This post was submitted by Topher Burns

Life (BBC, via Discovery Channel) is easily the most spectacular show on television right now.  A fantastic follow up to Planet Earth, and the crowning achievement of a long history of wildlife programming that has kept me stuck to the couch since Nature and Wild America (and though I miss George Page, I do not miss Marty Stouffer).

In the grand tradition of nature television, Life follows pretty much the same script:

Here’s an animal.  Ain’t he great?  This is what he does.  This is how he finds a woman, and gets her to have his kids.  Here are his kids.  Here are some of his kids getting eaten/starving to death.  Long shot of his habitat, fade to credits.

As a viewer, I find this rhythm comforting.  Applied to tree frog or a timber wolf, it seems to sum it all up.

But lately I’m getting tired of the formula.  Because every single nature program assiduously avoids the fact that nature, while red in tooth and claw, is also hella gay.

Did you know that researchers estimate 9 out of 10 sexual experiences a male giraffe has in his lifetime are with other males?  Did you know that nearly 25% of dude black swans pair with other dudes to raise baby swans they’ve stolen or gotten from a surrogate?

For years America has thought itself progressive, sexually educated, and mature.  Yet our nature programming has been parroting back to us a 1950’s set of sexual values that we have never thought to question.

Animals fucking LOVE sex, and they do it a lot.  While we tell each other mushy parables about how some whales mate for life and never take another partner even if widowed, some dolphins are living in polyamorous groups and having regular pansexual orgies for the sheer pleasure of it.

I remember in my mid-teen years, when my mom was trying to send me as many signals as possible that it was totally cool if I was gay, she used to tell me about a bull on her uncle’s old farm.  It wouldn’t mate with any of the alluring she-cows out in the pastures, and her uncle wasn’t squeamish about explaining why.  “The bull was gay,” she’d tell me, “and that’s just fine.  Some bulls are just born gay.”

Looking back, I think his sexual preference must have sped that bull’s way to the glue factory, but it’s great that I grew up with a mother completely comfortable with a world in which homosexuality is a natural occurrence.

So let’s dial it up, and have a new brand of nature show where animals don’t just chew bark off trees during long harsh winters.  The Brits already took a stab at it, now I want to see Wild America Gone Wild.  Just imagine how fun it would be to hear Oprah describing multiple-partner cloacal rape scenes!

- Topher Burns

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