By Eliot Schrefer, Illustration: Ælfleda Clackson/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, June 30, 2022
In 1913, naturalists captured a flock of penguins from the Antarctic and brought them to spend the rest of their lives in the Edinburgh Zoo. The birds that survived the transition came to enchant the Scottish public with their antics. They could go from suave to goofy and back again, simply by gliding in the water, toddling around on land for a bit, then diving in once more.
Over the years, the zookeepers struggled to determine which penguins were male and which were female, renaming four of the five in the process. The complications only grew from there. Like most birds, penguins are socially but not sexually monogamous. Though they form lifelong unions, they are very happy to canoodle on the side — and there were only so many sexual configurations five of them could go through before one truth became self-evident: The penguins were bisexual. As zoo director T.H. Gillespie wryly observed in his 1932 recounting of these sexual triangulations, they “enjoy privileges not as yet permitted to civilized mankind.”
Bi penguins have been stirring things up for over a century. The first record of same-sex sex in penguins was in 1911, when explorer George Murray Levick discovered “depraved” behavior in wild Adélies. In 2000, a pair of male chinstrap penguins at New York City’s Central Park Zoo bonded and raised a chick from an egg they’d been given to foster, inspiring the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three.” More recently, penguin behavior sounded like it was ripped straight from a celebrity gossip site when it emerged that two male penguins had stolen an egg from a hetero couple at a Dutch zoo — and then proceeded to steal an egg from a “lesbian” couple the very next year.
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