491 - Field Guide to Gay Animals with Owen Ever
Welcome, Owen!
Owen Ever is a community-oriented artist and educator committed to wonder, history and healthcare justice. They were previously a curator and historian at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, worked in HIV support and prevention at a community clinic and were a research associate with the CDC's national HIV behavioral health survey. They are a theatre maker, therapeutic medical clown and find queer joy in birdwatching.
For this episode, Owen expands on the following topics:
The gayest animal in the queendom.
Non-monogamous animals, like penguins, bonobos, and more.
Prairie voles, one of the few animals who exhibits social monogamy.
Female elephants and their lesbian lifestyles.
Their upcoming podcast, Field Guide to Gay Animals.
Find Owen on Instagram to learn more about them and their work!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're doing something a little bit different today, in that instead of focusing on humans, we're going to be focusing on animals and the animal kingdom or animal queendom, I suppose also it's possible. Today we have a guest, Owen Ever, from the Field Guide to Gay Animals podcast. Owen Ever is a community-oriented artist and educator, committed to wonder, history and healthcare justice. They were previously a curator and historian at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum.
They worked in HIV support and prevention at a community clinic, and were a research associate with the CDCs National HIV Behavioral Health Survey. They are a theater maker, therapeutic medical clown, I have questions about that, and find queer joy in bird watching. Whether that means an unusual joy or a gay joy, we'll have to find out.
Listeners, if you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we developed for humans in any type of relationship, that book is called Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers our most widely used communication tools. You can check out our first few episodes of this podcast for some of our most widely shared episodes as well. With that, Owen, thank you so much for joining us.
Owen: Thank you so much. Whenever I listen to my biography being repeated and reflected back to me, I'm like, "What a notorious dilettante I am?"
Yes. A lifelong learner. I've been doing many things, just the pursuit of care and wonder in so many ways, and a lot of these things that you mentioned, especially working in HIV care, outreach, prevention. Being a therapeutic joy practitioner in hospitals, aka, medical clown, can be really overwhelming. Can be really draining on all of my systems and taxing my personal life, my interpersonal life.
Over the past five years, I've really leaned into being a person who finds joy in nature, and birding, bird watching has become one of the main avenues for that for me, in all of the ways. Where I bird in the park here is also the cruising grounds, so, if I get there early enough, there can be opportunity--
Emily: People or the birds?
Owen: I like to believe that I'm a participant in mutual voyeurism.
Jase: Got it.
Owen: The birds are cruising. I'm cruising. We're cruising for birds. We're cruising for each other.
Dedeker: Birds are watching you. Birds are watching the humans cruise.
Owen: Exactly.
Dedeker: He was watching the birds cruise.
Owen: I like to think they must get some sort of joy or satisfaction from the momentary diversion that I bring into their lives, in the same way that I disrupt the atmosphere, the stressors of a clinic or a hospital or a shelter. I believe that I can do that for animals as well, and they certainly have provided that for me.
That pursuit, that interest, has led me into finding the new ways that I can feel reflected and affirmed by the animal queendom, as we at the field guide pod, like to say. Thank you for bringing that back. We made this podcast, which launches in June.
Jase: Amazing. To start off on a strong note here, and just to cut right to what everyone at home is wondering, could you tell us, what is the gayest animal?
Owen: What is the gayest animal?
I'm glad you didn't give me a lot of time to prepare for this, because I would have like there are so many definitions. There's such a spectrum of queerness. Obviously humans, we do forget a lot that we are mammals, and I think that there is such a forgetting of that. Part of this podcast is about re-fostering that connection, but that's actually not the answer I want to give. Right now, what comes to mind is the humpback whale.
Dedeker: Oh, not at all what I expected.
Emily: Really?
Owen: Yes, right. I think that there's definitely animals that have a higher frequency of gay sex, that have been observed for longer amounts of time, animals we'll discuss and touch on today, but I'm choosing the humpback whale for a couple of reasons.
Dedeker: Because it's in the name is that why because it's on the fin?
Owen: Because it's in the name.
The magic was written, and they have only fulfilled the prophecy, but I'm not sure if you're familiar with the fact that only in March of the year 2024, were humpback whales ever documented having sex.
Emily: Oh.
Owen: It was the first observation--
Jase: Of any kind?
Owen: Of any kind, and it happened to be gay sex.
Dedeker: What? Oh, my Goodness.
Jase: How many percent of observed?
Owen: Exactly. 100%, not to-- There's a certain level of gold star that I think they get for that. I just think that I want to celebrate that about the humpback whales, welcome them into the family, and just the beauty of them being like, "You, human creatures are literally obsessed with us, and we're these profound, charismatic megafauna who are sucking and fucking in so many ways, in stealth mode," which is also something that I think is part of the queer legacy.
Then are like, "We're going to surface and let you watch the most beautiful, sensual," I'm blushing, just the best sex that you've ever seen between these two male humpback whales.
Dedeker: Oh, my goodness.
Owen: It's so beautiful. I have a record of the humpback whale songs, and I'm just going to be listening to that all Pride Month. That's my gay anthem this year.
Dedeker: The theme of the summer, for sure.
Owen: The theme of the summer, the humpback whales new .
Emily: Scientists finally observing that, had there been any other humpback whale behavior, just suggests that they have any kind of homoeroticism, or anything like that, or was it all just presumed, probably pretty functionally heterosexual? Or do we have examples of other whale species, who maybe have given that sort of behavior?
