It’s pride month, friends! One of my dreams for this Substack was to share Made Up Publications, i.e. books that do not (yet) exist in the world but that I would like to make. And so I present, The Big Gay Book of Nature.
I made this series last year to commemorate Queer Pride and poke fun at the notion that straight heteronormativity is the natural ideal. It includes real life stories of animal couples, mating behaviour and just straight up kinky antics.
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Tilly and Mae Kham Puan, two lesbian elephants from Thailand who enjoy going on long walks, river bathing, and loving on each other far away from prying eyes. Neither of them wants to engage with bull elephants at all, but while Tilly needs no one apart from Mae in this world, Mae is a social butterfly who loves to flirt with other matriarchs.
These beautiful sheep, frequently used to symbolise traditional masculinity (sports team mascots, battering rams etc.) perform heterosexual mating for only three days of the year, when ewes are in the mood for love. For the rest of their seasons, Bighorns couple up with each other. Some gentle Bighorns, who do not wish to copulate at all, spend their time grazing with the ewes, laughing no doubt at strict and boring gender norms
Scientists in the early 2000s were perplexed at the behaviour of female Japanese Macaques, who seemed to lose interest when it came to getting it on with male monkeys. The only thing that got them going, as it were, was mounting other female monkeys, something they would do thousands of times during mating season. They (the scientists, not the macaques) then observed young male monkeys mounting each other as part of "play", and concluded that when given a choice between responsibility and sex, Macaques really will always choose pleasure.
Ugandan kobs are a species of antelope among which the females are known to enjoy sexually pleasuring each other in myriad loving and kinky ways. Obviously, these kobs are adorbs — but more importantly, they remind us that queerness isn't all pride and rainbows, DESPITE the fact that nature is queer, and queer is natural. Last year, Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni signed one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ laws in the world into action, which includes the death penalty for "aggressive homosexuality". This law affects humans, not kobs, but is premised on the same tired trope that queerness is "unnatural" and "against the natural order"
The male garter snake is a fella so comfortable with their sexuality that they will frequently mimic female snake pheromones to attract and distract other male garter snakes for a good romp-about.After a period of hibernation, garter snakes have been known to gather in pits for a massive orgy that can last for weeks: male snakes will continue the orgy long after the female has left.
Roy and Silo were two male penguins at the Brooklyn zoo in 1998, who successfully incubated a rock and then a dummy egg. In 1998 people didn't really want to admit that a whole lot of folks and penguins were gay, but luckily for Roy and Silo, zookeepers recognized that these two crazy birds were family to one another, and decided to give them a real, fertilized egg to look after. Roy and Silo hatched a baby, a female penguin named Tango, who then grew up to form a partnership with another female penguin named Tanuzi 💕 since then, zoos across the world have found that penguins are in fact, Hella gay 🌈
The Gynandromorph Cardinal has only been photographed a handful of times in human history. This rare bird's plumage is divided exactly down the center, split into crimson and grey, to let other birds know that they are BOTH male and female. If they wanted, these cardinals could probably fertilize their own eggs.
Single moms have a special place in my heart (because I was raised by one), so I couldn't help falling in love with the story of this crocodile from Costa Rica who went and made babies all by herself without any male crocs involved. Parthenogenesis is rare but it does exist in animals, and the crocodile from Costa Rica (let's call her Mama C) is the first documented instance on record of a croc reproducing solo.
This year, we’ve seen queerness weaponised again and again to justify the unending horrors in Palestine.
Like this.
And this.
We do not need a thesis on queerness to explain to us that flattening entire cities, destroying populations, and starving children is wrong. We know that queer cops, queer soldiers, queer politicians exist and that does not necessarily make the world any safer for queer folk. We know rainbow-coloured accessories and pink-washed-up-corporate merch does not make anyone a queer ally. Practising radical love and acceptance does.
This week I wrote and edited a newsletter about disinformation for the good people at Coda Story, you can read that here.
I will be moderating panels (and hopefully, conducting a workshop — more on that soon) at Zeg, the Tbilisi Storytelling Festival this month. (They have an incredible line-up of speakers which you can check out here.)
A (long and) incredible read on the history of Vogue — apart from its obviously enthralling subject matter, I love this piece because I miss feature writing like this, in which words feel alive and leap off the page. Sample this lede:
"The Christopher Street Pier is lit by streetlights as gangs of youths gather around two voguers on the Hudson River waterfront. Streetwear, tank tops, gold chains, cologne, bubble gum. It’s a sticky summer night and the air is charged with electricity. A third dancer with a head full of curls enters the scene. It’s Willi Ninja, mother of the House of Ninja. His hands teach a geometry lesson against the blackboard of the inner-city night sky. They tell a story in a lush, intricate language punctuated by snaps of the wrist, sharp lines, right angles. Each movement is an exuberance.”
On that note, I hope your week is filled with pride, rage, love and exuberance.
Thanks for reading Now and Zen! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
