Contents:
- MORE GAY DOLPHS OBSERVED OFF COAST OF WTERN ATRALIA
- CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
- FLIPPER CLEARED! DOLPHS ARE NOT GAY OR BISEXUAL RAPISTS AFTER ALL
- CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
- GAY DOLPHS AND MP ORS, HOMOSEXUALY MARE MAMMALS IS A FACT!
- CAN A DOLPH BE GAY
- CAN ANIMALS REALLY BE GAY?
MORE GAY DOLPHS OBSERVED OFF COAST OF WTERN ATRALIA
Homosexual behavr the animal kgdom is rife.
They recently observed big groups of dolphs engagg what appeared to be homosexual behavr. "Apart om homosexual behavr, mal, unlike femal, Shark Bay have also been rerd to perform synchrono displays, " she said.
Nicholson add that homosexual behavr appears to play a role the velopment of social bonds between mal, helpg them to tablish domance and Mann, who has studied dolphs at Shark Bay for s, says another possible reason is for mal to practice matg.
CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
In the book Homosexual Behavur Animals: An Evolutnary Perspective, she wrote: "Homosexual teractns bottlenose to serve multiple functns, although the exact fns nsequenc, if any, are unknown. Wh most speci, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadilly, and there appear to be few s of dividual animals who engage exclively. “This lony is lerally the largt proportn of — I don’t know what the rrect term is: ‘homosexual animals’?
” But the journal that published the paper, Blogy Letters, sent out a prs release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. A Denver-based publitn for gay parents weled any and all new rears om “the extensive lbian albatross parent muny.
” A gay rights advote e-mailed Young, askg her to fly a rabow flag above each female-female nt, to intify them and show solidary. In 1999, Bagemihl published “Blogil Exuberance, ” a book that pulled together a lossal amount of prev piecemeal rearch and showed how blogists’ bias had margalized animal homosexualy for the last 150 years — sometim nocently enough, sometim an eptn of anthropomorphic disgt.
FLIPPER CLEARED! DOLPHS ARE NOT GAY OR BISEXUAL RAPISTS AFTER ALL
” Homosexual sex between ostrich was terpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “go on and on. Homosexualy is a tough se, bee appears to vlate that central te, that all of sexual behavr is about reproductn.
Given this big umbrella of theory, the very existence of homosexual behavr animals n feel a ltle like imperable nonsense, somethg a rearcher uld spend years bangg his or her head agast the wall liberatg. The difficulty of that challenge, more than any implic or explic homophobia, may be why past blogists skirted the THE LAST DECADE, however, Pl Vasey and others have begun velopg new hypoth based on actual, prolonged observatn of different animals, cipherg the ways given homosexual behavrs may have evolved and the evolutnary role they might play wh the ntext of dividual speci.
CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
So far, the only real ncln this relatively small body of lerature seems to pot to, llectively, is a kd of flatg, meta-ncln: a sgle explanatn of homosexual behavr animals may not be possible, bee thkg of “homosexual behavr animals” as a sgle scientific subject might not make much sense. My take on is that homosexual behavr is not a uniform phenomenon.
But that shouldn’t trick to thkg that homosexual behavr has some equivalent, anizg purpose — that the two are tidy oppos.
GAY DOLPHS AND MP ORS, HOMOSEXUALY MARE MAMMALS IS A FACT!
“All this homosexual behavr isn’t tied together by that sort of primary functn, ” Vasey said. But we’re quick to nceive of that great range of activi the way most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic pot of view: put crassly, all those different animals jt seem to be dog gay sex stuff wh one another. ”Somethg siar may be happeng wh what we perceive to be homosexual sex an array of animal speci: we may be groupg together a big grab bag of behavrs based on only a superficial siary.
The Stanford blogist Joan Roughgarn told me to thk of all the animals as “multaskg” wh their private ’s also possible that some homosexual behavrs don’t provi a nventnal evolutnary advantage; but neher do they upend everythg we know about blogy.
As Z put , “There’s a lot of slop the system — which, ” she was sure to add, “is not the same as sayg homosexualy is a mistake. Homosexual activy is often observed animal populatns wh a shortage of one sex — the wild but more equently at zoos. She’s not tryg to expla homosexual behavr.
CAN A DOLPH BE GAY
Young’s hband, a blogil nsultant, was actually an thor of the paper, along wh Brenda Zn (who is also not gay, for what ’s worth). Young found the assumptn offensive — not bee she was beg mistaken for gay, but bee she was beg mistaken for a bad scientist; the people seemed to prume that her rearch was promised by a personal agenda. Still, some of the blogists dog the most cisive work on animal homosexualy are fact gay.
Several people I spoke to told me their own sexual inti eher helped spur or mata their tert the topic; Bce Bagemihl argued that gay and lbian people are “often better equipped to tect heterosexist bias when vtigatg the subject simply bee we enunter so equently our everyday liv.
CAN ANIMALS REALLY BE GAY?
” Wh a lgh, Pl Vasey told me, “People tomatilly assume I’m gay. ” He is gay, he add, but that fact didn’t seem to tract om his RETROSPECT, the big, sloshg stew of anthropomorphic analys that Young’s paper provoked the culture uldn’t have been ls surprisg. For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeg animals — pecially animals that appear to be gay — as reflectns, mols and foils of ourselv; we’re extraordarily, and sometim irratnally, vted a few months before I vised Kaena Pot, two pengus at the San Francis Zoo beme the latt a tradn of ptive same-sex pengu upl makg global headl.
And while he strsed that there is no scientific way of termg if animals are “gay, ” bee the word nnot a sexual orientatn, not jt a behavr, he also noted that, beg the San Francis Zoo, “there’s fely a lot of opn here, ternally, that we give and ll the pengus gay. ” Acrdg to the Amerin Library Associatn, there have been more requts for librari to ban “And Tango Mak Three” every year than any other book the untry, three years animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to rry a strange moral potency: ’s out there, irrefutably, as eher a validatn or a nunciatn of our own behavr, pendg on how you happen to feel about homosexualy and about nature.
Durg the Victorian era, observatns of same-sex behavr swans and sects were held up as evince agast the moraly of homosexualy humans, sce at the dawn of dtrialism and Darwism, people were vted seeg themselv as more civilized than the “lower animals. ” Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasong, as did the 1970s anti-gay csar Ana Bryant, who, Bce Bagemihl not, claimed an terview that “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do” and was unmoved when the terviewer poted out what actually happens barnyards. Gert Glossip has ed Bagemihl’s book to create a celebratory, terpretive gay animal tour of the Alai zoo, marketed to gay and lbian tourists.