Owen: Yes. We could do a comparative analysis. Yes, the ocean is really gay. You could have an only fins account, because homosexual--
Jase:
Owen: Thank you. Homosexuality is very prevalent among whales, baleen whales, toothed whales, all kinds of whales. The right whale, the gray whale, the blue whale, these have all been witnessed having sex. There's certainly, there's precedent, and I think they were just keeping it to themselves. They are very DL about it for a long time. Dolphins and porpoises have a lot of sex. They are one of the most sexually active, charismatic in terms of same sex pair bonding, partnership, mounting. That definitely exists a lot.
We could presume, but it had never been witnessed in terms of science, I will say. I'm sure it has been witnessed before, sex among humpback whales, but this is the first documented account, and there's only a few, to my knowledge, other animals that have only been witnessed in male-male copulation. The first ever documentation of octopuses actually was two males. There's an incredible 16-minute video, which we can all Google after this, of two males. Then there's the black-rumped flameback woodpecker, which, again, you're like, the name-
Jase: It's in the name.
Dedeker: It's in the name.
Owen: -sort of imply.
Dedeker: Like somebody knew.
Owen: We knew. There was a knowledge. There was a knowing. There was a queer knowing.
Emily: I feel like dolphins get this reputation of, they're the only other species to have sex for pleasure, but clearly that's not the case because if there are animals having gay sex, then they're having sex for pleasure, it's not for procreation. Can you just spell that myth right now like that's not a thing?
Owen: Yes, that is a myth. That is a myth. That's a myth that we have gotten off on the wrong track going all the way back to Darwin, who also wrote about the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of beauty. He didn't believe that the only imperative of existence was reproduction. He saw that there was an abundance of energy and all of these things exist. Pleasure among mammals is abundant. They have very similar receptors, sensory receptors, and nervous systems to us humans, and so they receive pleasures.
Great apes are amazing examples of this. They also are tool-makers and make tools for masturbation. They have invented so many ways of having sex. The types of sex, the diversity of sex, we're not unique and special in it at all. Actually, we like to think that we are, especially, even when it comes to the missionary position, it was believed for a long time that humans were the only advanced culture to have sex face to face.
Dedeker: To have such an advanced sexual position?
Owen: Right, so advanced. Even, there's biopolitics within human cultures have received its name missionary position because it was like we have to teach other less civilized people how to look each other in the eye, but to great apes, also, have missionary positioned sex as well. Then they do it all other kinds of ways, and then they've invented ways, and they have ways that they can have sex that we can't have sex, which is something I think about a lot like what are all the other ways of experiencing pleasure that animals have that we don't know anything about, that we can only imagine about?
Dedeker: That sounds like a thought I had when I was on mushrooms once, honestly.
Owen: Right, yes. Exactly. When you start to contemplate diverse exuberance that exists in the world, it is psychedelic. Elephants can transmit vibrations to each other over long expanses of space. What's stopping them from sending sex messages to each other from exploring these ways of being able to whisper across time and space to each other? That is so beautiful. I know that there's a hesitation among practitioners of science to anthropomorphize animals. We are not those scientists right here, right now.
In fact, I'm interested in the converse of that like, how can we think of ourselves more as animals? How do we lean into our somatic experiences, our experiences with herd animals, the way that we receive comfort by being around each other? That's something that I practice when counseling, when testing, when in hospitals like, what are the ways that we can trigger a sense of safety, of joy, of laughter with each other, and animals do this for each other. We'll get into some of that today.
Dedeker: You bring up the anthropomorphizing piece and how-- obviously, it's really hard to divorce ourselves from having a human lens when we look at things and that made me question, do we have a lot of examples of either we look at something and read it as asexual behavior when maybe it's not actually. Also vice versa, because I imagine there must also be a history of seeing animals engage in sex, or engage in sex for pleasure, or engage in queer sex, and with that human lens, we decide, "No, that must not actually be what it is."
Owen: I would go so far to say that not only is it difficult to divorce our human brains from the observations we're making and the interpretations that we're making, it's impossible. I think that in working in like human subject research, we have a lot of built-in checks and balances for the biases of the researchers, but we know so little about the behaviors and motivations of animals that we rarely are stopping to check, what are the biases that I'm bringing to my observations and to these interpretations?
Science is a practice it reflects the worldview of its practitioners. Absolutely, over the past few centuries, there have been so many examples of scientist observing sexual behavior, and either misclassifying it as entirely just based on aggression, especially if it's male-male or ignoring it. Then it doesn't end up into the data. It doesn't end up being perceived as functionally relevant because they're not talking about it--
Dedeker: They're just like, "Oh, that was a weird fluke."
Owen: They're like, "That's a strange fluke. That's aberrant. It goes against our prevailing theories. If we have a thesis, which is survival of the fittest, how does this fit into it? It doesn't. That goes to the side." When we have the benefit of like time or distance, whether it's like, we're looking back a decade, or we're coming from the outside talking to scientists who are practicing today, we have the benefit of picking up the ways that the moral miasma of the culture that we're in, the political context, the historical context does seep into the language we use.
A scientist will very readily talk about monogamy, parents, fathers, mothers, these things, but then will be really hesitant to say homosexuality. I think a lot of that is because there is-- we've attributed so much shame and stigma to things like non-monogamy, to things like homosexuality, to queerness, that we don't want to project that onto animals, which I agree with, but I also think that it's useful.
There's a utility to see queerness where it is, to see same sex behavior where it is, whether it's mounting, whether it's pair bonding, to really just acknowledge that that's existing, and to see what that's bringing up for ourselves in that.
