We'll Have a Gay Old Time

Yesterday afternoon, we made a trip to the liberry and checked out the book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which had been mentioned in one of the gay bird articles. At the rate animals are apparently engaging in homosexual activity, I don't understand why Bob Barker should always have to plead with us to help control the pet population. Let's take giraffes for example; throughout school I did no less than five projects on giraffes, often recycling the same research and even handmade paper-mache replica, but not once did I ever learn that nearly 90% of sexual activity between giraffes was same-sex. No wonder they're endangered! You know how giraffes wrap their necks around each other? I used to understand this behavior to be "play fighting," but what gets left out of Zoobooks and Encyclopedia Britannica is that this "game" is accompanied by erections, and is generally culminated in one male giraffe mounting the other and ejaculating.

As we do every night, last night Desiree, Amelia, Raumene, and I cooked dinner. According to our frozen lasagna box, the four of us constitute a "large family," which might be the cutest thing ever. Roy, the neighborhood's 83-year-old with Alzheimer's, stopped by to ask if he could join us, and since no large family is complete without the doting grandparent, we said sure.

The problem with Roy, aside from the incontinence he's surprisingly open about, is that he, without fail, tells the same five stories each time we share a meal. Therefore, I decided to strategically leave Biological Exuberance on the table in hopes of inspiring new conversation, a move my friends questioned since Roy was once a minister, a story I've now heard six times.

As it turns out, Roy loves gay animals! He flipped through the 700+ pages, enjoying the, uhh, enlightening photos. He even whipped out his notepad, which he uses to jot down our names which he forgets over the course of dinner, to write down the name of the book so he could obtain a copy for himself. We had to shovel lasagna into our mouths to hide the laughter as we discussed the book with him, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

But bi-curious harbor seals aren't the only thing to have captured Roy's heart: he also confessed a love for the comic strip Peanuts. Even that's a dangerous topic of conversation, though, because Amelia informed me recently that I say the word peanuts as "peanits," which of course sounds like "penis," and severely changes the tone of conversation with an octogenarian. I tried to correct the situation by earnestly asking Roy, "Do you also enjoy The Family Circus?" Yeah, try asking that question with a straight face -- I sure couldn't. I'd feel worse if I thought he'd remember the incident, but Roy has been known to drop by, leave, then come back again ten minutes later having forgotten he was just here. I can only imagine what went through his mind as his night ended, having no recollection of what happened during the day, wondering why he scribbled a note to himself about homosexual animals.