It’s at times like these that I want to remind us that we are all just flesh sacks propelled forward by dreams and chemicals.
In light of the current shit show that is pervading our queer spaces and trying to take away our joy, a beacon of light shone through this week by the name of Bi-Curious George. Between seeing the ‘Queer Planet‘ drag show today, and listening to a lecture by the exceptional Lucy Cooke a few weeks back that included loads of queerness and binary-breaking from the animal kingdom, I couldn’t help but share and celebrate these incredible sources of information with you all.
I learned so much from Cooke’s lecture “Bitch: On the Female of the Species“; hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program, this lecture taught me so much about the ways that birds, animals and invertebrates don’t fit within the hetero-normative and restrictive definitions that a chaste and verily ashamed Victorian society imposed on them. For example, naked mole rats who only breed with one ‘queen’ female and the rest go unnoticed until one day that queen slows and becomes weak and another takes her place to become the one fertile woman…
Fascinating stuff. Queerness is everywhere in the animal kingdom! What about the (now well-known) examples of life-pairing among albatross partners and penguin couples? Or matriarchal monkeys who have sex with one another for the purposes of emotional bonding? Or the innumerable creatures who switch genders and sexes, have both sets of genitals… or neither! Funnily enough, I learned about the hermaphroditic nature of snails, who penetrate each other with hormones to make the other into another gender, from a book I read as a teenager called ‘How animals have sex‘. It was an eye-opening book, unabashedly accepting of all the weird realities of sex within the animal kingdom, from these ‘snail love-darts’ to dolphin orgies, and it blazed the trail for my tiny baby-queer brain to follow.
It just so happens that today, some of these animalistic displays of queerness were dramatised thoroughly in a beautiful display of costume and dance, by the excellent aforementioned Bi-Curious George. I don’t know how it’s taken me this long to see their Queer Planet tour but I’m so glad that I did. As I said, it was a spark of queer delight among the monstrous pit that the UK is fast becoming due to its leadership this week.
But if there’s one thing these talks have really shown me, it’s that the animal kingdom, in all its queerness and beauty, cannot be put into neat little boxes, and neither can we. And what are we if not animals who dreamt one day about being something more?
Further reading
Cooke, L. (2022). Bitch. Basic Books.
(I swear I am not making this reference up)
Defoe, G. (2005). How Animals Have Sex. Orion.
Follow Bi-Curious George on Instagram: @bi.curious.george_drag
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