Queer n There	Queer n There Archive

There are a lot of good reasons for guys to enjoy gay sex: -- it's fun

-- the other guy is cute

-- it beats just sitting around.

In other words, gay sex needs hardly no reason at all. Like art -- it's for its own sake. But even if the world doesn't need excuses for gay sex, researchers in Boston have found two new ones:

-- it helps sire offspring

-- It makes way for fresh, wriggly sperm.

As well, they've found a novel disincentive: constipation.

If you're a male flour beetle, at least, considerations such as these might be on the tips of your antennae. So says research published in the Journal of Evolutionary biology that adds new chapters to the curiously entwined story of insects and gay liberation.

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Forget pink triangles and rainbow flags. If you're looking for a really apt symbol of the modern gay man, it's Tribolium castaneum. The common flour beetle is an accomplished sodomite, though he wields an aedeagus instead of a penis and spurts all over his mate's abdomen rather than up his ass.

Flour-beetles may be small, but they're sex dynamos. "Males can mate with up to seven different females within 15 minutes," notes coauthor KE Levan. Same-sex encounters can last up to a leisurely 11 minutes.

If food and sex are spices of life, flour beetles lives a charmed one. Humans' taste for bread covers one of the bases. And an inner joie de vivre means that the critters get to third base with few obstacles.

Researchers at Tufts University put males beetles in with virgin females. If the two didn't start copulating within five minutes, they figured something was wrong. (And offered a different female.)

Same-sex fucking is also zipless. Within an hour of being introduced into the same stretch of glass tubing, 12 of 14 pairs of virgin males had sex together.

More than being eager, flour beetles are au courant. That's not least because of what homosexuality for them is not.

It's not not about domination: partners switch readily between top and bottom.

And it's not about stupidity -- homosexually engaged insects have been seen by some entomologists as merely clueless about their partners' gender. But that's not likely, say the Tufts researchers, who found that male flour beetles, despite their promiscuity, can pick females with whom they've ever mated out from a crowd.

Not just discerning, male flour beetles are sexually flexible. Whether they mounted other males more often or got mounted, males were equally adept at mounting females.

But flour beetles who enjoy gay sex differ from their human brethren. Gay men don't indulge in sodomy with an eye on making babies. The Tufts researchers, however, found that about .5 percent of flour-beetle births came from gay sex: via semen transferred among males (being top or bottom didn't matter) that later found its way into a female.

The flour-beetle's penchant for gay sex in floury places has a downside: constipation. Crack it up the critter's adherence to the safe-sex rule-of-thumb "On me, not in me." With flour everywhere, semen tends to harden, like glue, into an anus-blocking obstruction. But that just makes the case for bisexuality: the accretions, notes Levan, "were often dislodged during males' interactions with females, and so any reproductive or survival handicaps they entail may be temporary."

Besides being a roundabout way of making babies, flour-beetle sodomy may serve another function: sperm dumping. Despite Monty Python, older sperm isn't sacred. Other things being equal, old sperm is less effective at siring offspring. Males deliberately isolated from other beetles were quicker to engage in homosexual activity, the researchers found -- the better to dump their old sperm and save the fresh for non-recreational sex.

Flour beetles and humans may enjoy some of the same foods and pastimes, but could insects have anything to say about human sexual patterns? Yes, say experts in same-sex behavior across species. Homosexuality in primates grows more common the closer to Homo sapiens. But analogous sexual behaviors appear across unrelated species. Monogamy is rare in mammals, for instance, but common among some birds. Social insects are perhaps of more interest in terms of understanding humans than many species of apes.

Insects and gay liberation, actually, are joined at the hip. Alfred Kinsey's mid-20th-century sex surveys proved for the first time that gay sex was commonplace. Before he turned his attention to humans, Kinsey honed his observational skills in entomology, spending two decades becoming the world's foremost expert on gall wasps. Flour beetles as gay icons? Kinsey wouldn't bat an eye.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com