The Seagulls 38:12

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Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. Latif Nasser. Lulu Miller. You ready to get wet? Wet? Mm-hmm. Because we are hopping in a boat. Okay. It's cold. 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 going to spot something that will change the lives of millions of people. All thanks to... Kohl's.

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. 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, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep.

I don't really remember what the males say. I think we actually have George doing that. You probably do. The male starts 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. Okay. 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, it's about a week after the mating has begun. And she begins walking around, looking at the nest. And suddenly...

Eggs are appearing. Okay. And so she's kind of going on this little Easter egg hunt. One egg. She's just marking. Two eggs. Her little clipboard, how many eggs are in each nest. 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 like. It would be like having septuplets. And as she goes along. Two, two, three. Oh! Oh!

There was a good chunk of them. 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's 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. Thank you for your service to science, that pair. And they just left six eggs hanging. Yeah, gosh, yeah. That's sad. I didn't even think about that.

Yeah. So they left those eggs cold in the wind. Okay. It's a very sad story. So George opens up the first bird, realizes it's the female. This species, the males and females are basically identical. And he looks and he sees the reproductive tract, ovaries. 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? 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...

We'll get on top of the other female and make the clucking sound as if she's the male. And we'll raise her wings. Steady her legs and kiss the cloacas. It's the whole same dance. 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. As far as I know, it was the first documentation of female-female pairing in any wild animal.

All right. Bias alert. Latif, my friend, you may recall that I, too, am a female-female paired vertebrate. I am a lady married to a lady. We've got two kids. And so when I first heard about this, I was...

I was totally charmed by it. And so I thought, oh, this would be a fun Mother's Day story, maybe a Valentine's Day story, whatever. I wanted to just tell a little story about it. But when I started looking into it, it turned out that the story of the Gulls is so much bigger than the Gulls. They would become a kind of turning point.

in our understanding of how homosexuality works in the animal world, and even how we think about and talk about homosexuality in us. 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

That, as best as I can tell, was born back in the 1200s. Wow, we're going way back. Yeah. All right. So come with me there for a brief moment. We're going to 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. Ah. And this idea, this phrase, this belief, it spread like wildfire all over Western Europe. Yeah.

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 like...

Wow. 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. A hundred percent. 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. Hi.

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.

All right, so quick lay of the land. June 1977, when this paper drops, over 100 countries and a majority of U.S. states still criminalized homosexuality, many based on Aquinas' old phrase that it was a, quote, crime against nature. This is historian Lillian Faderman. 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. Then 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. Come along with me.

The woman named Anita Bryant. Maybe you've heard of her. She's a pop singer and evangelical Christian. She did like the orange juice commercials, right? Exactly. She was the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission. Yeah. Into the Florida sunshine trees.

and a spokesperson for the anti-gay movement. She called her organization Save Our Children with the argument that homosexuals, they're very dangerous. And to try to convince people of this, she would often point

saying stuff like... Not even barnyard animals do the disgusting things that homosexuals do. That is, homosexuality is so much against nature itself

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

whole 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 the 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 paper.

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 gayness.

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, okay,

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, like, there was so much more acceptance. Right. But...

If I did grow up with anything, it's like my scientist father, evolution. Like, I just, I absolutely believed it was unnatural. And I would hear every so now and then, like, I grew up outside of Boston. There were like gay swans in Boston Common. And I was like, oh. But it felt like a byproduct of captivity. Yeah. So...

About a year ago, when I first heard about George and Molly's study, like I had this 40-year delayed version of what happened for a lot of queer people when the study came out. 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. And plays. One show actually had two women in seagull outfits. That's Pamela Gray. She wrote one of those plays. 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 Sochel, a queer ecologist who went out to the island to just commune. It was super loud. With his queer avian elders. It was like 24 hours.

For a time, the lesbian seagull really became like a mascot in the gay pride movement. Yeah. 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. Wow. 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. Just hundreds of studies, starting with

Ooh.

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 lessy-lizzies actually simulate compilation 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. Okay. Which get recombined to form more genetically diverse offspring, just like they would in a fertilized egg. No. Yes. No.

No. Never heard of that before. So they're freaking going to persist. What the last nearly 50 years of scientific study has revealed is that there is not a single corner of this planet where animals are not being super freaking queer.

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. Same-sex mating can strengthen hunting alliances. It can help resolve conflict during resource scarcity. It can reduce stress and strengthen social bonds, which is really good for fitness. And it can even increase the survival rate of offspring. Huh. How? So my favorite example of this is in white-tailed deer.

Males will mate with one another. And there are these societies, these all-male societies of deer called velvet horned.

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. And these all-male packs will take in orphaned fawns and raise them and protect them. And learning about the sheer breadth of how queerness is

There can be a loneliness to being LGBT that in a kind of broad 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. And I love the idea that queerness does not make us an anomaly, does not separate us from the natural world, but instead it is our heritage as animals

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.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Latif. Lulu. Radiolab. Gulls. And where are we going next? All right. So we need to take a brief pit stop in Washington, D.C., because about 30 years after George and Molly first discovered the gulls, the quote unquote lesbian seagulls make an appearance at the Supreme Court. The

The gulls did? Kind of, yeah. So in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas, the case that will overturn the remaining bans on queer sex and legalize it for the whole country, make it a constitutional right. It's this huge victory. There was a brief that was filed that said basically you can't call homosexuality a crime against nature because...

Look how common it is in nature. And they footnote this book in the middle of which is a section complete with illustrations on...

the lesbian gulls. Wow. And so whether or not any justice like opened that book and changed their mind because of that, I do love to just know that the homosexual seagulls were there that day. Like cheering from the rafters. Cheering from the footnotes. Yeah, cheering from the footnotes. Molly, this all kind of started with your...

That's right. It started with you noticing something. And I think whether or not it's a big part of your life now, I know that I at least feel this odd feeling.

gratitude to the grueling spring you spent out there because in a real way, it is part of why I feel a deeper sense of belonging than maybe like a queer woman 50 years ago. So I guess I just kind of wanted to say thank you. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

So what I'm really hoping I can do next is actually go out to the island. I'm trying right now to get my editor to send me with my wife and our two little boys to go camp there for a night so we can, you know, collect the sounds of the gulls and then at night be nesting down with our little brood in our little nest and picturing that there's like female-female pairs with their little nest and just feeling like this oneness. But...

you know, the female-female pairing died out. Wait, what? What? So there aren't, there's still seagulls, but the island is hetero now. How did that happen? Well,

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. Okay.

Has it been seen since on the islands that you know of? Not that I know of. 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? This was the early 70s. Isn't it hard to see with the naked eye? Sorry to interrupt, but couldn't it be happening without us realizing? Yeah.

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 know. I was like, as a queer person, that's... 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, which honestly knocked the wind out of me. It made me feel...

Okay, I mean, what is your deal with these queer animals? Okay, so... Queer animals. Queer animals. 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. You're welcome. And I asked her to talk to me because the whole time I've been working on this, Grace has been side-eyeing what she calls... 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, almost. Whoa. Of our relationship. Not like our relationship specifically, but of like your own experience of being queer. Yeah.

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.

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 background check. You have to submit yourself to a house visit, knowing that the presumption is you're probably not fit.

You have to like experience looking at your floors and like your body and wondering, oh God, there's a dust bunny under this part of my kitchen. What is in my cupboards? Am I too messy today? There is a, I mean, there's literally coffee stain on my pants right now. And, and, and, and,

Just that process, like any broccolocca on the street, it seems, can go make a baby and the state's fine with it. But should it be two women or should it be two men or should there be a trans person involved and you'd like to adopt that child, your own child?

you have to prove that you're fit. 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, you know, like, or to delegitimizing our relationship. I mostly feel angry, FYI. But I think the salient feeling is disgust. Yeah.

Or like wrongness. 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 there's a low grade always trying to prove otherwise. Yeah. But I feel like those...

All the discriminatory practices should be taken away just because. Not because we're like human beings. Not because we also exist in nature. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Why do we need to prove our worth by existing in nature? Why not just acknowledge that whatever, the relationships are... It's love. All it is is just loving people and there's nothing wrong with that.

Oh my God, what time is it? Do we have to pick up our kids? Holy s***. Oh my God, we gotta go. Okay. Oh God, we're gonna be the last moms at daycare and then they'll be like, lesbians, don't pick up their kids on time. She's putting on her jacket. She's leaving. Sorry, am I getting too much? We want to book. We want to book.

This episode was reported by Lulu Miller, with help from Sara Khari, and produced by Sara 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 Chato, 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 sunset-y rainbow and you can get it if you become a sustaining member of Radiolab by joining our membership program, The Lab. Just go to radiolab.org slash join. That's radiolab.org slash join. Stick with us. Happy Pride. Happy Summer. It's

Hi, I'm Maureen and I'm calling from Charlottesville, Virginia. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Akedy Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. ♪

Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.