No sex please, we’re Proboscis Monkeys

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. The Proboscis Monkey and its extraordinary nose lives in Borneo. The species is regarded as vulnerable, one stage away from being endangered.

Proboscis groups are centred around a polygamous male with several adult female mates, although males have little say in the group’s social life or decision making. Female relationships hold the group together and most friendly or aggressive interactions take place between females. You could possibly conceptualise it from a less patriarchal and heteronormative viewpoint as a group of females who maintain a single male partner that they agree to share. Sometimes the “excess” males band together in all-male troops.

Both males and females take part in homosexual activity, although neither heterosexual and homosexual advances are always welcomed and the aggressor will try to force them. But sexual activity of any orientation is fairly rare. In one study, there were only 12 mountings in a whole year, two of which (17%) were same-sex. 28% of all adult males never have heterosexual relations because they live in all-male groups. Proboscis Monkeys will even try to stop others having sex. Attempted heterosexual copulations gather audiences who try to disrupt the mating pair by climbing on them, pulling the male’s nose, making noises, or making distracting movements. It’s like a mashup of monkey porn and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Proboscis Monkey (Nasalis larvatus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: Incidental Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… Boy Flycatchers who like Boy Flycatchers who act like Girl Flycatchers.

Original Proboscis Monkey image from Wikipedia Commons.

I love you *VOMITS BLOOD*

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. The Common Vampire Bat is a small flying mammal that lives in central America. Obviously their most famous trait is their thirst for blood. Vampire colonies usually have between 20-100 members, though there can be up to 2,000. The main social unit is the female group of 8-12 related bats. Males sometimes have “bachelor” groups that roost in the same places as the females.

Females often mate with several males, although a vaginal plug forms after the first mating so only one of them is likely to inseminate her. When not in heat the females refuse to mate at all, and they’ll defend their refusal with as much violence as is necessary. They also exercise their prerogative to refuse males whose approaches they deem too aggressive.

Vampire Bat (Desmodus rotundus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Elephants and the S-shaped configuration

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Elephants hardly need any introduction and since they weigh up to 7½ tons they definitely don’t need an introduction when you stand next to one. Sadly both the African Elephant and the Asiatic Elephant are endangered species. African Elephants live in Sub-Saharan parts of the continent; both sexes have tusks. Asiatic Elephants range from India through southeast Asia to China. They are slightly smaller in general, with smaller ears and tusks only on the male.

Elephants are matriarchal and have complex social lives. Females live in matriarchal herds, while bulls generally live alone or in smaller male-only herds. The sexes are mostly segregated and antagonistic towards each other. Females show solidarity towards one another and care for the group’s calves collectively. Unlike animals like the Manatee or the Walrus, female Elephants actively fight back against male abuse. Females charge and chase offending males, and they will intervene to forbid males from mating with juveniles of either sex.

African Elephant (Loxodonta africana)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Subscribe now for hot Manatee on Manatee action

Part of a series based on Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Manatee’s are large seal-like marine mammals, up to 2.5-4m (8-14 ft) long. This species lives in coastal areas and rivers of the southeastern United States, the Caribbean, and northeastern Brazil. Manatees are generally solitary and barely social at all. Occasionally they form small groups of two to six individuals; these groups may be mixed or consist entirely of younger males.

Having no society as such doesn’t stop male Manatees from cruising for other males. Most male Manatees are probably bisexual, since their homosexuality is usually either interspersed with heterosexual encounters, or it develops out of ménages à trois (or quatre, or more) involving a female and several males. In other words, male Manatees sometimes compete against each other for female attention but then go off with their male rival instead. A good twist there for soap opera script writers, although I daresay it’s been done already on some show or other.

West Indian Manatee (Trichelus manatus)

Planet of the Lesbian Macaques

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Unfortunately the appealing and somewhat internet famous Japanese Macaques are an endangered species. In the wild they live in forests and on mountainsides. I met a load of these Macaques who live at Arashiyama near Kyoto. They’re about a meter (3 feet) long. Their groups are between 20-100 strong. In large numbers they were more terrifying than adorable. I particularly remember a viewing area where it was safer and more practical to cage the humans and let the monkeys grip the mesh to look in.

Female Macaques form “consortships”, temporary but exclusive pair bonds based on mutual sexual attraction. The two females spend every possible moment together once they’ve bonded. There are seven different sexual positions in homosexual copulation, and they most definitely use them all. Females will actively compete and fight with Macaques of both sexes for access to their chosen female partners. Heterosexual partnerships rarely last beyond the mating season, and the homosexual consortships don’t last more than a few weeks either although unlike the heterosexual partners the female couple will remain friends. In effect female Macaques are serially monogamous. Incest is taboo, but consortships may otherwise be between females of any age.

Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Courtship, Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: primary Observed: Wild, Semiwild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Seen a Dolphin on your cruise? He’s cruising you

Part of a series based on Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Because Dolphins are found in temperate to tropical coastal waters throughout large parts of the world, they’re already somewhat notorious for sexiness, but no matter how many other human values get projected onto them their bisexuality and homosexuality is still frequently whitewashed. There are four basic social units in Bottlenose society: mothers and calf pairs, adolescent groups (often male only or male dominated), bands of up to a dozen adult females and their young, and adult males in lifelong pair bonds. Yes, male dolphins get sort of gay married. In some communities more than three-quarters of all males are in same-sex partnerships.

Dolphins of the same sex sometimes spend anything from several minutes to many hours rubbing against each other, caressing, stroking, mouthing, chasing, pushing and leaping. This sexual play involves their whole bodies including fins, flukes, snouts, heads and genitals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the males often sport erections during this type of play. Although humans who “play” with Dolphins are often too starry-eyed and idealising to notice it, male Dolphins are quite often engaging with these humans in what is to them sex play. They’re not choosy about species, and they’ll have sex (or try to) with other types of marine mammals.

Update:

QED. The gentleman depicted here seems to be enjoying himself, anyway.

Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Courtship, Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: Primary Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Long, and strong, and down to get the friction on

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Giraffes are the tallest mammals, up to 19 feet/5.8m tall. They live in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania and the Transvaal.

Female Giraffes generally live in groups of up to fifteen individuals, including their calves and sometimes a few juvenile males. Adult males live in “bachelor” groups, but become increasingly solitary as they age. These older males may mate with multiple females, but play no part in the raising of the calves. Giraffes are sexually mature before they’re four years old, but have little interest in females at that age. Once they’ve had their heterosexual flings after they’re eight years old, most males “retire” alone.

Male Giraffe courtship is unique, because it involves the long necks they’re famous for. When “necking”, two males stand beside each other for up to an hour and gently rub their necks on each other’s body, head, neck, loins and thighs.

Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardis)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Courtship, Affectionate, Sexual Ranking: Primary Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Walrus moustache rides

Part of a series based on Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Walruses are massive arctic pinnipeds, a group of marine mammals that includes seals. Males can grow up to 12 feet long and weigh 3,500 lbs. January to March is the heterosexual breeding season. Males mate with several females but form no long-lasting bonds. At other times when both sexes are present, they are mostly segregated. When the females and their calves go north for the summer, it’s time for the males to stay behind and really indulge their inner gay Walrus.

In groups of up to fifty individuals, male walruses float at the surface and engage in homosexual courtship, intercourse and affection. They solicit boyfriends by perching on their favourite boulder or beach, inflating their throat pouches and issuing a series of vocalisations. One or both males may also dive and resurface until his intended gets the message and/or the horn. Sometimes a group will gather round to hear a homosexual courtship song, or the courting Walrus will be accompanied and helped out with his song by a younger attendant male.

Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)

It’s Gay Animal Fortnight

What’s that? You never heard about this carnival of homosexual, bisexual and transvestite animals? (That I just made up.) So sad… some people have a sheltered upbringing. Because there are definitely gay and, yes, even intersexual or transvestite animals throughout the world and there always have been. Sorry about that, bigots and religious nuts, but to adopt a phrase already in circulation: DEAL WITH IT.

It’s documented in thousands of scientific papers, even though a shameful number of scientists themselves have not been averse to clutching their pearls and squeamishly claiming not to see what their own data unequivocally shows. In 1999 Bruce Bagemihl did the world a great service by compiling and summarising this evidence for the ubiquity of non-reproductive (hetero- and homo-) sexual practices throughout the natural world in his mammoth 750-page Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. It’s an exploration of possible evolutionary and biological explanations for the fact that a spectrum of sexual behaviour and gender identity exists in almost every species; a far cry from the scientifically and logically unsupportable view that a heterosexual majority means any individual with a different sexual or gender identity is therefore abnormal. It’s not always even true that the majority of individuals are heterosexual in some species. I don’t know why I find it so funny, but Bagemihl’s deadpan assertion that “the majority of male manatees are probably bisexual” always cracks me up. Many other animals have far more sex with their own gender than they ever do with heterosexual mates, as we shall see.

The book also doubles as a methodical but weirdly entertaining catalogue not only of real-life and empirically confirmed bi-curious manatees, but also of lion benders and gay ostrich dance clubs. I’ve picked out a few and I’ll be posting them during Gay Animal Fortnight alongside the other random stupid stuff.

Let’s start Gay Animal Fortnight with our cousins, the sex-mad Bonobos. If you’re offended by descriptions of sexual acts between (mostly) consenting animals… well, firstly you’re weird and you’re probably projecting your own hangups rather than genuinely seeing anything shocking. You should just relax a bit. This is the blog where James Joyce’s jaw-droppingly dirty letters reign supreme, after all. But if you know you’re offended by this kind of thing, then just don’t read any further.

Squirrels, stupefied by opium

SQUIRREL.

“Very often those sold as tame, especially by men in the street, are simply stupefied by opium or some other drug.” Cassell’s Book of Sports and Pastimes (1896) on the buying of pet squirrels.

In a section regarding “Home Pets”, the writer (“LEWIS WRIGHT, AUTHOR OF THE ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF POULTRY”) sings the praises of squirrels as pets, and in passing makes the mind-blowing comment about casual trafficking in drugged squirrels; a comment that opens up a whole new vista of Victorian weirdness. There were men standing around on street corners, selling doped-up squirrels to passing boys? The mind boggles. In the next Victorian drama I see, in the street scenes I’d like there to be authentic shady sellers of totally monged squirrels. The squirrel pictured is of course a native British red squirrel; a century or so on from the publication of Cassell’s Book of Sports and Pastimes red squirrels have almost been driven to extinction by the alien greys.

No, not the ones with the anal probes.

SQUIRRELS

“THE Squirrel makes a beautiful and engaging pet when moderately tame… there is something irresistibly attractive in the way it sits up to eat its food. No animal is so pretty in its ways, and this accounts for its being such a favourite. A squirrel can generally be obtained at a good bird shop for from three to ten shillings, according to its beauty and the abundance of fur, a good-tailed one being worth a great deal more than one poorly furnished… It is useless buying an old squirrel, as it will either remain savage and vicious, or what is quite as likely, pine away and die. It is not much use trying to get a tame one, as it will be nearly as shy with a new owner, and very often those sold as tame, especially by men in the street, are simply stupefied by opium or some other drug. It is far more satisfactory to look out simply for a young and healthy animal… It is often of great service to smear the hands now and then with a drop or two of oil of aniseed, most small animals being very fond of the smell.”

I got a serious case of semantic satiation while I was writing this post. The word “squirrel” first started to seem weird, and then meaningless.

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,  squirrel…