Gay, lesbian and intersex whales: our queer sea has much to teach us

Whales are extraordinarily sensuous creatures. Those blubbery bodies are highly sensitive, and sensitised. At social meetings, pods of sperm, humpback and right whales will roll around one another’s bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a group of right whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting an entire morning.

I have also watched a male-female couple so blissfully conjoined that they appeared unbothered by our little fishing boat as they passed underneath it. And in what may sound like a career of cetacean voyeurism, I have also been caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins continually penetrating each other at speed, regardless of the gender of their partner.

That’s why this week’s report of the first scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii is not surprising.


The remarkable image of a two-metre whale penis entering another male “leaves little room for discussion that there is a sexual component to such behaviour”, as one whale scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk at the Wageningen Marine Research institute in the Netherlands, notes drily.

In fact, one of the whales was ailing and there has been speculation that the encounter may not have been consensual or that the healthy whale was actually giving comfort to the other. Whatever the truth, such “flagrant” acts also expose many of our human presumptions about sexuality, gender and identity.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/01/documented-sex-male-humpback-whales-gay-lesbian-nonbinary-queer-cetaceans-sexuality

If Moms for Liberty hear about this, they will have all have massive strokes.