Original subtitles

[Narrator] Few animals can survive the harsh winter

of the Rocky Mountains.

But one icon of the west thrives here.

300 lb of rugged all-American muscle

topped off with four feet of rock hard horn.

There's no prizes for guessing their name.

Big horn sheep.

The battle lines are drawn.

To the victor...

go the spoils.

But this isn't a film about that.

This is a film about something else entirely.

Love and family, in all of their forms.

These two males might be fighters,

but they're also lovers.

You think you know nature? Think again.

Our planet is home to over 11 million species.

Each with their own way of being.

From flamboyantly gay flamingos,

to pansexual primates.

Sex-changing clown fish, to multi-gendered mushrooms,

and everything in-between.

Nature is more queer than you could possibly imagine,

but don't take my word for it.

Take theirs.

And also, theirs.

Ready.

My name is Dr. Christine Wilkinson.

-Dr. Ross Brooks. -Antonia Forster.

-Bradley Trevor Grieve. -I'm a mycologist.

A tropical marine ecologist.

I'm a senior lecturer in natural history.

The founder and director of The Vagina Museum.

[Narrator] Together, we'll be going on a global search

for queerness that goes far beyond our human definition.

We'll be bucking gender norms, breaking taboos,

and switching sexes as we uncover the reasons

why we know so little about how nature truly is.

Queerness is abundant in nature.

Queerness practically is nature.

I like the word queer because it defies boxes.

It gives you the flexibility

to be able to run the gamut of behaviors.

It's love, diversity, and the most extraordinary

complex relationships you can possibly imagine.

When it comes to what Mother Nature intended,

she was pretty open-minded.

If you're judgmental, prudish or squeamish

then brace yourself, because this is a queer planet.

[lion roars]

[Narrator] And there's only one place to start a trip like this.

New York, New York.

A city of fame, fortune, acceptance...

and even love.

Where Broadway dreams really can come true.

Even for a boy from Nebraska.

But this year's hot queer power couple are Elmer and Lima

and we've got a tour of their fabulous upstate New York pad.

The only catch...

they're not people, they're penguins.

Contrary to the gay agenda, life isn't one big pool party.

[Debbie] Penguins on average will defecate

every five to seven minutes,

so that's great job security or us.

There's a lot of cleaning that goes into the exhibit.

[Narrator] Debbie's been looking after the penguins

at Rosamond Gifford Zoo for the past 14 years.

Hi, Vente, good boy.

[Narrator] But it's the first time

she has had a penguin couple like these guys.

[Debbie] Elmer and Lima, characteristic wise,

they generally can be very goofy.

They love kind of exploring in piles of rocks

and picking them up and bringing them to various locations,

so they're actually quite easy going

but also very curious and just playful.

[Narrator] They are also very gay.

They formed a bond with each other

about a couple of years ago and through that

we started showing signs increasingly

that their bond was becoming stronger and ultimately

they built a territory together,

then subsequently built a nest together.

Elmer and Lima are special in the fact that they are two males

that together were successfully able to raise a chick.

[Narrator] Humboldt penguins stay monogamous for life,

unlike half of West Hollywood.

And like many families, these two decided to adopt.

But despite clearly living a successful gay lifestyle,

critics say this is only because they're in captivity.

I mean, come on.

One of the disparaging comments you'll hear from people

who don't know anything about nature,

is that the reason there are gay couples

is that there's not enough of the opposite sex.

It's just not true.

They choose the partner that they want.

So seeing queer behavior in the zoos

is actually quite common.

It's been observed in many different zoos over the world,

both between two males and two females.

It's been shown that about 5% of pairings,

with pair bonding is actually among same sex partners,

and up to 10% or 12% of copulations

occur between same sex partners.

But that kind of behavior doesn't just happen there,

it's just that it's more visible there.

[Narrator] These two wouldn't be stuck in the closet in the wild,

but that's not common knowledge.

It is extraordinary that today still many people

do not know about queerness in animals.

Queer behavior in nature

has been known about for a very long time.

[Narrator] So why do people know so little about it?

Not everybody's happy to hear that big horn sheep are "gay,"

or that male penguins are rearing offspring together,

and that can be very hard on the researchers.

They can be ridiculed, they can be ostracized,

their work can be buried.

[Narrator] But the big queer truth

is out there if you're willing to look.

All of the science that we're talking about,

about queerness in nature is based on

actual scientists' observations and studies in the field.

[Narrator] But finding some action or observing in the wild,

it's not as easy as it sounds.

As this male king penguin knows all too well.

After a week of hunting at sea, he's headed back to shore,

fighting the wind and waves.

[Bradley] That great southern ocean area of the subantarctic

has to be one of the toughest places in the world

to do anything, let alone live a normal life.

