Bird of the Week: The Seagulls Of Lesbian Seagull Island

Welcome to Gay Animal Month on Discourse Blog!

Earlier this week, I was talking to the wonderful interns at the other place, and the subject of gay animals came up. It turned out that the interns had been doing a lot of thinking about gay animals. For instance, they informed me that aardvarks are apparently pretty gay, and not just on television.

It’s no slight on The Nation, an iconic institution that I love so much, thank you for employing me, to say that gay animal facts do not exactly fall within its normal bailiwick. But you know what is a good place to talk about gay animals? Discourse Blog.

That’s why we’re proud (wordplay) to announce that this month is Gay Animal Month. All through June, we’re going to be celebrating the animals that have made queer history. Did you know that a bisexual lion threw one of the first bricks at Stonewall??? OK, I made that up, but wouldn’t that be awesome?

Because this is Discourse Blog, the first gay animals we’re going to talk about are obviously birds. So without further ado, let’s get to this week’s Bird of the Week: the inhabitants of Lesbian Seagull Island.

This picture of two seagulls is for illustrative purposes only. Are these gulls gay? I don’t know. But is this what two lesbian seagulls who live on Lesbian Seagull Island could look like? For sure.

Gay? (AH AP/Flickr)

I had never heard of Lesbian Seagull Island until Nation intern Emmet Fraizer said (I’m paraphrasing here), “Did you know there’s an island full of lesbian seagulls?” Every Nation intern is a highly skilled fact checker, so I was not surprised when I googled “lesbian seagull island” and found that Emmet was correct. It turns out that Lesbian Seagull Island is super-famous and caused a nationwide controversy when it was first discovered in the 1970s. Who knew?? (Lots of people, it would seem. But not me.)

Now, technically, Lesbian Seagull Island was not the real name of the island. The real name was Santa Barbara Island. But even the most boring name couldn’t dull the dazzling power of this November 1977 report from UPI:

A university research team says that about 14 percent of the female seagulls on an island off the California coast are lesbians, calling it the first solid evidence of widespread homosexuality among wild birds.

One of the female gulls assumes a male role and the birds form stable unions like those of heterosexual seagulls: They go through the motions of mating, lay sterile eggs and defend their nests like other couples, the report said.

No evidence of homosexuality among male birds was found. [ed. note: Riiiight.]

“We were absolutely astounded” at the discovery, said Dr. George Hunt of the University of California at Irvine. “This sort of thing has not been found before and was clearly not what we anticipated.”

He and his wife, Molly, who is also his co‐researcher, studied 1,200 pairs of western seagulls for three years on Santa Barbara Island, an uninhabited rock about 40 miles southwest of Los Angeles. They recently published their findings in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Cool!!! Can you imagine going to some island and then realizing it’s not just any island, it’s Lesbian Seagull Island?¹

To say there was a big reaction to these findings would be an understatement. True, the bar is low when it comes to public interest in seagull studies, but even so. Here is a 1977 headline from the New York Times.

Not “extensive” lol. Here’s Time:

And the Washington Post:

That’s not all. From an LA Times retrospective in 1993:

Hunt got a stack of mail several inches thick—some of which he still has not read. Gay men and women wrote him in thanks. Conservatives wrote him in fury. An Orange County business owner took out newspaper ads condemning the research, which was partly funded by the National Science Foundation. Congress guffawed, waving the gay gull study aloft as another example of federal folly. An unscientific citizens task force in New York—obviously eager to dismiss the gull colony as one more California quirk—proclaimed that 100% of the sea gulls in the five boroughs of New York City were heterosexual.

Sure New York, whatever you say. And yes, that Congress part is 10000 percent true. Here is an actual snippet of the Congressional Record from June 1978; the speaker is then-California Republican Sen. S.I. Hayawaka.

It became a whole thing. This is the Washington Post again:

Heaven forbid!

Anyway, the study confirmed what we now take for granted: some animals are gay. And that is why Lesbian Seagull Island is so important. Why were the seagulls lesbians? People have many theories, but I say: who cares. Seagulls get to be lesbians too.

So thanks, lesbian seagulls! Without you, Gay Animal Month would not exist. See ya next week!

A reminder: you can check out our complete Bird of the Week list here, and get in touch with your bird suggestions at hello@discourseblog.com.

1. Interesting side note: while this was groundbreaking public evidence of bird queerness, it was far from the first time anyone had seen homosexual bird behavior. For instance, in 1911 and 1912, British explorer George Murray Levick witnessed male Adelaide penguins mating with each other in Antarctica:

“On one occasion I saw what I took to be a cock copulating with a hen. When he had finished, however, and got off, the apparent hen turned out to be a cock, and the act was again performed with their positions reversed, the original ‘hen’ climbing on to the back of the original cock, whereupon the nature of their proceeding was disclosed.”

He also saw the penguins engaging in rape and necrophilia; these birds had no boundaries.

Levick was so shocked and appalled that he wrote his findings in Greek so that only the most hoity-toity Englishmen could read them. (“There seems to be no crime too low for these Penguins,” he seethed, one of the funniest sentences maybe ever.) Then he wrote a scientific paper about the penguins, but it was deemed so offensive to public morals that it was censored and buried for literally 100 years. Really!