This is actually a serious question, even if it may not seem like one. There was a new law passed in Finland a few weeks ago regarding gay couple registration rights. (i.e. Marriage) Naturally such a topic caused a lot of polemic and one of the major objections to it was that homosexuality was not natural. So, does gay sex happen in the wild nature or not? I and my friends couldn’t find the solution anywhere.
Thanks,
Alphie
Bonobo chimps (this was on the Evolution PBS series last month), but they don’t have anal penetration or fellatio, they just rub their scrotums together, butt to butt, or have “penis dueling”, where they evidently hang by trees face to face and bang their erect penises together. So, is that “gay sex” or not? It actually sounds more like “kid sex”, “playing doctor”, to me.
http://www.colszoo.org/africanforest/species/bonobo/bonobo.html
Gay sex exists in the animal kingdom and it’s not even all that hard to find. Quite often it’s tried to be explained away as “dominance behavior” or “social rituals” but it’s pretty obvious just by looking that, no, most of the time the parties involved really get off on it and are doing it just for that reason. It happens in many species of all types, from lizard to bird to mammal, by males, females, sometimes both. With some animals you pretty much can’t watch them at all for any length of time without coming across some gay sex (dolphins spring to mind 
)
It’s definitely there.
Homosexual behavior is said to be especially prevalent among vultures and giraffes. I do ot have a cite for this.
I recall seeing a documentary some years ago in which it was said that squids will bond at random with their own sex and the opposite during a mating swarm. It has been speculated, though, that this is largely because squids can’t determine the sex of a prospective partner until they actually attempt copulation.
according to South Park, there are gay dogs…
Glenoled
I never quite understand the hang up about this. Humans do lots of things that aren’t ‘natural’ and often comparing their actions to ‘animals in the wild’ is pointless.
Right now I’m tapping a lump of plastic and looking at a glass sheet light by internal sparks. Perversely, I appear to believe that I am conversing with potentially thousands of people. It’s deviant conversation, isn’t natural and no animals have ever been seen doing it in the wild.
There ought to be a law against it.
Sorry, I can’t recall the author. As the title implies, the book is about the behavior and mechanics of other animals copulating. There is a section on bedbugs. Homosexual activity has been witnessed in bedbugs.
re Unnatural- Any animal capable of feeling pleasure will stimulate its genitals with whatever doesn’t push it away. This is why dogs everywhere go for our legs. There are some species which are not capable of distinguishing the gender of a potential mate. Researchers observed that male frogs (of a species I can’t remember), will grab any object of roughly the right size and attempt to copulate. Other males generally respond to this by shaking and making a distinctive noise. Anything that does not shake and make that noise gets some froggy lovin’. Thus, the unnatural human behavior is not homosexuality. It is that we are taught not to masturbate constantly, and have sex with anything that doesn’t attack or run away.
I believe Cecil covered this in the original Straight Dope book (although I could be wrong on that). Anyway, I recall reading that female macaques (a type of monkey) will stimulate each other to orgasm if males aren’t available.
Found a link to the column I was remembering:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_064b.html
Incidentally, Alphie, welcome. Gotta love a person whose first post is a question about homosexual encounters between animals.
There are numerous species of plant that have evolved to a symbiotic relationship with a certain species of animal. The seeds of some plants, for example, will not germinate unless they are eaten and excreted by bats.
There is a species of orchid which mimics the appearance of a female (sadly the documentary failed to give a spelling so-)ick-new-mott-ed wasp. The male attempts to mate with this flowe. In the process, its underside is covered with pollen. When the wasp mates with a different flower, he pollenates it. Animals having sex with plants-natural and necessary for the survival of the plant.
If you want to avoid “unnatural” things not found in nature you would do better staying away from organized religion and politics. [sub]I am sure someone will soon claim the alligators in Florida said they voted for Gore.[/sub]
I read a review of a book not that long ago, and the book was all about “sexual deviancy” in the wild. Homosexuality, rape, some animal versions of S&M, incest, gangbangs, etc. have all been recorded.
I’ve been searching for it and there are only two places I could’ve read it: http://www.canoe.ca or Josey Vogel’s column My Messy Bedroom.
Canoe has a notoriously bad search engine. You could search for “Canoe” and not get a single hit. Consequently, I’m finding nothing. And I don’t even know how to search Vogel’s columns, I read those in physical newsprint. Maybe this will inspire somebody else to track down the book review, though.
The seminal work on the subject is “Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity” by Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D.
Hey, Otto, are you inside my head? I was just pulling up the link to post that! Instead, I’ll paraphrase myself from a thread a while back…
Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance has more info then you’d ever want on homosexuality in the wild. (There are some excerpts at QT.) It describes same sex activity, duration, frequency, orientation, and relationships- including lifelong pairings and trysts among both couples and multi-gender triads and quads- of and between several dozen mammal and bird species. There’s even (gasp) pictures!
Quite a suprising, though hefty (700 pgs or so) read. But well worth the trouble.
Got a cite for that? I believe you are spreading a bit of ignorance and that’s not what we’re all about. While I believe a couple animal species perform sex for personal gratification as opposed to repreduction, this is not true for most animal species. The sex drive is generally seasonal and rarely motivated by anything except for reproduction. In these species, when gay sex occurs, since pleasure is clearly NOT the motivation, it’s easily explained by other factors. The usual one that I hear of is there are not enough members of one gender to go around.
Ummmmm… am I missing the point, or…?