[Narrator] So for these beefy birds,

love doesn't come easy.

King penguins spend some portion of their time

hunting for fish, swimming,

but a large majority of their time is spent standing around

in large colonies in their own poo.

[Narrator] Wildly enough, poo is the least of his worries.

He has to find his mate at the largest circuit party ever.

And king penguins are practically identical,

male and female.

[Antonia] Imagine you're standing in a football field

looking for your partner,

but there are thousands of individuals,

they all look like your partner,

and they're all shouting at the same time.

It's pretty challenging.

[Narrator] The problem with penguins is,

like that one friend after a bottomless mimosa brunch,

they wander off.

They get lost.

Start fights.

Luckily, like the wise Kelly Clarkson once sang,

nature has prepared him for a moment like this.

So in penguins finding a mate is about

tuning in and becoming in sync.

At the beginning of the season,

king penguins spent a lot of time bonding,

engaging in small dances,

and getting to know each other's voices really well.

So that when they come back from a trip and they're faced

with thousands of identical individuals,

they're able to pick out the voice of their partner

above the noise of the crowd.

[penguin call]

[penguin call]

[Narrator] Though slightly off tune,

he tracks his partner's voice.

And he's reunited again.

They take the time to dance once more...

But he's not dancing with a she.

So wild king penguins, in a 2010 study,

was found that no less than 28% of the initial pair bondings

at the beginning of the breeding season,

was between mates of the same sex.

Having same-sex partnerships in king penguins

is really important to the colony,

and that's because raising an egg

in such hostile conditions is incredibly difficult.

It can't be left alone or it will freeze or break,

and sometimes there are eggs that don't have

a pair caring for them.

So a same sex pair will take an abandoned egg,

and raise it to a healthy individual

which can then join the group.

[Narrator] Despite how often this occurs,

studies on queer behavior like this

are unfortunately few and far between.

[Martin] So, king penguins live in the harshest of environments.

Being on land in perpetual winter,

they will have to endure strong winds,

really chilled temperatures, and just a very harsh place.

So in nature it's hard to study.

[Narrator] But harsh climate isn't the only reason

these observations are rare.

[Narrator] Half a world away, Africa's wildlife

never ceases to amaze and surprise.

[Antonia] If you were a tourist in Africa on safari,

you might see some things that you weren't expecting.

[African music plays]

The plains of Africa are alive with the sights

and sounds of same-sex relationships.

[Narrator] These two male lions are no exception.

The paparazzi really are everywhere, aren't they?

One of the great cliches in natural history is the lion

being the king of the jungle.

But the notion of a proud be-maned lion,

looking over his harem of lionesses is,

I mean, it's only a fleeting part of that animal's life.

Coalition of male lions might only be able to take over

a pride and mate with the females for about two,

two-and-a-half years.

Effectively male lions might only have that one chance

to reproduce for their entire lives.

They have really beautiful social bonds amongst themselves,

so you'll have groups of two or three or maybe even more

male lions that travel together in what's called a coalition,

that they spend most of their time in.

[Narrator] Lion bromances are a long-standing intimate affair.

[Christine] So when I was doing my research out in Kenya,

I would always see this coalition of male lions

cuddling with one another,

right there on my doorstep every morning.

And those males, as far as we know, are still together today.

They bond with one another

through a number of various activities

like nuzzling one another,

and cuddling with one another,

and even mounting one another...

That's never shown in the popular media.

[Narrator] And there's an intriguing reason why.

In a lot of places, being queer or being gay is illegal,

so it's very difficult to try and do science around

these sorts of queer animals.

[Narrator] Which gives a skewed perspective on their lifestyles,

because male lions need to stick together.

For a solitary lion,

the plains are a dangerous place.

[Christine] Many animals face risks from spotted hyenas,

and African lions are no exception.

[Narrator] Caught out on his own,

this young male is in trouble.

[hyenas barking]

[Christine] And they're gonna go for the soft bits.

They're gonna try and grab you by your genitalia.

[Narrator] How rude!

Luckily for him,

even a pack of hyena are no match

for an all-male coalition.

The fitness of a male lion is a lot higher

when he's working with other male lions in a coalition.

[lion groans]

[Christine] He is able to better defend himself, work together,

and defend each other.

[lions groan, hyenas bark]

[Narrator] Together they are able to survive, thrive,

and bond like the proud kings they truly are.

But they are far from being the only queer animals

on the plains.

[Antonia] The natural world is incredibly queer

and animals don't prejudice against that.

There's a lot of homosexual behavior

and it's only in humans that we have such a stigma about it.

[Narrator] In an unexpected plot twist,

in some species not being queer makes you the exception.

