For me, it’s the question that’s always the most effective in firing like a black arrow into the heart of the Fundamentalist dragon, felling it down to earth in a cloud of ash and fire:

Why are there gay animals?

Confront even the most strident sexual absolutist with this lone, almost child-like question, and a look of confounded frustration will come over them. Clearly stymied, they’ll never be able to give me even a halfheartedly assured reason for homosexuality existing in the animal kingdom. There’ll be some hurried allusion to God creating Adam and Eve in his own image, then something arcane about man being the master of beings that fly or walk on all fours will be trotted out.

The only conclusion that I can reasonably reach from it all is that Man is held to a higher standard of sexual decency than other life forms by his Sky Daddy. Cain and his whoever-the-hell-she-was wife were special. Her improbable existence has been justified by everything from Adam’s and Eve’s genes being so ideal that they permitted him to a marry a sister without fear of inbred mutation, to Cain marryin’ up an ape-woman member of the early hominids and producing those beastly “other races” whose genealogies lie in the mating of a perfect Aryan with a lesser being. They had to keep it classy. So…ewww either way.

Bambi and Thumper, however, are apparently allowed to throw it around the forest any which way they please.

If the society-upending catastrophe of incest — though whites with an unbroken line to the “pure-blooded” Edenic forebears are apparently exempt from the shame of doing with a blood relative — isn’t the first red flag thrown up when it comes to any acceptance of The Gay as natural, then bestiality is. The implicit link between gays and animals is one of the most long-in-the-tooth feather-rufflers, and while it’s meant to cast us as subhuman and base, if you’re an animal-loving misanthrope like me, you might take it as a compliment.

Homosexuality is practiced in over four hundred species of disparate animals — big horn sheep, dolphins, apes, lions, manatees, penguins — and is particularly common among herding animals. And these are just the higher vertebrates. Some animals swing back and forth between male and female mates, while others go exclusively gay. All-male group sex is a big hit with giraffes, and our close relative the Bonobo love a good game of dick-fencing, which results in plenty of happy endings but no baby chimps running all over place.

“But animals eat each other and kill their own young!,” protests a typical sexual moralist who claims accepting animalian homosexuality as an indicator of the naturalness of human variety is sheer folly. This only opens the door to all manner of weird shit we partake in that makes zero sense from a survival standpoint. Animals aren’t that inclined to willingly starve themselves, become obese and slow outside of captivity for decades of sedentary indifference to their own decrepitude, or go to war with another pack or pride over who has the best god.

Conservative, moral-skewed “science” clings to the notion that while animals may get it on with same-sex partners, it’s just a capricious whim driving them, one that will without fail be sublimated by their biological imperative to reproduce. Sure. Just like my mating instinct has my eye wandering toward the ladies with their great tits and hips suitable for breeding instead of my favorite stubbly Greek waiter who’s just poured into that white T-shirt. That’s why scores of my illegitimate broods have just overrun the earth.

In reality, for animals who run in packs or herds, monogamy is often a key factor in their extinction. It was one of several causes that contributed to the Dodo being hunted to death, and any collective comprised of only a select few males servicing a larger group of females is especially vulnerable to the bloodlust of the human animal. Yet, two female albatrosses raising chicks together as partners with the aid of male surrogacy can do so for multiple generations without upsetting the balance of the flock. If homosexuality for humans is supposed to be a temptation or vice, then I’m curious to know the cosmic significance of kinky devils spurring two male elephants to mount up? Is the point to make them turn from their Maker, resulting in a check in the column for Team Evil? Are they also Hellbound like gay humans are? If two butterflies have a gay fling in Morocco, will the beating of their wings result in a hurricane for San Francisco?

Creationists may demonize Darwin, but they are perversely reliant on his transfer-the-genes imperative whenever they castigate The Gay as a threat to a normalized reproductive order. Now, the theory that homosexuality is not only beneficial to a species’s survival, but perhaps even necessary for it is taking root, undercutting the exigency of Darwin’s sexual selection as much as it does the Antediluvian Theory of Go-Forth-and-Multiply.

I’ve forever been convinced that homosexuality is actually a boon for all societies in the sense that it results in less competition for mates, thus making the mating dance less of a tug of war. If every fit-as-fuck, better-adapted gay buck suddenly gave into every lady who put the moves on us or went into heat when we passed by them, just imagine the inferior straight men who’d be sitting the bench while we laid claim to all those acres of pussy. Even a dearth of female prospects — the so-called “prison effect” — can’t always account for animals gaying out. Often same sex encounters are about relating and establishing ties, creating a sense of communal interdependence, and maintaining equal footing between rivals who would otherwise tear out each other’s throats in a territorial throw-down that could result in two dead suitors.

Is The Gay actually, as Joan Roughgarden posits in Evolution’s Rainbow, an adaptive trait and “prelude to social cooperation, a pleasurable way of avoiding wanton conflict” that fosters congruous good will among the body politic? Male chimps rut their rancor away rather than bash in one another’s skulls. Dolphins who penetrate other males’ blowholes when they’re young learn to later collectively woo females in seamless formation rather than in violent contention. Gulls of both sexes will raise hatchlings as dude-slanted threesomes, while two partnered gay flamingos will adopt abandoned eggs when mothers die or fly the coop.

The moral: birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and sometimes, animals just wanna have fun.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com