(For the purposes of my post, “human” is what you and I are, “animal” is every other living this we’re discussing in this thread. I know there are better definitions, but for the sake of simplicity…)
Several people here have posted anecdotal evidence of sexual activity occurring between two animals of the same gender. They have also pointed out that this is often due to said animal’s bad eyesight (or inability to distinguish a mating partner that will eventually result in offspring), “dominance behavior”, or the desire to “get off”.
Each of these reasonably and realistically explain why two animals of the same species and gender will “have sex” with each other. However, none of these show that the animals are “gay”.
Unless I am grossly misinformed, “gay” humans eschew “having sex” with humans of the opposite gender. Whatever else your personal definition of “gay” encompasses (and please don’t hijack here, that’s clearly a Great Debate), I assert that the stunning majority of “gay” humans prefer to “have sex” with other “gay” humans of their same gender (i.e. gay males prefer having sex with other gay males, not gay females).
There is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of two humans of the same gender engaging in sexual (or “pseudo-sexual”) activity without either one of them, or anyone else in their society, considering them “gay”. Young children often play “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with others of their own gender. Most people accept this is natural curiosity, not homosexual behavior (while two fifty-year-old humans playing “…show me yours…” if often correctly identified as “homosexual behavior”). Some heterosexual women kiss or preen over each other in a manner that might be considered light foreplay if conducted between a hetero- woman and hetero- man, although few would automatically consider two ladies walking arm in arm whilst shopping to be gay.
“Dominance behavior” employing sexual tactics is certainly displayed by animals, dolphins come to mind, although the animal is not actually gay nor is the behavior. This is just the same way rape between humans is generally accepted to be about dominance, not sexual attractiveness. When a man rapes a woman it is generally held to be a display of domination or oppression, not sexuality. When a man rapes another in prison, it is my understanding (thank G-d I’m not speaking from experience here) that these are generally dominance or ‘boredom’ acts, an attempt to dominate others in their society or because there just aren’t any females available. Either way, it’s domination, not sex. One male attempting to dominate another doesn’t automatically make either of them gay. (Volpe raped Louima with a broomstick, does that make either of them gay? (Answer: no) Is one male inserting something phallic into the arse of another a “gay” act? (Answer: frequently yes, however not absolutely and in every instance yes))
As for the “getting off” theory, well…… who doesn’t? And what does that prove? A male dog humps my leg. That means he’s gay??? Nope, can’t reconcile that one. How about the same dog next humping my wife’s leg. Bisexual dog? Keep kidding yourself…. I’ve seen a dog hump a full laundry bag lying on the floor. What does that make it? “Laundryophile”?
In general, gay human males desire to have sexual relations exclusively with other gay human males, to the point many absolutely never have sexual relations with human females (gay or otherwise).
Show me, then, the male animal (remember: non-human animal) that completely, unfailingly does not under any circumstances engage in sexual relations with females of it’s species it’s entire life but does with other males. Likewise any female animal: show me the one that is born, sexually matures, grows to old age, and dies while * unfailingly * rejecting all advances of males in her species and instead “getting off” exclusively with other females. This behavior is displayed by some humans, and the humans that display this behavior often consider themselves, and are considered by others, to be gay. (And yes, of course some humans do this but are not gay: for instance some who take religious vows of chastity.)
In other words: yes, animals engage in sexual activity that, when engaged in by humans, is often exclusively the realm of “gay” humans. However, the animal isn’t gay (no matter how much you wish it was, screennameomittedbutyouknowwhoyouare).
It’s a personal appraisal of mine, not someone else’s opinion I read somewhere. I don’t think the mods would at all appreciate me linking to my, er, source material, even if I was willing to…which I’m not, as it could get some people in a lot of trouble.
No? I would argue just the opposite: that humans are the only animal that performs sex just for reproduction (and only a few humans, at that) I really can’t think a fish or fly is going around pining for having little spawnlings to fit social or religious pressures, or what have you. They do it because they derive some sort of enjoyment from it – an urge fulfilled. Nature’s way of making sure it gets done. More often than not, non-reproductive methods can fulfill that urge just as well, and we get things like the flower-humping wasp and leg-humping dogs and, indeed, sex between the same genders. Recreational sex, all of it.
Jimbrowski: The OP is asking about “gay sex”, not “gay animals”. The former you cannot possibly deny. The latter is a more vague area, as determining preference can be rather difficult without communication. My own personal opinion is that all animals, human included, are largely bisexual. I believe strictly-heterosexual preference is as rare as strictly-homosexual preference, and the animal kingdom appears to support that to me
But I realize that it may not support that theory for other people. It’s impossible to prove what an animal is thinking, so we tend to intepret things based on our own experiences. You might see something and call it rape, whereas I might see the same thing and say they were flirting towards it. Either way, you can’t say it doesn’t happen, which is what the OP was talking about.
…and as for finding strictly-homosexual critters, judging by the description of his book, apparently Dr. Bagemihl has done just that.
There’s a whole book about this out there (gay sex occurring in animals). On an amusing note, I read about two male flamingos in a zoo (Europe somewhere…maybe Netherlands) who were involved in a TWENTY-YEAR relationship!! Zookeepers, sensing somehow that the flamingos were feeling paternal, gave them a fertilized egg and the happy flamingo couple reared a lovely chick…I swear, I’m not making this up!
At least it was “between,” not “with”…
(runs back into audience)