Giraffe are sort of famous

for having a very, very, very high incidence

of same sex behavior, especially among male giraffes.

Giraffes are super queer.

That's the best way I can describe them.

[Narrator] Scientists aren't exactly sure why this is,

but traveling in large same-sex herds

means that fights among the young males are common.

And they found a uniquely queer way

to settle their differences and bond together.

[Antonia] Giraffes engage in a behavior called necking,

which involves rubbing their necks on each other's bodies

and slamming their head into each other.

And sometimes that seems to be aggressive.

But in other times it seems to be a type of foreplay

because it's also followed by things like mounting

and orgasms.

One out of every four matings you're seeing

actually males mounting each other.

Most male giraffes will get up to

some sort of same-sex behavior throughout their lives,

some more consistently than others.

[Antonia] Gay interactions between giraffes

have been explained away as a mistake,

or as lack of access to females

but actually we've seen it directly,

even when there are females present.

So if you saw two human males having sex with one another,

you wouldn't say that it's dominance,

so why is it that when we're looking at animals

like giraffe or lions,

that we always wanna say that it's dominance,

why can't it be something else?

[Narrator] So despite the difficulty in studying them,

it's clear that there are plenty of gay animals.

But it begs the question, are there any lesbians?

[Narrator] Japan, a country of beauty, tradition,

fabulous sushi,

and a troop of macaques who skipped gay ski week

to find another way to stay warm in the snow.

[macaques squeal]

[Florence] During the winter,

they will spend a lot of their time in these hot springs.

It's very, very cold in Japan around that time of year,

and they also use the opportunity

to bond with each other,

and to spend time with other members of their tribe.

[Narrator] But fitting in isn't always easy.

This young female needs to do some networking.

Don't get your phone wet!

[Florence] Japanese macaques are very matriarchal

so their hierarchy is really dependent on making these bonds.

[Narrator] But in macaques, it's not about being a dom.

Intimacy is key to building strong relationships.

[Florence] Japanese macaques are extremely lesbian.

The females are constantly having relationships

with other females, often if they're given a choice

between having a relationship with a male or with a female,

they'll pick the female.

[Amy] Macaques are a species where

it's been shown that females can have orgasms.

They measure things like uterine contractions

and blood flow and heart rate

and those things line up with the experience

that human females are having during orgasm,

so it's possible that they just like mounting each other

purely for the sexual satisfaction.

[Narrator] What better way to spend a day

than in a hot spa with your new partner.

Macaques, lions, giraffes

and even penguins all show lesbian or gay behaviors

and they aren't alone.

More than 1500 different species have shown to engage

in homosexual or pansexual, bisexual behaviors.

[Amy] We find it throughout the animal kingdom

in all kinds of circumstances,

and it seems not to be something that your learn

or that's an influence that comes from other people,

but something that's more innate than that.

Queer sex is so omnipresent,

so universal in every stratum of life on Earth

that it's absolutely clear

this is what nature has always intended.

[Narrator] If we know that queerness in nature

is so widespread, then why has it been trapped

in the closet for so long?

Like many unpleasant secrets,

the answer can be found in a museum in England.

[Bradley] Queer behavior's been prevalent

since the dawn of time.

One of the great agonies in my life, and I'm sure yours,

is I've never seen a dinosaur penis.

[Narrator] Well some things have been sadly lost

to the passage of time.

One man's journals reveal why queer research remained buried.

George Murray Levick was a Navy man,

but he was also a biologist

around the beginning of the twentieth century.

Levick went to a part of Antarctica

called Victoria Lands,

and in particular the colony of Adelie penguins.

He was kind of marooned there for about nine months.

[Narrator] But what he found was unexpected.

Animals of the same sex having sex with each other,

and that really weirded him out.

He did not like it at all.

Levick's notebooks are absolutely fascinating,

particularly when he's recording

the sexual habits of these animals.

At some point, he starts writing in the Greek alphabet.

At other points, he goes back to text written in English

and pastes over them with the text re-written in Greek

so that others who are not elite

physicians or scientists who can understand Greek,

that they won't understand the really rude bits.

[Antonia] I think people aren't aware of queer behaviors

in the animal kingdom because, historically,

it's either been suppressed

or been considered too taboo to publish.

So this is a very typical example of how knowledge

of queer bodies and queer behaviors in nature gets lost,

and certainly growing up gay in the 1970s and '80s,

there was nothing like this in the nature books that I read

or on the nature programs that I saw on the television.

It's knowledge that has been almost completely lost.

[Narrator] But that is all starting to change.

New research is uncovering just how queer nature is.

Across the world, it's being celebrated with pride.

