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R E C E N T L Y

To sir, with love?
By Susanna Stromberg
It looked like sex, but maybe it was just old-fashioned teaching
(03/12/99)

The monk, the philosopher and the cynic
By Chris Colin
Christopher Hitchens torpedos the harmonious dialogue between philosopher Jean-François Revel and his son, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard
(03/10/99)

The end of student activity groups?
By Kenneth Rapoza
Christian student groups are using the courts to attack the legality of student fees and changing the free speech debate on campus
(03/08/99)

Thong wars
By Jon Bowen
When asked not to go bare-assed at the campus pool, a professor makes it a constitutional issue
(03/08/99)

Pop culture studies turns 25
By David Jacobson
When Ray Browne founded the first department to study "Star Trek" semiotics and cartoon aesthetics, he expanded the boundaries of academic study forever
(03/05/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

The FABULOUS
- - - - - - - - kingdom of GAY animals

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A BIOLOGIST OFFERS THE FIRST VISION OF A TANTALIZINGLY DIVERSE NATURAL WORLD: NOT ALL ANIMALS ARE STRAIGHT ARROWS.

BY SUSAN McCARTHY | 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.

Six bighorn rams cluster, rubbing, nuzzling and mounting each other. "Aggressosexual behavior," the biologist explains. A way of establishing dominance.

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.

Bruce Bagemihl spent 10 years scouring the biological literature for data on alternative sexuality in animals to write "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," 768 pages about exactly what goes on at "South Park's" Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary. The first section discusses animal sexuality in its many forms and the ways biologists have tried to explain it away. The second section, "A Wondrous Bestiary," describes unconventional sexuality in nearly 200 mammals and birds -- orangutans, whales, warthogs, fruit bats, chaffinches.

Bagemihl's dry style is obedient to the precepts of scientific writing. He explains why animals can be called homosexual or bisexual, but not gay, lesbian or queer, and he follows the rules -- though "homosexual" frightens some who prefer terms like male-only social interactions, multifemale associations, unisexuality, isosexuality or intrasexuality. (Fortunately, as a book reviewer, I am not bound by this rule. We're talking gay animals!) Yet the book is thrillingly dense with new ideas, and with scandalous animal anecdotes. In other words, an ideal bedside read.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Animal one night stands and beastly marriages