males, which left an island without that many males around.

And a female that's primed to mate will mate with the best prospect available, so they pair up with another female.

And once DDT was banned, the male population could rebound so the females didn't need to pair up anymore. That's his theory. Has it been seen since on the islands that you know of?

Not that I know of.

You do you guess that, like in these 30 years, 40 years, do you think sometimes it happens just because of?

I have not seen it since.

Okay.

Nobody has told me they saw them.

But isn't it hard to see with the naked eye? Sorry to interrupt, but couldn't it be happening without us realizing?

It could be happening without us realizing. But the eggs are big and obvious, and there are enough people walking around in gull colonies and dealing with gulls. In one way or another, people would be aware of lots of eggs, especially after what we had. But no, I don't think it's going on now.

Sorry.

I can hear you, please tell me. They still like doing that.

No, no, but I appreciate you, George Hunt, as a just man wed to the facts and the observations, which is how we got here. But yeah, there's a deflation in the like. You know, you want a certain story sometimes.

Yes.

So, to just sum that all up, it means that the animal that opened the floodgates to all the research which has helped us see the naturalness of homosexuality in nature was most likely a fluke.

Uh.

Which honestly knocked the wind out of me. It made me feel embarrassed.

Okay, I mean, what is your deal with these queer animals? Okay, so quanimals?

Quanimals? This is someone very close to me, my wife Grace. Is this the first time I've dragged you under the microphone in 10 years of being together? I think, yeah.

This is your pathological obsession with finding queer animals, like one book after another of gay animal stories started popping up in our home. No matter how many times they put them away, they would be back where they started. And like, I thought it was cute at first, but then it kept going. It almost. To me, it felt like you were seeking validation of our relationship in a certain way.

Oh, whoa of our relationship.

Our relationship specifically, but of, like, your own experience of being queer.

And though at first I kind of denied that, the more we talked.

I thought you said at some point that it, like, brought reassurance to you.

Yeah, the more I did realize that, maybe they were like giving me something. Like a shield against a message that you can get as you walk through the world as a queer family.

What do you mean?

I mean, the state next door, the attorney general, three years ago, wanted to scratch me off my son's birth certificate. We each have a kid who's biological and one who's not, and for the non-biological parent, we're currently allowed to both be on the birth certificate. But anyone in the gay community knows that. You want to also adopt your child because you don't know where rights are going and the process of adopting your own child. To have the state officially recognize each of us, you have to submit yourself to a background check, you have to submit yourself to a house visit.

I mean, I get that, you know, when we're in public, sometimes with our kids, and it's like, you know, if they're misbehaving? It feels worse because we're two moms and you're like, Oh, I don't want it to reflect badly on us.

Right? And they're like, See, it is bad for them, I don't know. There's just something so like, profoundly like, a fresh drink of water to just like, you know? And that's why I'm cherry picking the studies where the homo animals have higher offspring survival rates and where it's about like species. Like where I'm like, it's good for a community, it's good for a kid.

I mean, it just makes me sad that you think of it like that. It makes me sad that those laws are still contributing to you feeling gross, gross, you know, like, or to delegitimizing our relation.

I mostly feel angry Fyi.

But I think that the salient feeling is.

Yeah, I don't know. It's like the fear that there are some people who think you would be dangerous to their kid and I.

Yeah, but I feel like those, just like all the discriminatory practices, should be taken away. Just because, not because because we're like human beings, not because we also exist in nature. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like, why do we need to prove our worth by existing in nature? Why not just acknowledge that, like whatever the relationships are like, it's love, like it's all it is is like it's just?

Oh my God, what time is it? Do we have to pick up our kids? Holy, Oh my God, we got to go, OK.

Am I getting the kids or are you?

Um, we want to.

This episode was reported by Lulu Miller with help from Sarah Khari and produced by Sarah Khari with help from Tanya Chawla, Heather Radke, Andrew Vinales and Akedi Foster Keys.

It was edited by Becca Bressler, sound design by Jeremy Bloom and dialogue mixing by Arianne Wack.

Special thanks to Michael Chado, Harsha Dasrathi, Sean McKeithen and Sarita Bhatt. We want to give a huge shout out to the podcast Breaking Green Ceilings, which amplifies underheard voices in nature and ecology. That's where Lulu first learned about the seagull study on their episode with Edgar Sochul, who you met in our piece.

Elliot Schreffer's book on Queerness in nature is called Queer Ducks and Other Animals. It's a great read if you want to go deeper on some of the science of this stuff. And I am excited to say that. Our resident artist on staff, Jared Bartman, designed a patch, an embroidered patch of the gay seagulls. It is retro, it's got a sunsetty rainbow.

Foundation Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.