Jase: Before we go on, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing community members in our Discord and our Facebook group. These are all people who are part of our private discussion group tier on Patreon. These communities are such cool places where people are actually there to support each other and listen and have constructive conversations, which feels like it's a rarer and rarer thing to find on the internet these days. It's just been an incredibly inspiring community to be able to be part of.
Our Discord server is really cool because there are channels for all sorts of different topics, everything from work talk, to crafts, to parenting, to being polyamorous when you're over 40, all sorts of different topics, as well as some channels where you can talk about games and just have fun with fellow multiamory listeners. Most importantly, it helps us support this show and keep this going and make it available for free for everybody out there every week in the world. This is also made possible by our sponsors on this show.
If you take a moment, check them out. If they seem interesting to you, use our promo codes or use our links. Those are in our episode description as well. That will directly help support this show and keep it going as well. Thank you so much. We have a few different animals that we're going to talk about in this episode. Owen, why don't you start off with the first of those that you wanted to talk to us about, which is giraffes.
Owen: Oh, giraffes. This is a perfect segue, actually, to what we're talking about because so often, well, giraffes, they're amazing. Their necks, incredible.
Emily: Incredible.
Owen: Incredible. So much has been made about the role of adaptive evolution in these necks so that they can outgraze other herbivores. Also, male giraffes have developed something specific to them, to their sexual culture, which is called necking. They will begin by hitting their necks together, caressing, and exploring each other's bodies. Giraffes have their own preference as to what side they like to be on.
They're like, "I'm the top. I'm the bottom. I'm left-handed. I'm right." They will explore in that. They will explore each other's genitals. They get incredibly aroused. There's erections. Can we talk about very untoward things on this?
Dedeker: Oh, yes.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes, very untowards.
Owen: Okay, great.
Dedeker: I think I've seen footage of male giraffes doing it, but again, I think in every nature documentary, it's always been coded as aggression, even though it often doesn't look necessarily very aggressive sometimes.
Owen: Yes. It is predominantly coded as aggression as seen as a way of establishing a social order among the males. This happens across many species. When you see male-male sexual activity or courtship, it's like, "Oh, this must be territorial." This must serve some social function that is robbing it of its eroticism. If a male giraffe is exploring a female giraffe's body and sucking in her pee pheromones, it's like clearly, they're horny. We don't even need to look further.
Jase: We don't question it.
Owen: We don't question it. We're not looking into like, what are their dynamics? Do they copulate? Have they known each other before? With the males of the species, it's like, they must be fighting. I don't know. It's often called jousting, ritualistic jousting. Giraffes offer this exceptional rebuttal to that because they do, in fact, have a hierarchy within the males of the herd. They do have a degree of social dominance, but when it comes to the necking, to the sex, to the copulation, all of that goes out the window. It's total homocommunism.
Emily: Wow.
Dedeker: Wow.
Owen: Yes, they don't prescribe to any of that, and they have gay sex with such high frequency. There was a study in Tanzania that over 3,200 hours they observed and recorded every copulation, and they saw 18 copulations, 17 of them were gay sex. Female giraffes rarely have sex. They're having so much sex. It has to do with who's around. It has to do with who chooses to engage.
Often it's observed that two giraffes will begin this and others will watch and get horny and then offer themselves. They really explore all different types of sex that isn't about who's in charge. They're like, "This is an opportunity to break those, to have this liberatory sexual experience."
Then also, they rarely ever injure each other. There's a certain virtuosity to this act, that if it was about aggression, if it was about putting another fella in its place, you would see more injury. They know precisely how to use these giant necks, how to swing them at each other in a way that's arousing. It's like the principles of BDSM. They know when to get to that edge and to not actually cause any harm.
Emily: Can I just ask, right off the bat, and this may be a silly question, but are the giraffes just born this way?
Jase: Or did they watch musicals or what?
Emily: No, exactly. I'm like, what's the function of-- I think that's me also anthropomorphizing the animal or saying, what is the reasoning behind why an animal would be gay? The way that you're describing it, it's almost just like, because they're fricking horny and the ladies don't want to have sex, and so they want to fricking do it. That makes sense to me. Animals, they're just pansexual. They're bisexual or whatever. They just have sex with everyone.
Owen: Yes. I think we deeply underestimate the amount of bisexuality among the animal queendom, humans included. There is like an evolutionary advantage to being bisexual, to be constantly maintaining your virility to seeking pleasure. There's health benefits to sex, and so animals are practicing that, especially when they're only a few male giraffes will ever have repro-centric heterosexual sex.
There is truth to the fact that they are strengthening social bonds, they're forming community. There is a culture around this for sure. I think that it gets messy when you separate the two and you're like, it's either a social function or a cultural function, or it's sex, which is not true with humans. We have sex for so many reasons, so many reasons.
Dedeker: That struck me when you were saying that scientists will see this behavior and think, it has to serve a social function, therefore it must be aggression and deciding what the hierarchy is, completely scrubbing out the fact that sex has a lot of social functions in it for so many mammals, so interesting.
Owen: Absolutely. I'm glad that you picked up on that. Often scientists will look to be like, is there some other like, "Is there like nutritional function to swallowing another male's semen?" You're like, "Sure. Maybe."
Dedeker: Do giraffes do that?
Owen: Giraffes don't do that, but bats will do that, and some other smaller creatures will do that.
Dedeker: This new taxonomy of the animal world of who swallows and who doesn't.
Owen: We need to just deeply dive into this and figure out who's into who. It's like, can the animals start flagging? I need to know who's into the fist play? Who's into the whatever? Often we do try to look for like, where's the evolutionary advantage for this? How did this develop over time?
