Schaefer, Donovan O. “Darwin’s Orchids: Evolution, Natural Law, and the Diversity of Desire.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 27.4: 525–550. DOI 10.1215/10642684-9316824. Author version. Please cite published version available here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/27/4/525/175602/Darwin-s- OrchidsEvolution-Natural-Law-and-the Darwin’s Orchids: Evolution, Natural Law, and the Diversity of Desire Donovan O. Schaefer University of Pennsylvania “People are different from each other. It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.” – Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet “failure the feature of all systems.” – Ed Madden, “Adapted in the Most Perfect Manner to Each Other, or Reading Darwin” 1. Introduction Sometime in the early 1850s, the adventurer Sir Robert Schomburgk placed an orchid in the vaults of the Linnean Society of London. The orchid had produced, on a single scape, the blossoms of two different genera—monachanthus viridis and myanthus barbatus. Not only that, the explorer reported the existence of similar specimens in the wild sporting also the flowers of a third genus— catasetum tridentatum. This biological prodigy was a bad omen for mid- nineteenth-century European botanists, who saw in it a dizzying rebuke to the entire Linnean model of species taxonomy. The botanist John Lindley quailed: “such cases shake to the foundation all our ideas of the stability of genera and species.” 1 But when Charles Darwin analyzed the tri-bloomed specimen in a paper he presented to the Linnean Society in 1862, he offered a comforting solution: the blossoms were, he discovered, not only the same genus, but the same species. Where most orchids were bisexual, the catasetum was trisexual, with three different blooms that were completely different in shape and structure. The reported wild plants had, somehow, produced the blossoms of all three sexes. Catasetum tridentatum became the male, monachanthus viridis the female, and