The lesbian seagulls that weren’t

The Radiolab episode about seagulls wasn’t really about seagulls.

The episode, which recently re-aired after its 2023 debut, begins with the story of a seagull colony on an uninhabited island off the coast of Santa Barbara. In the late 1970s, researchers documented a strange phenomenon: Roughly one out of 10 nests on the island were inhabited by pairs of female seagulls. These gulls were “go[ing] through the motions of mating, lay[ing] sterile eggs, and defend[ing] their nests like other couples,” their report read.

Radiolab host and self-described lesbian Lulu Miller says the report had impeccable timing. It was published at precisely the moment the ‘anti-gay’ movement was leaning heavily into the “tactic”—that’s her word—of calling homosexuality “unnatural.” The “lesbian seagulls,” Miller said, threatened to prove that homosexuality was as ‘natural’ as the birds (and the bees).

Alas, the seagulls were not the #Allies they first seemed to be. After further study, researchers discovered there had been a crisis amid the male population of seagulls on Santa Barbara Island. They theorized that a chemical in the air or water was killing them off. For a brief period, that meant the female birds struggled to find a mate, prompting them to “playact” mating with each other. When the government regulated the harmful chemicals and the male seagull population rebounded, the “female-female pairings” disappeared.

The climax of the Radiolab episode is Lulu Miller’s earnest disappointment upon hearing this news. Her strange longing to prove her own desires are not “disordered,” and her frustration in defeat, make the episode a perfect cultural artifact from the era of writing and re-writing gay history.

First, there’s the somewhat bizarre effort to “discover” same-sex pairings in animals—as if that would “prove” the “naturalness” of human homosexual desires. It does not require belief in Christianity to conclude it’s usually not a good idea to build moral foundations on the behavior of animals, which—I’m sorry to say—often behave rather shockingly. Does Lulu Miller know that some animals eat their young?

I assume she does. Which supports my theory that she was not really asking “do animals do this, too?” She was asking “is this good?”

Only she couldn’t ask that question outright. She was hamstrung by a worldview which views humans as no more valuable than animals already, and which sees no meaningful order or higher purpose to the universe. Such a world cannot have categories called “good” or “bad” or “unnatural”—everything is “natural” in a world that exists by accident. Everything is permissible where nothing matters.

Second, it is utterly fascinating to listen to Miller and her co-host set out, like dogged investigators on a cold case, to discover just where this shadowy “tactic” of calling homosexuality “unnatural” originated. They find their culprit all the way back in the 1200s. It was Thomas Aquinas! He’s the brilliant PR strategist (and philosopher and priest) who came up with the idea, Miller tells us, to call homosexuality a “crime against nature.”

It genuinely does not seem to occur to Miller, or anyone else who ostensibly had their hands on this episode (editors? producers?) that for all of human history leading up to the west’s sexual revolution, it was accepted as a scientific reality that sex and reproduction were inherently connected. Obviously there have been people and cultures going back just as far in history who engaged in homosexual sex acts. But no culture ever called this marriage, because no culture ever suggested it could produce children.

The Radiolab episode takes a personal turn when Miller mourns the fact that she is still “forced” to adopt the baby her wife gave birth to. She is outraged that same-sex people who have no biological connection to children they want to bring home are not guaranteed the right to appear on those children’s birth certificates. These, to Miller, should constitute gay “rights;” and in the decade since Obergefell—when proponents promised us this was just about grown-up love—the wider culture has grown to agree.

This is the great irony of the episode (and the irony that looms over the entire gay “rights” movement). If the seagull story proved anything, it was that nature is ordered toward reproduction, and when animals cannot achieve it, they descend into crisis. The female seagulls were not exploring a “new” desire; they were miming an urgent craving for an unmet one. This isn’t a story about the naturalness of homosexuality; it’s a story about the irrepressible impulse of creation toward heterosexuality.

But as brilliant as Thomas Aquinas was, he did not invent the idea that homosexuality was fundamentally opposed to the flourishing of the human race. The appeal to nature in this debate was never about how ‘like’ humans are to animals; or whether gay people earnestly experience their desire. It was about the obvious, irrefutable fact that God designed reproduction to only happen one very specific way. And the recipe of heterosexual sex points to not only the purpose for which he made us, but also to what every child needs and deserves after they are made: the mother and the father who made them.

The Radiolab episode about seagulls wasn’t really about seagulls, and the gay ‘rights’ movement isn’t really about adult affection. It is about what is good, how we were made, and what we owe our kids.