I think we're on the wrong path when we think that it has to have some outcome other than just the benefits that pleasure bring to your physical, to your emotional wellbeing, and to the social bonds that you're forming. These are all really important to animals, especially herd animals. This is a huge part of how they spend their time together. What else are they doing? They don't have television.
Dedeker: Other than eating and avoiding predators.
Jase: They don't have emails. We were put on this earth to eat figs and have orgies, and here we are making podcasts.
Dedeker: Speaking of eating figs and having orgies, I want to start talking about non-monogamy within the animal world. I know that when I was growing up watching nature documentaries in the Discovery Channel, I think the sense that I always got was, it's a little bit of like, yes, most of the animal queendom is non-monogamous. Yes, sure, but we're not animals, us human beings. We're different.
We're different and these five other species that allegedly practice monogamy, and we're the more special ones in this particular club. I guess I just wanted to open that up as a topic, specifically non-monogamy in the animal world and the ways that we have interpreted or misinterpreted that as humans.
Owen: I like to think of it as the monogamyth, because it is often championed among animals as there are a few that we can put on a pedestal and say, "If we are going to see ourselves reflected in animals, these are the five." The more that we understand the behaviors of animals as like more observations are happening, as technologies are increasing, we're realizing that's just not true. They are not practicing monogamy.
I read a study in the making of this podcast that compiled a lot of different data sets and proposed that only 3% to 5% of all species worldwide practice any form of monogamy. Some of that is only within breeding periods, just seasonal monogamy. That's just only for a few months, like many penguins, and then that goes out the window.
That's such an example of the way that the cultural project of family values, of monogamy, of heteronormativity patriarchy seeps into what we're allowed to extrapolate from what we're witnessing, even when there's an abundance of evidence to the contrary. You're like, "Okay." 39,000 other species are not doing this, and yet we're supposed to hold ourselves and a few other animals to this standard that feels so unnatural. There's animals giving us so many examples of ways to exist outside of that structure.
Jase: You mentioned penguins briefly, and that's one of the ones that I wanted to bring up that I thought was so interesting because when that Morgan Freeman Penguins documentary thing came out several years ago.
Owen: March of the Penguins.
Jase: That's the one. Thank you. The monogamy of them and how closely they bond while they're coupling up was so emphasized and so romanticized in that. One is, like you mentioned, that pairing up just happens for that mating season. Sometimes the next year, they'll pair up with that same person again, but often they don't.
It's more of like a serial monogamy rather than this kind of romantic, lifelong monogamy that I think the producers of that documentary projected onto those animals, and then make us feel like, "Oh, we should hold penguins up on a pedestal as this example of beautiful monogamy in nature."
Owen: Focus on the family loved this movie so much. They were like, "This is the greatest triumph since the Passion of Christ." I was like, "That movie was such a tool for the perpetuation of this myth, that the only way that we should care about animals is if they are practicing family values in some way."
I re-watched it recently on the plane to New York, and was just like, "Oh my goodness. This is such a small fraction of the reality, and also it's painful how much is being projected on these animals, forcing them into a narrative that just doesn't hold how exceptional they are."
Jase: The thing I found so fascinating was, I had heard that before years ago about them actually being more like serial monogamist. Then more recently when I was looking into this before this episode, I learned that from doing DNA studies of the penguin babies, that even amongst those super closely bonded pairs, that a good portion of those babies are not genetically related to the father even. Even within that, there's not monogamy even within one mating season that's supposedly where they're so tight that they still want sex with others.
Owen: There truly is not. It's like they have an agreement of a certain amount of pair bonding and co-parenting. A co-parenting agreement. If we wanted to have some terms, I would say they have a co-parenting agreement, but there's a lot of egg switching. The documentary does a good job of showing the travails that they're up against. Many perish, and so there's so much switching of the family units, but also there's a lot of male-male and female-female bonding happening, and sex and pair bonding.
A high frequency of these couples taking over or adopting eggs that have been abandoned, or even just stealing them and raising them to fledge with high frequency, which a lot of birds will do, especially swans recently whooping cranes, which are nearly extinct, and then they're like, "Oh, also there's gay ones among the flock." It's not the product of overpopulation, but yes.
Dedeker: Hold on, aren't swans also often held up as a paragon of birds that mate for life. Is that true or not?
Owen: They are.
Emily: I always feel like I have to question every animal claim.
Owen: It's so true. Some owls have been held up, and recently, technology has allowed scientists to listen to their night calls and interpret them and realize that they have--
Jase: They're saying, "Hey, you up?"
Owen: Yes, and so they will send each other, "WYD, are you up right now?" They're realizing-
Jase: Hilarious.
Owen: -this whole time they're thinking that they're nesting in these specific pair bonds, and they're actually switching. They're all swingers at night, and they know because they call out each other's names and then will go over, and it's like--
Jase: Amazing.
Owen: Even the wives, old owls.
Jase: Yes, the swans, Dedeker was one. I looked up as well, and they did that DNA testing on their signets, I guess is what baby swans are called. 20% are not from the pair of their offspring.
Dedeker: Maybe similar to penguins, where they create a little co-parenting agreement, but then they swing at night and come back before the kids are up in the morning.
Owen: One thing that I learned in the making of this podcast is that specifically about March of the Penguins and the How to Lead Penguins, is that their sexual diversity and homosexuality was documented back in 1910 by George Murray Levick, a famed Antarctic explorer who did most of the foundational work on penguin behavior that is continually drawed upon, built on. He observed sexual solicitation, lots of homosexuality, what he called hooligan cocks, lots of masturbation.
Emily: Hooligan cock.
Jase: Hooligan cock is also the name of my band.
