“What a piece of work is a man” ~ Shakespeare, Hamlet
My mother had lesbian cats.
Seriously.
I was raised by my grandmother but when I was twenty, my mother and step-father’s marriage finally imploded and they split up. My mother took their female cat, Cass, with her. When she moved in with her current partner, he already had a female cat of his own, Sam. And they became, well, lovers. Sam was old even then, half-blind and deaf as a post so Cass would go out, hunt a mouse, stun it and bring it back for Sam to play with (which somehow manages to be both horrible and sweet at the same time). They shared bowls, shared a basket and yes, for all the gutter-minds out there, they engaged in the sex act.
One of the more common criticisms thrown at gay people is the accusation that homosexuality is somehow “unnatural”. Now firstly, have you ever actually looked at nature? If humanity had stuck purely with what was natural, we would be living in a tree, eating our meat raw and dying of dental abscesses. The life of man in the state of nature is, as Hobbes said, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Most of us are not aboriginals, most of us do not know how to live in harmony with nature. Even if we allow tool-making as “natural”, how many of us know how to make a decent bow or fletch arrows, how to make gunpowder or construct a snare? I know how to do those things, maybe a few of you do as well but how many? One percent would probably be being generous. The entire history of civilised humanity is a flight away from nature, a history of adapting nature to our own ends. Many ancient cultures (including the Roma) had a tradition that a communal fire was open to anyone that turned up and that was because, in the time when communal fires were common, the darkness was full of things with big teeth that wanted to eat you. The life of man in a state of nature is not The Flintstones, it’s having few natural weapons and being eaten by things with plenty of them. What saved humanity, what has made us the dominant species on the planet (unless Douglas Adams was right about the mice) is that we adapt nature to our own ends, change and refine it until it does what we want. So let’s not have any veneration of “nature” from people living a life which is entirely unnatural.
Secondly is that they’re just plain wrong. Now, we need to be careful with our definitions here because describing animals as “gay” or “lesbian” risks imputing human thought processes upon animals which do not share them but biologists have observed homosexual behaviour (that is, choosing to engage in sexual acts with a partner of the same sex even when mating partners of the opposite sex are available) in roughly fifteen hundred species. In about a third of those, homosexual behaviour is common and well documented . In Germany and Japan, penguins often form gay couples. When the German zoo authorities attempted to break the couples up by separating them and importing penguins of the opposite sex (largely to boost breeding numbers), it simply didn’t work. The zoo director remarked that the relationships were too strong and, amusingly, German gay rights groups protested the seperation. In American Bison, homosexuality is so common that the Mandan festival of Okipa (intended to ensure the bison’s return) concludes with a ceremonial re-enactment. The Lakota have a specific word for homosexual bison: pte winkte (meaning “bison two-spirit”). Giraffes virtually follow the old Greek saying of “a girl for duty, a boy for pleasure”, being more common than heterosexual coupling. Bonobos are almost uniformly bisexual. This listing could go on for some time but the point is made. Homosexuality is widely known in the animal kingdom and thus, in nature. Therefore, homosexuality is, by definition, entirely natural.
What is a uniquely human behaviour though, is homophobia. Again, we have to be careful not to apply human values because there is no such thing as “marriage” in most of the animal kingdom but nowhere in nature, excluding humanity, is there any kind of prejudice against homosexuality. Animals fight for all kinds of reasons; for territory, for food, for a mate or for dominance but in not one species outside humanity has violence ever occurred because one party took exception to another party shagging their own gender. Gay, straight, it doesn’t matter to them. If you can keep up with the pack, you’re fine.
When Cass died several years ago of cancer (which cats are prone to, get yours checked), Sam began to pine for her and when she died herself three months later, family tradition is that she died of a broken heart. When I think of the two of them or of my own two adored cats, Mac and Jelli (who died seven months ago and three weeks ago respectively), I sometimes wonder if they didn’t have the better deal. The life of a house cat is sleeping, playing, eating and being petted. We call ourselves an intelligent species but our feline friends don’t give a hoot about which god you worship or who you love so really, which of us are the intelligent ones?
“I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth” ~ Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man
