The Saga of the Toronto Gay Penguins

In a bizarre move, a zoo is splitting up a male pair, to force them to breed. 

Queer Politics for the Birds: The Saga of the Gay Penguins

Toronto’s zoo is splitting up a pair of same-gender penguins. These Happy Feet males, Pedro and Buddy -- jokingly referred to as "Brokeback Iceberg" -- have been nesting with each other for a year.

The reason for the boys’ split-up, a zoo official says, is because African penguins are an endangered species.

The pair has what’s known as a "social bond," but it’s not necessarily a "sexual bond," Tom Mason, the zoo’s curator of birds and invertebrates told the Associated Press.

"Penguins are so social they need that...company. And the group they came from was a bachelor group waiting for a chance to be paired up with females," Mason stated. "They had paired up there, they came to us already paired, and it’s our job to be matchmakers to get them to go with some females." 

SheWired 

The argument they have used to justify this, is the old one that they aren't "really" queer, just doing it in the absence of females. This is nothing more than homophobia directed at the animal world, used to avoid facing the fact that sexual activities between members of the same biological sex are commonplace in nature - for some species, and for some individual animals, more common than the heterosexual kind.

Bruce Bagemihl, in Biological Exuberance, has described this avoidance strategy, and several others, in his book "Biological Exuberance" - together with accounts of the extensive scientific evidence now emerging to rebut them.

As scientists, the curators at Toronto zoo really should know better. 

Books:

• Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity
• Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
• Sommer, Volker and Vasey, Paul: Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective
• Poani, Aldo:Animal Homosexuality: A Biosocial Perspective

Related articles

• "Unnatural" Nature, Immoral Butterflies: The Great Cover-Up of Animal Homosexuality
• Breaking up is hard to do - even for vultures
• Aquinas, and "Nature" 
• Is Exclusive Heterosexuality Unnatural?
• Our Queer Primate Cousins
• Animals Use Sex Toys, Too
• Same Sex Parents, Furred and Feathered
• Natural Law, Laysan’s Albatross, and the Question of Evidence
• Queer Bonobos: Sex As Conflict Resolution
• Bighorn Rams: Macho Homos, Wimpish Heteros

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• Canada's same-sex penguin pair to be split apart (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Is it homophobic to split up gay penguins? (guardian.co.uk)
• The Gay Side of Nature (time.com)
• Divorcing Tradition: Freedom, Equality and Marriage (3quarksdaily.com)
• 15 Bizarre Animal Mating Rituals (popcrunch.com)
• Sexual Fluidity Is Natural in Animals (gayrights.change.org)

The Real Mama Grizzlies: Lesbian Moms?

Sarah Palin, With Bear

Sarah Palin's understanding of wildlife appears to be no better than her tenuous grasp of social history.  Mrs Palin has been very much in the news over her enthusiastic promotion of a band of crazies  thoughtful, conservative candidates who agree with her own views on education and "traditional family values".   The women in this band she likes to describe as "mamma grizzlies", most recntly Christina O'Donnell in Delaware.

The problem with the conservative view of the "traditional" family and its values is that has little relation to history, and is in fact a relatively modern invention. The problem with her adoption of mamma grizzlies as her model is that they too scarcely embody the "family values" she claims to support.  Real life mamma grizzlies do not live or mate in the nuclear families she so admires. Rather, they mate in promiscuous, polygamous groups, then raise their young as single mothers - or in collaboration with other females, as family units headed by two women.  The closest human counterparts to real-life "mamma grizzlies" are lesbian couples, with kids - not exactly Christian O'Donnell.

Bruce Bagemihl in Biological Exuberance describes the family structure of grizzly bears, based on an analysis of 18 published, peer-reviewed academic papers. He notes that while grizzlies (and Black bears) are largely solitary creatures, they do sometimes form short-term social groups around specific food sources. Mating is indiscriminate and polygamous, with both males and females mating with multiple opposite sex partners for conception. After mating, the males have no further part in child-rearing.

Consequently, many grizzly mammas raise their young as single parents - unless (as many do) they team up with another female for co-operative parenting.

The two mothers become inseparable companions, travelling and feeding together throughout the summer and fall seasons as they share in the parenting of their cubs.. ....... A bonded pair jointly defends their food, and the two females also protect one another and their offspring (including protecting them from attack by grizzly males). The cubs regard both females as their parents, following and responding to either mother equally; bonded females occasionally also nurse each other's cubs. If one female dies, her companion usually adopts her cubs and rears them as her own.

Bagemihl is careful to point out that there are no observations to suggest that these relationships are sexual, but that is not my point. Rather, I want to draw attention to the abundant evidence from history, anthropology and zoology that "natural" sexual and family relationships are far more varied than the simplistic formulations of  "traditional family" propagandists would ever like to admit.

Sexual activity is not always exclusively for procreation and not always between opposite-sex partners; the partners in procreation are usually opposite-sex (not always - some lizards reproduce from female pairs), but the parties in biological parenting and child-rearing are not always the same; and there are instances where same-sex parents have clear advantages over the alternatives, especially where the alternative is not "one mom and one pop", but a single mother, as in the case of the Grizzlies.

There are thousands of animal species that are known to have homosexual relationships, some even more frequently than heterosexual relationships (for example bighorn rams, female bonobo chimps and male giraffe). Many other animal species, especially birds, form same-sex parenting couples, by adoption or surrogacy. In human societies, there are likewise numerous examples where standard practices include same-sex relationships in addition to opposite sex-marriage - and the evidence from research is that just as in the animal kingdom, same-sex couples are at least as capable of good parenting, and sometimes even better, than opposite - sex couples.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sarah Palin's Top 10 Tea Party Mamma Grizzlies (middletownmike.blogspot.com)
• New Sarah Palin Ad Welcomes Grizzlies Of All Genders (As Long As They're Not "Politicos!") (mediaite.com)

• The Gay Side of Nature (time.com)
• Why It's OK for Birds to Be Gay (livescience.com)
• Sexual Fluidity Is Natural in Animals (gayrights.change.org)
• Parental care linked to homosexuality (nature.com)
• Same-Sex Parents, Furred and Feathered. (It's a Queer World)
• Natural Law, Natural Sex, Natural Families (It's a Queer World)
• Africa's Male Wives (It's a Queer World)

Books:

Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Stonewall Inn Editions)

Crompton, Louis: Homosexuality and Civilization

Naphy, William G: Born to be Gay: A History of Homosexuality (Revealing History)

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

Exclusive Heterosexuality Unnatural?

"I don't know of any species that is exclusively heterosexual"

- Zurich Zoo tour guide, Myriam Schärz.

The argument that same -sex relationships are supposedly "unnatural" is so fundamental to the homophobes' case, that it needs to be countered at every opportunity. At Bilerico Project, Jesses Monteagudo has a good rundown of just how widespread same sex behaviour is in the animal kingdom. Here are some extracts: