Horny History: The Birds and the Bees Are Bisexual

It’s real history, as told by some horny dudes in my inbox and me.

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Scientists have known for quite some time that animals display homosexual behavior, though they haven’t always wanted to admit it.

As far back as 350 BCE, Aristotle described male partridges as “extremely salacious and given to intercourse with males, mounting them as they do the females.” He said the same of male quails. But later translations quietly rewrote that history, changing male to female, or removing the line altogether.

For centuries, homosexuality in animals was reframed not as preference, but as accident. A mistake. An anomaly. Something desperate or misdirected.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, during witch trials across Europe, women were accused not only of consorting with the devil, but of corrupting their animals to do the same. Under torture, some confessed to bewitching goats or swine into same-sex relationships. Male goats mounting other males became a sign of diabolic influence.

It was rarely described without condemnation. In monotheistic religions, homosexuality was a human sin against nature, and as those religions spread, so did the belief that animals simply didn’t do that. But they did. They always had. When people couldn’t ignore the homosexual behavior, those behaviors were explained away as devilish, ignored entirely, or buried in euphemism.

Victorians called homosexual animals “given to strange pairings.” Biologists, when they mentioned them at all, referred to them as curiosities or errors. Sometimes, they hid them in Latin footnotes. Other times, they just left them out.

Darwin himself dismissed same-sex behavior as either nonexistent or a biological error. He and many of his peers left these animals out of their writings, not because they didn’t see them, but because they didn’t want to explain them.

To acknowledge them would have meant rethinking what was natural. Instead, they were footnoted. Reworded. Erased.
The swans stayed paired. The penguins raised chicks. The rams mounted one another in broad daylight.
And still, the men writing nature chose not to see.

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As always, the men in the following conversations found me through a very realistic looking photograph of MAGA babe filtered me. My Horny History contestants are right-wing men who message a satirical conservative Facebook profile. Find out more about me here.

Me versus MAGA Blonde Babe satirical me

Animals: Are they Gay or What

Technically, we can’t assign an identity to animals based on their sexual behavior. So no, a scientist might not call them gay, they’d say animals engage in homosexual sex. But I’m not a scientist. I’m calling them gay.

I’m here to bother right-wing men, in this case, mostly Christians, with the queerness of the natural world. These guys aren’t picturing emotional intimacy when they condemn homosexuality. They’re thinking in sex acts. So the distinction between “gay” and “has gay sex” is moot.

To them, queerness is depraved, animalistic, chaotic, and yet somehow, also unnatural.

To be clear, most animals are probably bisexual, if anything. But many of them have a lot of same-sex sex. Flamingos. Dolphins. Giraffes. Beetles with detachable penises. Nature is out here living.

Beetles with what?

Candidate A

Back to those homosexual beetles for a moment. Some scientists tried to explain it away. They claimed same-sex pairings only happened when no females were available. In 1850, a German entomologist theorized that male beetles “make use of other males to satisfy their violent procreative urges, probably taking them for… females in their blind passion.”

None of this held up. The male beetles weren’t confused. They just picked other male beetles.

And as it turns out, Christians hate when you tell them that. I highly recommend doing so. Nature has never been more fun.

The rest of these replies are from other Christians. I won’t introduce them one by one. Just picture a rotating cast of white right-wing men, mostly between the ages of 40 and death.

Candidate B

They practically block themselves.

Candidate C

So. Easy.

One of the my favorite gay animal meltdowns in history came from George Murray Levick, a British explorer who discovered homosexual penguins during a 1910 expedition to Antarctica.

He called their behavior “astonishing depravity” and wrote, “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.” What were they doing? Gay stuff. Male on male penguin gay stuff. Which, apparently, was enough to shatter his British sensibilities.

He was so scandalized he wrote the entire section in Greek, so no one back home would know the penguins were out there… touching each other homosexually.

Anyway. Let’s check in with another right-wing good Christian man and see how he’s handling the news that animals don’t read Leviticus.

Candidate D

Let’s take a break from all the animal sex to talk about something sweeter: a little homosexual animal romance.

Some animals don’t just hook up, they court each other.

Male ostriches perform a full pirouette dance to impress other males. Female rhesus macaques have a lesbian game of hide-and-seek to woo one another. 🥹

Some animals kiss. Bonobos tongue kiss.

Homosexual animal couples become parents in all kinds of ways.

Some form long-term pair bonds and raise babies together. Female geese often use sperm from a male to fertilize one or both of their eggs, then raise the goslings as a couple. Female grizzly bears with cubs have been observed joining forces, co-mothering their young.

In the 1970s, scientists discovered that 10 to 14 percent of gull pairs were lesbian. These females mated with males only to fertilize their eggs, then returned to their same-sex partners to raise the chicks.

Each time scientists “discovered” homosexuality in animals, it wasn’t just biology being observed. It was culture reacting loudly and with ignorance.

Like this ad from a California hardware store in the 1970s, mocking the idea of federal funds being spent on studying “gay gulls.” In the ultimate display of festive irony, this entire meltdown was used to sell Christmas decorations.

Because nothing says peace on earth, goodwill to men like hardware-store homophobia.

As much as I love queerness, and I truly do, not all queer animals are tender or kind in their pursuits for parenthood.

Some are ruthless.

Male black swans will court a female just long enough to get an egg, then run her off the nest and raise the cygnet as a gay dad duo.

There’s beauty in their bond.
But also a kind of loss, whether it’s felt or not.

Two is a Pair

Monogamous love is not the default. It’s a rule we made up, and then forced onto ourselves.

Many animals form bonds with more than one partner in all kinds of ways. Over 90 percent of birds form pair bonds, but they also mate outside of them. In fact, there’s a good chance that adorable little baby bird was fathered by someone other than the bonded partner.

In 1923, a biologist tried to explain this behavior in sandpipers as being caused by “deranged sex organs.” Slut shaming the birds.

And while birds appear monogamous on the surface, mammals are even less likely to settle down. Only about 5 percent of mammal species form anything resembling exclusive pair bonds.

Since we can’t know the emotional dynamics involved, scientists describe these relationships by structure:

• Polygyny – one male, multiple females

• Polyandry – one female, multiple males

• Polygynandry – everyone’s mating with everyone

Candidate E

Candidate E and I take a bit of a detour before getting to the topic of polyamorous animals, and yes, I know that’s a human word. Technically, we should be using those structural terms for mating systems.

But I want my animals to be in love.

Here’s his Q drop, if you’re curious. I didn’t watch it all but I’m certain it’s about animal queerness.

Nature Does Not Care About Your Gender Norms

Animals don’t follow our gender rules. And they certainly don’t feel pressured to stay the same sex.

All female parrotfish eventually become male. Some frogs and lizards change sex more than once. Sea snails are all born male, but when they pair off, one transforms into a female.

It turns out, nature breaks every gender rule we’ve made up, not just with bodies, but with behavior.

Male seahorses carry pregnancies. The females deposit the eggs in the males and the males give birth. Male marmosets do the mothering of carrying their babies around. Spotted hyenas have external genitalia that looks like a penis and testicles, but they're female. These poor creatures give birth through their enlarged clitoris, breaking it open. Clownfish live in strict hierarchies. The dominant fish is a female, and if she dies, the largest male changes sex to replace her.

Nature isn’t bound by binaries.

But some people want it to be. And when animals break their expectations, they panic.

This is the story of a male chicken, a cock, who laid an egg, and the panic it caused.

Candidate F

Candidate F is the only man here that is an older piece. He comes from a time before I used a filtered fake version of myself for my safety, but he is still a right-wing man messaging a satirical right-wing Facebook profile.

The rest of this candidate’s conversation is for paid subscribers.

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