The Wisdom of Gay Albatrosses

Outside of humans, the best (worst?) example of repugnant same-species violence is found in chimpanzees. When compared to other nonhuman great apes, chimpanzees are notoriously bloodthirsty. I mean that literally. Rival chimpanzee groups defending their territories will engage in open battle where they will occasionally beat one another to death. But they also conduct clandestine raids into enemy territory, targeting rival males to kill. In the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, primatologist Richard W. Wrangham and science writer Dale Peterson note that these raids are “marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, and drinking a victim’s blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.”¹

The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy describes the violent nature of chimpanzees in the opening pages of her 2011 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.² Humans, she notes, can spend hours crowded together in an airplane without resorting to violence, even when faced with rude passengers and crying babies. “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees?” she asks. “Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmaimed. Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.” In other words, chimpanzees are terribly violent and often outright murderous, and they inflict this upon one another.

While same-sex attraction is not unique to humans, homophobia is.

But even this behavior pales in comparison to the kind of violence that