Introducing A Field Guide to Gay Animals

June 15, 2024·43 min·3 clips

The oldest living land animal, a 192-year-old tortoise named Jonathan, turned out to be mating with another male all along.

First comes the network handoff. After an A-Cast nod to Heaven Bent, the Canada Land Network brings in A Field Guide to Gay Animals, a show about queerness in the natural world. The setup is simple: homosexuality has been documented in over 1,500 species and counting, so why do people keep arguing it away, brushing it off, or forgetting it? Owen Ever and Lane Cavill keep the tone dry and loose. The jokes land gently, even when the scholarship sounds nervous or ridiculous. Beetles cause the first commotion. A paper on male beetles turns into something less tidy than a specimen case: scholars trying to describe what they were seeing without quite knowing what to do with it. History sneaks in from the side. By 1900, Oscar Wilde has been jailed, gay animals are still being gay animals, and scholarly men are, apparently, losing their hats. Then Jonathan arrives. The world's oldest living land creature gets the softest bit of tape: waking, wandering, smelling pears and windfalls, grazing, sunbathing, finding shade, and tucking himself in for the night. The preview slows down there, happily. For a minute, it would rather hang around Jonathan's orchard routine than rush back to the big story. That is the good stuff. The animals are not only stand-ins for human arguments. Their habits do some of the talking. The ending opens the door to future episodes: a 30-year relationship between two dolphins, a pig farm where sexuality is allowed to flourish, elephant sex, and more animal-world strangeness. The mood stays exuberant, but the best moments let the comedy rub against old embarrassment until the denial starts to sound pretty small.

As heard by us

A cheerful, history-tinged introduction to a queer-animals podcast that treats its premise with real curiosity.

The episode frames A Field Guide to Gay Animals as an exuberant take on queerness in the natural world, and it gives that premise enough seriousness to make the oddness feel welcoming.

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Press play for an exuberant field guide to queerness in the natural world.

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