Dedeker: Yes, we got a staff around Hooligan.
Owen: Exactly. Hooligan cocks. He was so disturbed by this that everything outside of the reprocentric family unit narrative he wrote in secret code and did not publish. It remained unpublished until 12 years after the March of the Penguins.
Emily: He still knew I need to document this.
Owen: He knew and he documented, but he was just like, "I cannot reconcile this. I can't go back to the academy, to my peers, what will they think? They'll think I'm perverse. They'll think I'm a homosexual," which is something that so many scientists have been up against, even recently, within the past few decades, not knowing if their institution will support them, not knowing if it will change the way that their science is looked at.
We've spoken to scientists who observed non monogamy and homosexuality among Japanese macaques, for example, and she was laughed out of the academy and would not go on the record and really, really exists with a high amount of paranoia and was like, "Please don't do this." It exists and it is closeted. The penguins are such an example of that.
At the same time, we have Roy and Silo at the Central Park Zoo, the famous gay penguins. When you do like a voice of the people, "What's a gay animal? They're like penguins. I don't know penguins." That's like a cultural touchpoint, gay penguins. It's because of this idea of respectability politics. They're like, "Okay. We can wrap our head around the idea of penguins being gay, because we already have this sort of false belief that they're monogamous, that they're going to reflect our values." We'll let that one go.
Emily: We're going to make sure that they just want marriage rights.
Owen: They want marriage rights. Exactly. Roy and Silo were claimed by both the Christian right and also the marriage equality movement, which was really interesting. It's like they're just bisexual penguins at the zoo, along with so many other animals here.
Emily: Mind blowing.
Jase: Wow, amazing. I want to move us along to the next animal that you brought for us, which is bonobos. How do you say it?
Owen: Bonobos.
Emily: Bonobos.
Dedeker: Bonobos have already done some good PR in the non-monogamous community because--
Emily: Like Sexy Don.
Dedeker: Yes. Sexy Don. All the research and I think that that work has disseminated enough into the non-monogamous community people like, "Wow, cool, bonobos, yay."
Owen: I'm curious. What comes to mind when you think of the bonobos and their proclivities.
Dedeker: Sex all the time, is the first thing that comes to mind for me. Sex as social currency and sex as social bonding and highly bisexual, and not just also sex involving genitals, but my understanding is also like French kissing and looking into each other's eyes, and again, to project a little bit of these things that we tend to consider a little bit more like courtship or like romance. Those are some of the behaviors that have been seen in bonobos.
Jase: Another one I remember was that when two tribes of bonobos would meet each other, that kind of the way they would establish a non-aggression between them was to have sex with people from the other tribe, I guess, something like that. That's what I remember.
Owen: I think that is one of the most fascinating things about bonobos, who are our like closest mammalian relatives, along with chimpanzees, they're great apes, not monkeys, but that they use sex for reconciliation and for conflict resolution, and it's like, why not? Why not do it? Why not use it as repair and de-escalation and instead of becoming heightened and active and moving into a place of aggression or fleeing, why not lean into the pleasures that we can give to each other satisfy those things?
Bonobos are so fascinating. The thing that I wanted to bring up is this particular characteristic of their behavior that has been observed, both in captivity and in the wild and in sort of orchestrated research, is that when they're presented with food, or come across an amount of food, often when it's not enough, when it's a limited resource, the presumption is that they will fall into some alpha dominance hierarchy.
There will be aggression. They'll become agitated because of that scarcity, and then only the ones who have saddled up next to the king male or whatever will get the food. That's not the case at all. What they do is they play. They start the kissing. Yes, they tongue kiss. They kiss, they play. The little ones play. They have sex, all kinds of sex. Bonobo sex, to human standards, is incredibly fast. It's like 13 seconds. In a short amount of time--
Dedeker: You've got a lot of people to have sex with, you got to get through it.
Owen: Exactly. They've made it efficient. They've made it efficient. They're not just like, "I have to satisfy my one partner." They're like, "All of you, we could all have sex. What if we all had sex right now?" Then that's going to hormonally change the way that they are feeling. It's going to foster the bonds and the connections that they have. Then suddenly they're not coming from a place of scarcity.
They're capable of sharing food based on who's hungry, not based on who wants it or feels beholden to it, which is such a fascinating example of being able to share, to meet needs of, I don't know, mutual aid. Like how do I foster the relationships that I have so that I feel like I don't need to make competitive choices in the world. Because I feel really grounded in myself and in my community and in my partners and in these relationships, and I'm not just like out here, unbalanced and horny and fighting people at the grocery store.
Jase: It's making me wonder if at business board meetings, where we're discussing something really contentious, we're trying to figure out how these two companies could work together if we all had sex first, if we might be able to approach it with more generosity.
Owen: How humbling. Generosity. Yes, that post orgasm clarity.
Dedeker: Exactly.
Jase: Let's approach conflict from a place of bliss, where it's like, "I suddenly I feel like I'm not mad anymore." Like, what was I mad about?
Emily: We just have so much to learn from animals and all of these things that you're talking about. I mean, absolutely in terms of relationships and what we talk about on the show, just being able to sit back and observe or research animals in this way can teach us a lot about ourselves.
Owen: A thing that I think I've mentioned to you or wrote about that I think a lot about is the ways that we as humans have opportunity to follow libido into surprising and new relationships outside of our social sphere. I think about dating apps, hookup apps, bars, social places, sex parties, play parties. All of a sudden, you can develop kinship with people that you wouldn't necessarily if your prerogative was finding your lifelong soulmate partner and that was going to be the only person you had sex with, or if you were limited to only the people within a certain rank, education, socio socioeconomic, language, cultural background, racial background, these things.
