| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
studied, “their” species, would behave in such a way. Valerius Geist (1975) saw many of his mountain sheep males mounting each other, but at first he called this activity “aggressosexual” rather than homosexual behavior. He wrote, “To state that the males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To conceive of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’—Oh God!” and Geist repudiated “that drivel!” (pp. 97–98). He called a spade a spade and admitted that his rams did indeed live in essentially a gay fellowship.
From these examples, it is clear that homophobia was being transferred, consciously or unconsciously, by scientists from the human to the animal world, just as sexism had been. Nowadays the possible evolutionary reasons for homosexuality in animals remain problematic, but at least it is acknowledged to happen in many or most animal species as well as in human beings. Yet even today, when most cases of homosexuality in humans are known to have a biological (genetic or hormonal—not psychological) basis, bigots continue to harass and even murder people who are gay or lesbian.
Bias Against Full Participation of Africans
Society would have been amazed if an African in the past had come to America to study the behavior of bison. Like Jane Goodall, he or she may not have had a university education but would still have been anxious to research the large migrations of this species, which might shed light on the vast annual movements of animals in Tanzania. News media would have wondered why Americans and Canadians did not study this themselves. Radios might have blared that members of a society should set their own agenda about what is important to study.
Scientists in Western nations and in Japan were anxious to do research on African animals when peace came after the Second World War. Beginning in the mid-1950s, foreign zoologists began to trickle into the continent in a steady stream to study exotic species. Ideally, Africans would