Make Way for Lesbian Swans

Next week marks Boston’s 22nd Annual Return of the Swans to the Public Garden. The swans, whose predecessors were made famous in Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s book Make Way for Ducklings, parade from their winter home in a nearby zoo to the Public Garden for the summer, accompanied by the mayor, a brass band, and hundreds of local children.

It’s quite a celebration, but would be of mostly local interest except for one small fact. The swans, named Romeo and Juliet, are actually a same-sex pair.

Park officials first thought they had a male-female pair when eggs turned up in their nest and the swans began guarding them, the Boston Globe reported in 2005. When the eggs didn’t hatch, however, officials took a closer look — swan gender is apparently difficult to determine from casual inspection — and discovered that both birds were female.

This made them perhaps the second most famous same-sex animal pair in history, after the two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo, celebrated in Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three. At least one visitor to the Public Gardens has suggested that park officials should give Romeo and Juliet a fertilized egg to care for, in the same way the Central Park zookeepers did for the penguins.

That has not happened, but the swans remain an example of the more than 450 species that show some form of homosexual activity, as a recent New York Times magazine story explained (and ably covered here at Change.org by Maia Spotts).

It’s nice to have a mascot, whether swans, penguins, or any other creature, but the real significance of these animals goes far beyond mere imagery. Much of the political debate about gay rights hangs on whether being gay is innate, like race, or a choice of behavior that can be modified. The evidence from other creatures indicates that same-sex attraction is widespread and natural.

The swans’ names are not, however, as inappropriate as they might now seem. Many a gay or lesbian teen has his or her own tale of forbidden love and parental disapproval. Some, alas, are just as tragic as those of Shakespeare’s pair. Perhaps the example of the beloved Public Garden swans will help to change that.

Photo credit: Marek Szczepanek, via Wikipedia Commons (Not the actual Boston swans)