PRIDE: Life lessons on homosexuality - and bedbugs

This month, in celebration of PRIDE, we are giving space to LGBT+ voices from across the BIAZA membership. The PRIDE blogs will provide a snapshot of the experiences of LGBT+ people working in the zoo sector and highlight diversity across the animal kingdom too.

In the mid-noughties, I spent a year studying in the heart of Texas in a place famed for being the state’s oldest town. The heat was suffocating, the days were long and the insects were everywhere.

The sounds of crickets bounced around the walls whilst cockroaches crawled out of every crevice. 

There are around 100,000 species of insects that are native to the United States and more than a third of these have been found in Texas. Texas has a wider variety of insects than any other state.[1]

Some months after arriving, extreme itchiness and discomfort eventually prompted my visit to the University’s Health Clinic where, as a result of bites across my body, it was promptly identified that I had bed bugs.

I, along with 15 other British students, had been invited to salvage second-hand furniture for the unfurnished accommodation provided. All of the furniture belonging to the previous year’s cohort of international students had spent the summer stored in the theatre departments wood workshop.

At the clinic I was asked to strip down where, completely naked, I was lambasted that the parasites terrorising me were ‘as a result of the company I keep’. I was left in no uncertain terms that I was suffering with a plague of bed bugs because I was a gay man. The doctor sent me to CVS under the illusion these critters were some sort of STI and though the bites eventually disappeared, the shame and embarrassment from that experience lasted for over a decade.

Despite being unenforceable since 2003 due to a Supreme Court intervention, a ban on “homosexual conduct” remains part of the Texas state’s law to this day. Rolling Stone Magazine, in an article titled “The 5 Worst States for LGBT People” commented “Republicans have fought to keep language in the state’s penal code making “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex” a misdemeanor charge.”

I share this to highlight the institutionalised homophobia that enabled that professional’s prejudice. Like bed bugs, he was a product of the environment he was in.

When I joined Twycross Zoo in 2022, a different kind of Doctor unknowingly taught me to appreciate this parasite with tales of their homosexual behaviour. Male bed bugs will mount any other bed bug that has freshly eaten, no matter what their gender. The very thing that had been used to demean me in my teens by one doctor was now being reintroduced to me as an accidental queer creature by another. 

It was an incredible full circle moment.

In addition to my role at Twycross Zoo, I also volunteer for Diversity Role Models: a charity that exists to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (HBT) bullying in UK schools. As a volunteer, I share my story in schools to help young people gain understanding of the impact of their language and actions and empathy of what it's like to be LGBT+.

Every young person should know they are valued and supported, whoever and wherever they are.

A few fun facts about bed bugs:

• A study by The University of Sheffield found bedbugs have been parasitic companions with other species aside from humans for more than 100 million years, and were around at the same time as dinosaurs.
• Experts during the same study discovered bedbugs are 50 million years older than bats – a mammal that people had previously believed to be their first host.
• Researchers from the University of Florida and Union College in Lincoln discovered that bed bugs strongly preferred the colours red and black, and seemed to avoid colours like green and yellow.

[1] https://tpwd.texas.gov/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_bk_p4000_0043.pdf

By Richard Loftus, Marketing Director at Twycross Zoo 

All blogs reflect the views of their author and are not a reflection of BIAZA's positions.