I think animals really show that they disrupt that. They're like, "Oh, who's around, and who wants to have sex?" That is really liberating. That's really freeing and can lead to a lot of revelations about what your needs are, what your wants are, what your desires are, what your holdbacks are, what your prejudices are when you just start to be like, "What if sex was this way of getting to know other people? What if I was really open?"
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If that's interesting to you, go check that out and help support us in doing this show every week and making it available worldwide for free. Or, of course, take a moment, check out our sponsors. If any do seem interesting to you, use our promo codes and our links in the description for discounts on those. By visiting those and using our codes, you're also directly helping to support this show and keep this going. Thank you so much for that.
Dedeker: That's so interesting to bring it back to bonobos because I know one thing I always think about is, yes, like, Jase, you're talking about if two troops will encounter each other and there's a little bit of that tension of the unknown and the fact that they might choose to have sex with each other, for me, makes me think about, I don't know, the thrill of what we perceive to be other and exotic and new, right?
It feels like that tracks with what you're saying, Owen, about using libido as this pathway that helps us step outside of the comfort zone sometimes. Ideally, that's safe for everybody, safe and consensually for everybody involved, right? That, yes, this pathway that helps to bring down those particular barriers. It's a really interesting way of framing it. While, as we've been talking about a particularly monogamy and non-monogamy, I know for myself whenever I think about animal studies and research, what always comes to my mind is, yes, bonobos, they're the horny ones, they're the non-monogamous ones.
Then always on the flip side, what comes up in my brain is prairie voles. That they're one of those five that we've pointed to to be like, look, there they are. They're the monogamous ones. They're the ones who model an ideal relationship structure for us as human beings. What can you tell us about prairie voles who allegedly sit on this opposite end of the spectrum?
Owen: I have to admit that I know very little about prairie voles, actually. I may need to have Jase tell me a little bit about prairie voles.
Dedeker: Oh, does Jase know more about prairie voles in this situation?
Owen: Do you know?
Jase: I was researching this before this episode to try to have stuff, because my touch point with voles in general is that--
Dedeker: I can't wait to hear about your vole background.
Emily: I'm trying to even think what this animal looks like and where they exist in the world.
Dedeker: A little cute meadow prairie.
Jase: Cute little rodents. Yes, little prairie rodents.
Owen: Rodent, yes.
Dedeker: They're cute. They look like a little hamster.
Emily: Is it like a prairie dog?
Jase: They're less long. They're a little more mouse hamster size.
Dedeker: It looks a lot like a hamster from what I can see. Really cute, though.
Jase: The reason why I know anything at all about voles is that with the whole thing about a lot of animals not being monogamous, I remember that prairie voles are pointed out as this example of these beautiful monogamous living in community, pair bonding. They demonstrate anxiety when they're apart from their bonded partner. They really seem very attached to each other.
Then I also learned about these studies making a contrast between prairie voles, which exhibit this social monogamy, and then in contrast to meadow voles, which I guess are different from prairie voles, but meadow voles are more aggressive with each other and they don't pair bond. They're just much more promiscuous. Then in studying the two, they found that the monogamous ones had higher levels of oxytocin and vasopressin, those neurotransmitters in their brain than the meadow voles.
The reason why this stood out to me was, one, it's interesting, but also that it was used as this potential argument to say if you, the human, don't feel monogamous, it might just be a hormonal imbalance, or it might be that you don't have enough of these neurotransmitters, or maybe that you could be born more inclined toward monogamy or not based on how much your brain produces these chemicals.
Emily: More inclined to be a happy monogamous vole versus an aggressive, cranky, non-monogamous meadow vole. Which they also look identical from Google image search.
Owen: Those are the two options. At a certain point, we all have to do a mole reveal party and be like, "Which mole are you?”
Jase: “Which vole are you?" Yes. Then the thing that I thought was interesting is, so in preparation for this episode, I said, "Okay, I'll look into voles a little more." I found out that the prairie voles do exhibit these lifelong pair-bonding traits, specifically with the partner that they mate with and that they live with. Although they did find sometimes they might live together and never have offspring together, but still form a really close bond, which I also thought was nice and goes against that whole idea that it's only about procreation for animals.
Dedeker: That's nice.
Jase: Then they exhibit anxiety when they're apart, and that when given a choice, they'll still tend to prefer their partner that they're familiar with as opposed to someone new. All that, yes. Again, doing genetic studies of their offspring, 23% to 56% of litters are sired by other partners. It's like, so even in these very arguably socially lifelong monogamous ones, 25% to 56% of the offspring is not from that couple.
Dedeker: Wow.
Jase: Even within the ones we hold up as this paragon of, oh, they've got the right amount of oxytocin and vasopressin to be monogamous, they also don't really do it.
Owen: Yes, my first thought was like, "Good for them." It's like there isn't the sweeping solution for any of us, especially for voles, and so good for them. Then also it's like the way that scientists has happened over time, the track record, is that we usually realize there's a lot more going on in those burrows than we know.
We're only ever seeing a small portion of their social structure, of their behavior. There's usually so much more. I think it's beautiful that they pair bond. Dolphins do this also. I think because they love these strange polyadic relationships, they love group sex, they have lots of sex, the fact that they will also form and maintain lifelong partnerships is really beautiful. I think that that's really moving. I think that nature gives us the ways that this can happen alongside and with each other.
There's integrated hybrid relationships that are happening, and it's not all or nothing. It's not meadow or prairie. It's both. Also, fun fact about the dolphins. We cover a certain gay dolphin pair, and they've been together their whole lives. They love each other. I'm just going to say it. They love each other. They do participate in gangbangs. It's just part of gay dolphin culture.
What I find to be really touching the thing is that when one of them is the bottom, the sub of the gangbang, the other one doesn't participate, chooses to not, and actually performs aftercare, and will swim around with it, we'll caress it, will feed it afterwards, and then we'll go and do a gang bang elsewhere, or they'll participate together, which is just like, "This is what I want. This is beautiful." Sometimes they'll break up, and then they'll be in other relationships, but then come back together a year later.
It's just like, you're like, right. It's all about what is working for the individual animal. I think that's also something we think about, like species, and we're like, "You must be all of this. You must be exemplary of your entire species." It's not true for humans. It's not true for any animal. I hope that every creature is getting what they need and getting those good hormones.
Emily: It doesn't really sound, even these like pair-bonded animals are still exhibiting signs of being monogamish because they're going off and having gangbangs with multiple people as well. Is there any animal out there? I’m assuming there must be that met at high school and then they got married and they lived together until they died. Does that exist? Does it actually ever exist?
Dedeker: Actual, lifelong monogamy?
Emily: Yes, like what people wish we did or whatever. What people wish most, I guess, humans did.
Owen: There definitely are creatures that do that. There are a lot of birds that will be like very monogamous, but again it's not the whole species. It's not an imperative of the species. It'll just be these two birds and even the frequency of that will be very low. Within many species, there will be some couples that are just-- some creatures don't live very long and so they don't have a lot of opportunity.
It's just like very short. There are creatures particularly in the ocean where there's so few of them and they're so far apart that they've developed all kinds of ways of having multiple, all different types of genitals, so that just whomever they come across, they're going to be like, "We're bonded, we're having sex, we're reproducing, just whatever, because I don't know if I'll ever run into another one."
Dedeker: I know we can't extrapolate this to every single animal that is practicing some form of monogamy. I have heard that there's like a rough trend that in those animals that are maybe not as social or maybe less likely to live in groups or less likely to live close to other members of their species that may preference monogamy, because again, there's just less opportunity.
Owen: Yes, and it’s about safety.
Dedeker: If I'm only going to meet one other one in my lifetime, then yes, we're functionally going to be monogamous. Maybe if it's dangerous for me to come into contact with other members of my species that then it would make sense.
Owen: I think it's good to think about what are the other advantages of being in a relationship. There are so many things you're resource sharing, a sense of safety. You only make one nest and you both stay in it. There are reasons why it's practiced that are beyond just being like, we are sexually inclined to only receive pleasure from one. There's, especially with more isolated creatures. It's true a lot of the higher frequencies of homosexuality do come from ungulates and herd animals. Ones that already have very complex social structures. Bighorn sheep have a lot of sex but they also live primarily in sex-segregated herds.
Dedeker: That's also in the name, because they would have a lot of horn.
Owen: Yes. The pronghorn will do conga line mounting where they'll all like, just like mount each other like centipede style and you're like, "This is amazing."
Emily: We've talked a lot about male sex, but I want to talk about female sex within the animal queendom. Did you want to talk a little bit about female elephants?
Owen: Yes. I would love to talk about elephants. I should also say bonobos, their genitals, female genitals have developed specifically for lesbian sex. They have adapted because of the prevalence of their sapphic pleasures. They do a thing called genital-genital rubbing or GG rubbing, that's the scientific term in which one partner will be on all fours and the other will dangle wrap the legs and arms around and dangle. They thrust their clitoris at a rate of two thrusts per second.
Emily: Whoa. It’s fast.
Owen: Their external genitals have developed specifically in the pursuit of that pleasure so they can do that.
Emily: They’re like bonobo vibrators.
Owen: Yes, absolutely. Great apes make so many forms of vibrators and have so much sex, which is just incredible.
Dedeker: There was this really great docuseries about the orangutan school in Borneo where they're rehabilitating orphaned orangutans basically and teaching them how to be orangutans before they're released into the wild. They got footage of one of their tween orangutans figuring out how to use a garden hose in a particular way. All the trainers there were cracking up.
Owen: We all remember our first time in a hot tub. We remember our first time at discovering the hot tub chat.
Dedeker: Exactly. Where she was like sneaking out of class to go back to where the hose was.
Jase: And turn it on and have a good time.
Dedeker: to turn it on. It was just fascinating.
Owen: She's not thinking this is going to make a baby. She's just, my body is having experience. There is wonder. I'm feeling exuberant. Elephants. Anyway, what were you talking about? Elephants. Elephants like bonobos are matriarchal in their societies and the converse of the giraffes, the herds of elephants will be almost exclusively female. The males once they reach maturation will go off and live a solitary life and there'll be herds of up to a hundred female elephants living together. When reproduction happens, they have a very long gestation period, which is also comparable to giraffes, which is why so few have reprocentric sex, because it's just like it's taxing. There needs to be a recuperation period.
The sex is on their terms. They're like, "You man, you're coming in here. We'll pick if we want to have sex with you." Because they have this lesbian separatist society that really sustains them, that allows them a lot of body autonomy, that allows them a lot of independence, and allows them copious amounts of sexual gratification. Female elephants will masturbate. They have sex with each other. They also have really amazing co-parenting dynamics because they will have all of these babies and then all around the same time. They can wet nurse for each other and they'll develop caretaking pods that will take care of the calves while other female elephants will go out exploring, will go roaming for days, will be having sex.
They form intimate lifelong pair bonds within that are female-female and support each other. I think it's like a beautiful example of family dynamics. I think one of the things that we are looking at in the podcast Field Guide to Gay Animals is not just the sex. We think that there's so many ways that being in relationship can be queer. We think co-parenting, caretaking, these are queer relationships as well. Reimagining the family structure, reimagining what a unit can be like, and reimagining what body autonomy is like. We’re like, that is profound and that is important.
Elephants are really inspiring in that. They have a great sense of humor. They mourn their dead. They remember things. My co-host Laine Kaplan-Levinson very much identifies as an elephant. It's like, "These are my people. This is the queer lifestyle I want. They move around, they live in multiple places." They seem to have it figured out in a really, really beautiful way.
Dedeker: There's something that I want to address, something that's in the back of my mind specifically having to do with non-monogamy. Because I think that what I've seen play out in the community sometimes is there can be a little bit of a dark side to this in the sense that sometimes people can go this opposite extreme point to all these examples and say, "Look, human beings were never meant to be monogamous." Therefore, monogamy itself is toxic and it's unnatural. Sometimes this can be used as a little bit of a bludgeon against people who are choosing monogamy. Be like, "No, no, no, it's so natural, so go to this orgy. It's so natural, we should be polyamorous."
I really appreciated what you said earlier about how hopefully we're able to look at behaviors through the lens of not just what is good for the species but also what is good for that individual animal in that particular context. That's a really wonderful way of framing it because I think that makes sense for this debate as well. That even if people can argue till they're blue in the face that like, yes, humans are probably never meant to be monogamous. There's still going to be individuals where that context is what's best for them. That ultimately leads to what's best for our species as well.
The more of us that are able to feel happy and safe and cared for and having our emotional needs met and physical needs met, whether that's through monogamy or non-monogamy is also good for us as a species. That wasn't really a question. That was a little bit more of my soapbox moment where I wanted to tie this all in together.
Owen: Thank you so much. I think it's so important to think about animals on the individual level, because animals go through trauma. They experience things and we are the product of our experiences, and that's going to influence how we want to be in relationship. That will change throughout the course of our lives. What feels appropriate now, what feels rewarding now may be different later.
That happens for animals as well, especially when we're thinking about animals within the spectrum of captivity. An animal that has been in a zoo or an animal that has been on a farm or an animal that has been injured or lived with resource scarcity. The world is changing.
They're going to have different needs. How they feel a sense of safety, the way they connect to each other will change on an individual basis.
It's important to overemphasize all of the diverse ways that animal relationships happen because we're up against a deluge on the other end. There's been an overemphasis of things like monogamy and heteronormativity and competition as being the end-all, be-all.
It's important to amplify these other examples, but not forget that those other things do occur. When we have both equally balanced and weighted, that's actually, I think, where we're getting to a place of health, joy, liberation. That's actually where we're creating a healthy community when we have both of those things, we're free to explore. Science has spent so long trying to define why gay sex happens as an aberration in animal queendom that they've rarely spent any time as to why heterosexual sex would happen or why monogamy would happen. It's just not even explored. It's just like, "That's just the norm."
We cannot wrap our heads around any of these other things. You're like, "There's countless reasons why any creature would choose to reproduce or would choose to be in a relationship or a pair bond." We know very little about it because we take it as the norm, as the standard, as the de facto, and then don't look at it for the beautiful thing that it is and can be when it's the right tool.
Emily: This has been so great. So much fun. Oh, my gosh. I've loved every minute of this.
Owen: Me too.
Emily: Before you go, can you just talk to us about your podcast, what it is, why you and your cohost Laine decided to create it, what inspired you besides all of the stuff you just talked about with us that was clearly very inspiring?
Owen: A Field Guide to Gay Animals, we're releasing our pilot five-episode season. It'll come out in June through July. Our investigation was really inspired by a particular book, actually. It's called Biological Exuberance. It was published in 1999. The author, Bruce Bagemihl, did an exhaustive job combing through centuries of research papers and looking at every instance where some form of queer behavior, whether it's same-sex mounting, pair bonding, parenting, courtship behavior was referenced, even if it was incredibly marginal, and brought it all together in this 750-page book.
He did an incredible job at countering the homophobia of the fields of mammology and zoology in doing this and really lit a torch for this. I was inspired by this book. I was given this book over a decade ago. My partner and I at the time were given this book and we had a bunch of chickens. We were like, "They're all lesbians because we have a no rooster policy here."
Someone was like, "You got to read this book because you might be right." I've been living under the specter of this book for a long time, and then was like, "How do I explore this? What is the legacy of this book? Do people know about it?" It happened in this little vacuum and then failed to do much, but it's so radical and so profound. He proposes a whole theory that he calls the theory of biological exuberance that is about more than just reproduction. It's just so beautiful.
Part of the podcast was looking into what is that legacy? Who are all of the people who are working in siloed fields to bring gay animals into public consciousness and to have these complex conversations about relationship dynamics? Have they been influenced by this book? What is happening now? What is happening now in relationship to what has happened before?
That's part of our journey is looking at this book, its influence, and what is like the current ecosystem of individuals, whether they be artists, scholars, zoologists, behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, who are interested in this now and who are willing to talk about this now? What does it mean for us to all find some familiar ground, some platform to feel exuberant about it?
Jase: Amazing. Thank you again so much for joining us today.
Owen: Thank you so much for having me. I learned so much, actually.
Dedeker: So did we. My goodness.
Jase: So did we. Learning all around.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: I hope our listeners did as well.
Owen: I hope you do too. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for having me here. Please don't be strangers. Let's talk about animals, human animals included, whenever.