Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality | 
pickInformative and witty, this science book for teens explores the wonderful variety of sexual behaviours in the animal kingdom. Chapters are illustrated with charming cartoons by Jules Zuckerberg, and interspersed with interviews with field researchers, many of whom are queer. There are lots of suggestions for further reading too. #YA #LGBTQ
March of the Penguins told the story of loving heterosexual penguin couples who braved the frigid Antarctic winter to raise their chicks. Conservative commentators praised the penguins as pinnacles of traditional family values upholding the nuclear family. The few people who were aware of the rampant bisexuality in the penguin world wrote opposing opinion pieces, arguing that many of those bird couples might just as easily have been same-sex.
Tellingly, for two of the most prominent books on queer animal behaviour, Biological Exuberance (Bagemihl) and Homosexual Behaviour in Animals (Sommer & Vasey), the authors‘ methodology was to approach researchers who had preexisting study sites and data sets on animals and ask them if they had observed same-sex behaviours in their study animals that they hadn‘t published. The answers were resoundingly “yes.”
I love that the diversity of human sexuality places us within the natural world, rather than settling us apart from it. Queerness is not ours alone. We don‘t live existences isolated from the ways of bonobos and penguins and, yes, fruit flies. What we experience is experienced by them too. It‘s humbling and freeing to know that humans aren‘t the only creatures with complicated sexual feelings. We‘re exceptional in some ways, but not all ways.
How simple and how freeing—and how important—that the most compelling reason for why female macaques engage in sex with one another is also the simplest: pleasure.
If I get reincarnated, I want to be a Japanese macaque. […] If you want to have a really fun afternoon, look up videos of “snow monkeys in hot baths” online.
After all, traditions are just peer pressure from dead people
indie bookstore haul!
