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“The "pseudoheterosexual" interpretation of animal behavior offers striking parallels to stereotypical views about human homosexuality. Scientific puzzlement over assigning animals "male" or "female" roles echoes the refrain often heard by gay and lesbian people, who are frequently asked, "Which one plays the man (or woman)?" The assumption is that homosexual relationships must be modeled after heterosexual ones - a view that is as narrow a conception of human relationships as it is of animal sexuality.”
― Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

“This near-obsessive focus on penetration and ejaculation - indeed, on "measuring" various aspects of sexual activity to begin with - reveals a profoundly phallocentric and "goal-oriented" view of sexuality on the part of most biologists. Not just homosexual activity, but noninsertive sexual acts, female sexuality and orgasmic response, oral sex and masturbation, copulations in species (such as birds) where males do not have a penis - any form of sex whatsoever that does not involve penis-vagina penetration falls off the map of such a narrow definition.”
― Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

“The scientific discourse surrounding animal homosexuality has been preoccupied with finding an *explanation* for the phenomenon, often at the expense of providing comprehensive descriptive information about, or acknowledgement of, the actual extent and diversity of same-sex activity throughout the animal kingdom. Rather than being seen as a part of a spectrum of natural variation in sexual and gender expression, homosexuality and transgender are viewed as exceptions or anomalies that somehow stand outside the natural order and must therefore be "explained" or "rationalized".”
― Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

“As we have seen, one way in that zoologists have tried to avoid classifying same-sex activity as "homosexual" is by using terminology and behavioral categories that deny it is a sexual activity at all. This approach also extends to the interpretations, explanations, and "functions" attributed to same-sex behavior, even when it involves the most overt and explicit of activities. Astounding as it sounds, a number of scientists have actually argued that when a female bonobo wraps her legs around another female, rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screms of enjoyment, this is actually "greeting" behavior, or "appeasement" behavior, or "reassurance" behavior, or "reconciliation" behavior, or "tension-regulation" behavior, or "social bonding" behavior, or "food exchange" behavior - almost anything, it seems, besides *pleasurable sexual* behavior. Similar "interpretations" have been proposed for many other species (involving both males and females), allowing scientists to claim that these animals do not really engage in "genuine" (i.e., purely sexual) homosexual activity. But what heterosexual activity is ever "purely" sexual?”
― Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity