How to avoid the old rat race.

Creative Homosexuality

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by JOHN SHELDON, Ph.D.

Nowadays the pressure of life seems to be too much for many people. Not only do we have to worry about The Bomb and overpopulation and lung cancer and earning a living, but we also have to worry about our social position, prestige, the race for status. Instead of seeking the good life on terms meaningful to ourselves we seek success, at whatever price we must pay.. It is interesting to learn that many other animals have the same kind of problem. For instance, rats.

Psychologists had been studying rats for years, to find out how they learn and what sort of drives they have. Unfortunately none of them bothered to ask the rats what they thought about all this. The psychologists knew very little about how rats actually lead their lives when they are not being studied by psychologists.

Then came the Second World War and somebody in the government became painfully aware that rats, the free-living cousins of the lab rats, were destroying many millions of dollars worth of scarce food and supplies every year. Something had to be done but nobody knew just how. It was time to start studying rat behavior from the rat's point of view, and a team of biologists was assigned to see what they could find out about rats-how they could be controlled.

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These biologists never did find a modern Pied Piper, but they did find that the social life of the rat is complex and difficult. One of the biologists, Dr. John Calhoun, has been studying rats ever since at the laboratories of the National Institute of Mental Health near Washington. The result is some of the most important work ever done on how animals behave in relation to each other, how animal societies develop, and how the individual animal fits into his society.

Most of this work has not yet been published, but once in a while Dr. Calhoun lets out a little of what he has learned. His most recent* report tells about what happened when he kept dozens of rats in a large room with food and water and nest boxes.

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Perhaps the most interesting result was that a definite social structure developed, with some rats associating with certain other rats and driving away rats that were not members of their own circle. Typically a particularly aggressive male would select part of the room as his headquarters and gather around himself a harem of females. Any strange male that came near would be driven off. The males formed a social ladder, with some dominant over all others and the ones at the bottom of the ladder picked on by everybody. The female and the young rats were left alone.

This worked all right for a while, but when the number of rats increased the strain of being picked on became too much for the unfortunate males near the bottom of the ladder. Then, right there in the government laboratories just a few miles from Congress and J. Edgar Hoover and the Unamerican Activities Committee, the unthinkable happened.

In Calhoun's own words, "at this density many males became homosexual, were mostly characterized by a low velocity (Calhoun's word for social position), but were infrequently attacked by their dominant associates. Expression of homosexuality constitutes the development of another class outside the dominance hierarchy, in the same sense that juveniles and females form such a class. Members of all such classes, by avoiding sanctions from dominant males, maintain a less reduced velocity than would otherwise be the case. To the extent that creativity is a form of escape from imposed velocity reduction, homosexuality represents a form of creativity."

In other words, to avoid losing out in the race for social position you can drop out of the race and become a homosexual. If you are a rat. Unfortunately Calhoun does not tell us what he means by homosexuality. Did these rats form a little clique of their own, did they make themselves available to dominant males, or what? We will have to wait for his next report to find out, but in the meantime there is much food for speculation here.

Above all, how does this apply to humans? Not at all, as far as I know, not directly anyway. The most obvious parallel is with the berdache system in some Indian tribes, in which some men chose to dress and live as women, do the women's work, and sometimes take husbands. Apparently they were accepted in this role, and usually were treated with some derision but without hostility.

It would be a mistake to try to read much into the results that Calhoun has reported so far, but at any rate we have taken another step toward understanding the whole phenomenon of sexuality and a reputable scientist has found that homosexuality can be creative. For this much let us be grateful.

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*Calhoun, John B. 1961. Determinants of social organization exemplified in a single population of domesticated rats. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences II, 23; 437-442.

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