Tell Us About Your Gay Pets!!!

Because it's Gay Animal Month.

It’s Frankie!!!! (Photo by Cros)

It’s June. And that means it’s Pride Month. And that means that it’s the second annual Gay Animal Month here at Discourse Blog!!! What is Gay Animal Month? It’s where we celebrate LGBTQ+ animals in all their glory. If you’re an animal and you don’t identify with something in that alphabet, scram until July.

Last year, we spent a lot of time talking about gay animals (mostly birds) that had won some level of public acclaim, such as the seagulls of Lesbian Seagull Island and Roy and Silo, the famous gay penguins. So this year, we’re kicking things off a little closer to home. Your homes, in fact. That’s because we want you to tell us all about your gay pets—the everyday animals who are queer icons in their own right.

There are so, so, so many gay pets out there. How do I know? It’s a little thing called REPORTING. It’s called I ASKED PEOPLE. And responses came flooding in—including from inside the Discourse Blog house.

Consider Frankie, Cros’s beautiful cat, pictured above. “Frankie has always had a very fluid gender energy. Sometimes he seems very feminine, but sometimes he is a mischievous little boy,” said Cros. Frankie the genderqueer cat!!!!

Cros also reported, “My friend has two cats, one is very obviously straight, the other is very obviously gay.” Very interesting.

I didn’t stop there. I asked the folks at my other home, The Nation, too. Check out this story from my incredible comrade Rose:

My cat is trans. Many years ago I had a roommate who took in a cat off the street and named him and stuff, but the cat just never, ever took to him, and it started sleeping in my room. When my roommate moved out he was like "he's yours now." And he became my precious little boy. Years later I took him to the vet & they were like "This cat is female, you know.” And I had just never checked before and was getting my information from my roommate. Not sure why he had that misapprehension. But I had been conceiving of him as my little boy for so many years that when I learned he had girl parts I just didn't go along with that. I've had him for 18 years, and he's my sweet little boy.

I love this so much. Trans kitty!

But I wasn’t done. I had to ask the general public.

And people were more than happy to weigh in.

Trans tortoise!

EDWARD R. PURROW. GREATEST NAME OF ALL TIME????

Hell yeah Saba!

I’ll close with this amazing email from CJ Higgins, a theater artist whose work you can find here. They write:

I wanted to share the story of my family's two cats, who are definitely elderly gay men in love.

We adopted them from a shelter back in 2009. We were told by the staff that while you don't generally want to bring two male cats into one household because they become territorial, they noted that these two cats were, and I quote, "oddly affectionate" with each other. [Ed. note: incredible.] So we adopted them immediately and named them Turk and J.D. after the characters in Scrubs (it was 2009).

It was apparent right away that they were not only gay, they were gay about each other and weren't comfortable sharing that information right away. I would often walk into a room and find them cuddling each other, only to immediately separate and walk around like nothing had happened. [Ed. note: oh my god.] I once caught J.D. being the big spoon and licking Turk's ear, and in their desperation to not have been caught they ran away so fast that J.D. ran into a wall. I tried to tell them that I too am queer and they were living in an accepting household, but it still took them a while to understand that.

They are now living their twilight years at my younger sister's home, getting plenty of love and care from her and her fiancé as well as the best seating next to the sunniest windows. In the attached pictures, J.D. is the brown-and-black one, and Turk is the black-and-white one.

OK, not only are they gay but they were gay about each other and they went on a little journey together??? And look at these two:

I mean!

So here’s where you all come in. Do you have a lesbian llama? A gay gecko? A bisexual bison? A trans tapir? A queer quail? An intersex iguana? A pansexual poodle? An asexual alligator???? We want to know about them!

(“But Jack, mapping common traits of human sexuality and gender identity onto an animal is too simplistic!” Are you hearing yourself? Please go away and let the fun people have fun.)

So leave a comment, or send me an email with some pics of your cute queer pets: jack@discourseblog.com. And tell your friends! And neighbors! And assorted loved ones! And then we’ll celebrate the world’s best, gayest animals together!

Wooo!