es, there are gay animals. All types. No, they're not just confused, or playing at dominance, or anything else that can be easily explained away. They're gay, they like it, and when they steal eggs or young from other animals they generally do a great job raising their young.

People react to this news in various ways, but I think it's a fascinating topic.

More recent additions are on top of the page.

February 10, 2004

While we're talking about weird animal news, here's yet another article about gay animals.  The poor things keep getting dragged into debates about morality and nature/nurture and now even gay marriage.

Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins. When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly. Roy and Silo sat on it for the typical 34 days until a chick, Tango, was born. For the next two and a half months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own. Mr. Gramzay is full of praise for them.

So why does anyone care?

This growing body of science has been increasingly drawn into charged debates about homosexuality in American society, on subjects from gay marriage to sodomy laws, despite reluctance from experts in the field to extrapolate from animals to humans. Gay groups argue that if homosexual behavior occurs in animals, it is natural, and therefore the rights of homosexuals should be protected. On the other hand, some conservative religious groups have condemned the same practices in the past, calling them "animalistic."

I like how both sides can find evidence to support their desired conclusions from the same event.  It's better evidence for the gays, since it pretty well shoots down the whole, "gay isn't natural" argument.  But then the anti-gays come back with "animalistic." Of course those are the type of people who deny that humans are animals; just the most intelligent type to have ever yet evolved on earth.

The rest of the article lists numerous studies of various types of gay animals.  And it wouldn't be a controversial issue on the Internet if Godwin's Law didn't come into play:

Still, scientists warn about drawing conclusions about humans. "For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn't natural," Mr. Vasey said. "They make a leap from saying if it's natural, it's morally and ethically desirable."

But he added: "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes."

Mr. Bagemihl is also wary of extrapolating. "In Nazi Germany, one very common interpretation of homosexuality was that it was animalistic behavior, subhuman," he said

The whole thing is pretty silly, IMHO. I just like the idea of gay penguins trying to incubate a rock.

December 2, 2002

One of the long time arguments against homosexuality in humans is that it's unnatural and that animals don't behave that way. There is a lot of irony in this, since it's usually an argument advanced by Christian types who spend the rest of their time talking about how there aren't any parallels between animals and humans, since of course evolution is a dirty scientific lie, and God made everything six-thousand years ago.  On a Thursday.

The self-serving nature of the, "there aren't gay animals" argument aside, it's also totally wrong.

There is a review of a book by Bruce Bagehihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, and it's a fascinating read.  The book review of it on Salon goes three pages and covers quite a bit of ground.  The book was published in 1999, but I'd never heard of it until now when a friend sent me the URL to the Salon review.

The book was exhaustively-researched over ten years, and runs 768 pages.  In it, the author illustrates dozens of examples of what is clearly homosexual behavior in all types of animals, and discusses why they may be acting that way.  You hardly ever hear about this stuff in mainstream scientific journals, or if you do it's always rationalized or out right lied about or omitted. There is usually shock and disbelief even on the part of the researchers.

The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they're seeing.

A female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.

Hot lesbian monkey love.  That outta turn up the search engine hits a bit.

A zoo penguin approaches another, bowing winsomely. The birds look identical and a zoogoer asks how to tell males and females apart. "We can tell by their behavior," a researcher explains. "Eric is courting Dora." A keeper arrives with news: Eric has laid an egg.

They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own), and animals who live in bisexual triads and quartets.

It's not just opportunism or boredom that's causing this either.  Lots of animals do it full time, to the exclusion of heterosexuality.

Two percent of male ostriches ignore females and court males with a lively dance that involves running toward your chosen partner at 30 mph, skidding to a stop in front of him, pirouetting madly, then "kantling," which includes crouching, rocking, fluffing your feathers, puffing your throat in and out and twisting your neck like a corkscrew. A male ostrich courting a female omits the speedy approach, shortens the display, adds a booming song and may include symbolic feeding displays. Male ostriches have not been seen actually having sex, unlike male flamingo pairs, who mate, build nests and sometimes rear foster chicks.

Male black swans court and form stable pairs. With two males, they are able to defend huge territories from other swan couples, which sounds like a double-income-no-kids situation except that they often manage to wangle some eggs from somewhere -- all right, they steal them -- and become model parents, twice as successful as straight parents.

Just like gay humans! Well, aside from the stealing babies in the night part.

Why don't we hear more about this sort of thing? Basically since the researchers are self-censoring, knowing that work on this topic will likely receive a poor welcome.  Or simply be deleted.  Page three of the review has some nice examples, including animals making tools to masturbate with, bonobo hand signals for better sex, and lots more.

Bagemihl ridicules ingenious explanations researchers have given for why animals might appear not to be straight arrows. It's dominance. It's a contest of stamina. It's barter for food. It's aggression. It's appeasement. They're confused and don't realize that they're both the same sex. It's a way of reducing tension. They're just playing! And my favorite: It's a greeting.

A report on killer whale behavior that described homosexuality in male orcas was reissued as a government document for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission with those passages -- and only those passages -- deleted.

Anyway, I'm just quoting the whole damn article, so obviously I think it's worth a read.  My own training in biology is limited, but I have maintained a captive society of furry rodents for nearly a decade, and made extensive observations of their behavior and courtship rituals during that time.

In other words I have pet rats and they are screwballs.

My female rats engage in faux-lesbianism all the time, but with them it does appear to be just dominance stuff.  There is sexual excitement to them, but just for one of them; there's nothing like mutual gratification.  Hmm, sounds like heterosexuality there, come to think of it.

One female will be in heat and running around, and the others will chase and leap up to mount her.  The one in heat arches her back just as she would for a male, then after a second leaps and runs free.  The non-heated ones get all fired up and into the chase, and some instinct in them compels them to mount, but as they have nothing to hump with, it's just a sort of horseplay.  Girl rats in heat will behave like that for anything also.  If one is in heat I can immediately tell when I pick her up (assuming I can catch her, the normally eager to play and calm creatures grow springs in their legs when they're in season).  If I hold one and squeeze lightly on her sides, or hips, she'll usually tremble like a paint mixer, and squeak and struggle after a moment of assuming the position.  They'll do this upside down or in any position, and whether or not there's a male rat within 5 miles.

These photos show actual male/female sex, but the lordosis poses are identical when there are just two females.

The females aren't sexual at other times, aside from licking themselves all over on occasion.  There's no female to female genital grinding, or anything of that nature.  They groom each other, but the erogenous zones for that seem to be the back of the neck and face, since the groomee will twitch and squeak in a sort of nervous ecstasy when the groomer does those areas.  And they'll do the same thing if I scratch them there, whey they're in the mood for it.

Now as to why the other females get the urge to practice male humping behavior when they've got nothing to hump with... I dunno.  They don't ever do it when someone isn't in heat, hence my thinking it's just sort of a fever that they catch of excitement.  There's never any of the hot monkey genital rubbing stuff.

Males who are in a frenzy will run around humping anything they can catch, including other males from the back or the side, females from the side, house shoes, baby rats who get in their way, etc.  But I've never seen another male do anything other than stand there.  There's no back arching or anything approaching penetration or even genital contact.

So none of my rats are gay.  They're just confused at times, and get caught up in the mood of the party.  A common human post-drunken-party lesbian/gay excuse, from what I hear.

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