Not long ago, as I was reading over a student’s senior thesis, I was struck by a persistent mental tic evident in her writing. The student’s research related to the bond between dogs and their owners, and at the outset, she explained the fallacy of anthropomorphizing the creatures we live with. And yet for all that, she kept making the same mistake she had cautioned her readers against in saying certain animals feel joy, for example, or they consider their owners to be parents. 

The fact that even someone primed to be wary of anthropomorphizing remains liable to fall into its trap bespeaks just how difficult it is to view other creatures purely on their terms rather than our own. Deliberately and unconsciously, in jest and in earnest, we constantly map narratives about ourselves onto non-human animals—including narratives about love, sex, reproduction, and childrearing.

Our desire to project onto other species our own thoughts about what and how a person should be in the world—how gender should be performed, what form a family should take, and what forms of sexuality are permissible—takes on a particular urgency in the case of zoos. Both implicitly and explicitly, zoos present themselves as places where humans can encounter pure, unspoiled, capital-n Nature. 

“Deliberately and unconsciously, in jest and in earnest, we constantly map narratives about ourselves onto non-human animals—including narratives about love, sex, reproduction, and childrearing.”

Yet even the most spacious, most luxurious enclosure is only an approximation of the wild—and sometimes, in less well-funded cases, not even that. Cloaked in palm fronds and artificial watering holes, faux savannahs and mock ice floes, the constructed nature of the zoo environment and the animal socializations it structures is less easily detected and more easily accepted as genuine. Zoos invite visitors to draw conclusions about what is natural—and therefore, in the minds of some, good—not just for nonhuman animals but also for ourselves.

The division of housing among zoo animals has often been decided based not on how the animals would group themselves in the wild but on narrow and conservative definitions of what properly constitutes a family. Prior to the late 20th century, American zoos frequently housed animals—and especially our closest cousins, the great apes—as nuclear families, with rigid heterosexual monogamy enforced among pairs of mates. Such a decision ignored both the complex relationships observed in ape social units and the natural occurrence of nonmonogamous and homosexual sex among apes. Zoos pursued this form of housing despite the demonstrable negative effect it had on the animals. Not only did it increase their stress, it also put offspring in danger because male apes don’t always conform to the ideal “doting father” image that zoo publicity was eager to put forth. Male apes might harm newborns, for instance, or else provoke females into doing so. 

Zookeepers’ decision to impose contemporary American sexual mores onto the apes in their care reflects the powerful hold human societal norms have on the way we understand other animals. But also, as Randy Malamud has argued in Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in Captivity, this decision reproduces the same hegemonic structures that are intimately intertwined with the heteropatriarchy. Just as the captive animals were made to bend their lives to the whims and beliefs of those who put them in cages, so too were normative ideas of sexuality and the family reinforced for the “captive” audience of zoo-goers. 

The flow of narratives isn’t unidirectional. In addition to transposing human sexual mores and family values onto captive animals, we look to other species for clues to the proper social order of our society. Inspired by a visit to the San Diego Zoo, Donna Haraway observed in “Otherworldly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms” that “people reaffirm many of their beliefs about each other and about what kind of planet the earth can be by telling each other what they think they are seeing as they watch the animals.” 

Worried about the sexual and moral degeneracy bred by new urban environments, social crusaders in the 19th century hailed the salutary effects of zoo visits, asserting that they helped reacquaint people with “natural” behavior. A study published in 2016 found that parents visiting zoos with their children often project heteronormative family relationships onto groups of animals when explaining animal scenes to their children by, for example, identifying two adults as “a mother” and “a father” regardless of their actual relationship or sex. What’s more, parents encourage their children to interpret the behaviors they see through the lens of stereotypical gender roles. In this way. children are taught that dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, and family are natural and universal, seedlings of ideas that can have major consequences for their developing understanding of human society. 

The heteronormative ideology of zoos even extends to how tickets are sold: zoo “family passes” frequently define “family” as two adults plus children, ruling out more expansive, nonnuclear notions of what might constitute a family. Zoos form part of a constellation of “family-friendly” leisure sites—alongside science museums, aquariums, and other similar spaces—that both reify and commodify the nuclear family. Deliberately targeting young families, advertising that places emphasis on zoos as wholesome places for family recreation and bonding tacitly relies on a shared cultural assumption about what a family is and what one should learn from a visit to the zoo.

“Children are taught that dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, and family are natural and universal, seedlings of ideas that can have major consequences for their developing understanding of human society.”

But what happens when we encounter homosexual activity among zoo animals? Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the interpretation is mediated by the sociopolitical milieu of the interpreter. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many who acknowledged the existence of such behavior asserted that only the unnatural pressures of life in captivity could bring out such “deviant” behavior. Such thinking has hardly disappeared. Gender and sexuality scholar Jennifer Terry documents similar rhetorical moves in contemporary scientific papers in which authors explain away homosexual behavior as acts of desperation or attempts to cement social status rather than the products of desire or pleasure-seeking. 

Yet advocates for the rights of queer people have also turned to the sexuality of zoo animals as a way to advance their cause. Early advocate Magnus Hirschfeld included stories of same-sex duck partnerships in the Berlin Zoo in his 1914 book The Homosexuality of Men and Women to argue that homosexuality is natural and should be destigmatized. In recent years, “gay penguins” at zoos around the world have garnered media attention, with zoo staff even staging weddings and giving the “couples” eggs to adopt. 

By interpreting homosexual penguin partnerships as loving spouses and adoptive fathers, modern viewers conform the animals to mainstream assimilationist notions of contemporary gay life. If the profusion of these stories in the popular press testify to the growing acceptance of homosexuality, they also participate in the erasure of more radical understandings of queerness in their evocation of the conservative institution of marriage and the idea that the proper purpose of a family is to raise a child.

Will we ever be able to view animals—their relationships, their families, their sexual and reproductive habits—on their own terms? While a historical examination of shifting attitudes towards homosexuality in animals traces the ascendant trajectory of LGBTQIA+ rights in human society, our tendency to mine animal behaviors for our own ends maps out as a flat line, a steady constant. The ends of conservative and progressive observers may differ, but the result in both cases is the same: domestication of animals not in fact but in rhetoric. 

Perhaps the radical queer way of looking at zoo animals is not one that seeks self-justification in comparisons with other species but one that does away with the notion that such analogues are necessary in the first place, celebrating both strangeness and similarity, and unlearning the tyranny of the "natural" over our idea of the good.

Image credit: Grown up Smokey Bear with Judy Bell at the National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., 1958, National Agricultural Library (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain).