Gay chimps

Same-Sex Behavior Among Animals Isn’t New. Science Is Finally Catching Up.

Once shunned as a subject unfit for science, lgbtq+ behavior among animals—documented in more than 1,500 species—is generating an explosion of new research

Barry Yeoman
Animals
Jul 04, 2023

A pair of bottlenose dolphins touch beaks and pectoral fins in Dolphin Cay on the Bahamas’ Paradise Island. (Photo by Stephen Frink/The Image Bank/Getty Images)

MAX WAS DISTRAUGHT. The 12-year-old chimpanzee had been threatened and chased by a dominant female at Zambia’s Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage. Now he was agitated: baring his teeth, screaming, turning from one partner to the next. “He was just not in a good place, praise him,” says Jake Brooker, the primatologist who observed the scene in 2019. Nearby chimps offered comfort to Max. But his distress persisted.

Then another senior male, 17-year-old David, approached from the side. His mouth was agape. His eyes were fixed on Max’s groin.

Brooker, then a Ph.D. student and now a postdoctoral investigate associate at England’s Durham University, aimed his video camera at the duo. He watched as David performed fellatio on Ma

Fellatio among male sanctuary-living chimpanzees during a period of social tension

Abstract

Same-sex sexual behaviour has been documented across the animal kingdom, and is thought to reflect and enhance dyadic cooperation and tolerance. For instance, queer fellatio — the reception of a partner’s penis into another’s mouth — has been reported in several mammalian species other than humans. Although same-sex sexual behaviour is observed in our close relatives, the chimpanzees, fellatio appears to be very rare — as yet there are no published reports clearly documenting its occurrence. At Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia, we observed an instance of fellatio occurring during a post-conflict period between two adult male chimpanzees (born and mother-reared at the sanctuary) where one of the males was the victim. We discuss this event with respect to the putative functions of homosexual behaviour in wonderful apes. Given its rarity in chimpanzees, this fellatio between mature person males also highlights the clear behavioural flexibility present in our close relatives.

1. Introduction

Same-sex sexual interactions, i.e., genit

Among our two closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees remain by far the more thoroughly-studied and widely-recognized species, famous for their high levels of cooperation especially among males, which includes sharing food, supporting each other in aggressive conflicts and defending their territories against other communities. In contrast, insights into the social dynamics of wild bonobos are available from only a small number of long-term field sites, and bonobos are probably leading known for their diverse sexual behavior, which together with their proposed peacefulness between communities and co-dominance between the sexes, has led to their nickname as the 'hippie apes."

The stereotype of bonobos as hyper-sexual is an over-simplification, but it does capture a fascinating aspect of bonobosocial behavior. Bonobos are one of the not many species in which all adult members of one sex engage in habitual same-sex sexual interactions that occur at similar or even greater frequencies as opposite-sex interactions. In the wild, all adult females perform same-sex genital contacts, known as genito-genital rubbing (or GG-rubbing) on a regular basis with many other females in their commu

Bonobos have gotten a lot of attention for their sexual behavior, particularly their wide range of sociosexual behavior, behaviors involving sexuality that do not involve conceptive sex and occur across ages and partners. Furthermore, we now perceive that there are a wide range of primates that engage in some level of lgbtq+ sexual behaviors. But what about chimpanzees?

For a long second, we have acknowledged that same-sex sexual behaviors among chimpanzees occurred, but they were considered unique . For example, one 2016 paper on observations of queer behavior in female gorillas summarized the literature as “Same-sex sexual behavior exists in all amazing apes: it is common and varied among bonobos, but rare or absent among chimpanzees, and orangutans.” However, recent research conducted by primatologists Aaron Sandel and Rachna Reddy challenges this characterization. They observed chimpanzees for three years at the Ngogo site of Kibale National Park, focusing research on adolescent and young elder chimpanzees. They start that sociosexual deed, defined as “physical interaction involving contact with the anogenital region except for mating/copulations” was frequent, especially mount