Are there any species or kinds of animals (besides mammals) that have been observed/known to be gay?
I think that in most cases what we see with animals is instinctive rather than social. Sometimes animals have messed up hormones or messed up receptors to hormones and they give off a scent that attracts members of the same sex or are attracted to members of the same sex physically rather than romantically. So far, I believe that this has only been observed in male animals, and in most cases involves one male animal attempting to mate with another male animal in the belief that they are a female. You see it sometimes with dogs with certain medical conditions. You can have a male dog that smells female to other male dogs so many other male dogs will attempt to mate with it. The dog with the hormone issue will often become confused or upset by this. It’s not really one animal being gay, more an animal mistakenly believing that another animal is a different gender. Kind of like a human being attracted to a transsexual without realizing that they are that way. Of course, I’m not a vet nor
Modern studies of animal homosexuality date to the late 19th century with observations on insects and small animals. In 1896, for example, French entomologist Henri Gadeau de Kerville of the Society of Friends of Natural Sciences and the Museum of Rouen published a drawing of two male scarab beetles copulating. Then, during the first half of the 1900s, various investigators described homosexual behavior in baboons, garter snakes and gentoo penguins, among other species. Back then, scientists generally considered homosexual acts among animals to be abnormal. In some cases, they “treated” the animals by, say, castrating them or giving them lobotomies. A recent finding indicates that homosexual behavior may be so common because it is rooted in an animal’s brain wiring—at least in the case of fruit flies. In a study appearing earlier this year in Nature Neuroscience, neuroscientist David E. Featherstone of the University of Illinois at Chicago and his colleagues found that they could switc