[Latin music]

As the rainbow rolls across the globe,

in Mexico things are just getting started.

Over 20,000 people have shown up in Merida

to show their true colors,

and their best ga-ga choreography.

But they aren't the only ones dancing.

On a nearby salt lake,

an iconic bisexual bird is about to shake its tail feathers.

[birds squawking]

[Bradley] The Yucatan in eastern Mexico

is probably one of my favorite places on the planet;

so many distinct ecosystems.

And one of the most extraordinary are these

incredibly salty lagoons.

Very shallow. Gets very, very hot.

The water is basically toxic to just about anything

and yet these flamboyant filter feeders

come honking in there and just thrive.

[Narrator] As the summer heats up,

a young flamingo is looking for a mate.

Male or female.

And like so many of us, she does this by dancing.

Like a troop of soggy salsa dancers

on a swampy stage,

they line up.

Wow, that was a mouthful.

You have this bright pink bird with a bizarre looking bill,

a hook, beautiful curved neck

and strutting around like a prima ballerina.

They all flock in one direction,

turn their head and all flock in the other direction.

[flamingos squawking]

[Antonia] They're looking for an individual

that is in sync with them,

that might be appropriate to mate with.

[Narrator] The young flamingo has found her perfect partner...

But despite mating and building a nest,

these two ladies won't have an egg of their own.

However, this queer couple's time to shine

will come soon enough.

Flamingos have no teeth, claws or natural defenses

which makes them very, very jumpy.

[Antonia] So if there is something

that is presenting a danger to them,

their first port of call is to run away.

And that's a big problem because that means

all of the eggs and young are left behind and abandoned.

[Narrator] And when the panic's over,

it's down to the young couple

to pick up the pieces and adopt an egg.

You might think that gay animals,

because they can't have their own kids,

are somehow less successful in the natural world.

But actually we know that there are many examples

of same sex partnerships that have wonderful outcomes

and high success rates for their offspring.

[Narrator] Unlike the penguins,

love for a flamingo is a fleeting summer thing.

Flamingos are sequential monogamists,

so what that means is they'll pair up for a season

then new year, new guy.

A 2006 study showed that up to 35% of the birds

formed relationships that were not

the typical male-female pair.

There might have been two males pairing up,

two females pairing up, two females and a male,

two males and a female or even four of them together.

[Narrator] So when the chicks are raised,

they move on, and find a new partner or partners

the next year.

Male or female, it makes little difference

to these beautiful bisexual birds.

I think humans can all agree with each other

that sex is not just for reproduction.

Sex is for pleasure, it's for social bonding.

Some animals, God bless them,

are not in any way shy about their sexual appetite

and sexually active animals have three things in common.

They're biologically young, they're generally single,

and they're not wearing pants.

[Narrator] Across the globe, in the jungles of Africa,

the animals certainly aren't shy about what they want.

Jungles, reefs and other environments are so loud

because every animal there is calling out to find a mate.

[animal sounds]

All those calls through the jungle, it's like advertising,

"Hey, I'm DTF."

Basically, like, a really audible Tinder profile.

* Please have sex with me. *

[Narrator] We've already met some gay, lesbian

and bisexual animals.

Now it's time to meet a tribe of pansexual primates

that are always swiping right.

Unlike us, these matriarchal apes use sex to solve

all their issues.

Like that one friend during pride month.

Critically endangered in the wild,

they've continued their sexual habits in sanctuaries.

Every bonobo has sex with both males and females

of multiple ages, and sometimes multiple partners at once.

And so this real rainbow of diversity

in terms of who they will have sex with

and in the combinations that they'll use.

[Narrator] But it isn't all fun and games.

With over a hundred members of the tribe to keep fed and happy,

there's some serious socializing to do.

They settle almost all of their differences sexually.

So we have make up sex,

they have, let's resolve this sex

and get back to having normal celebratory food sex

and then, after sex sex,

and a quickie just on top of that.

[Peer Gynt: Hall of the Mountain King]

The human equivalent of bonobo society would be having sex

to say thank you, having sex to say sorry,

having sex to say can I steal a bit of your dinner?

They're very promiscuous

and they're very free with sharing their love.

[Peer Gynt: Hall of the Mountain King crescendos]

[Narrator] Mass pansexual orgy complete,

food distributed, time for a nap.

Animals that have a lot of sex tend to have less war.

I don't know how that extrapolates to human society,

but to be honest

we should all probably get laid a little more than we do.

[Narrator] All animals might not embrace sex

as vigorously as bonobos,

but they certainly found countless ways

to get their rocks off.

Literally.

Animals have a much shorter life span than us,

generally speaking,

and that means that their window for carnal pleasure

and reproduction, is even tighter.

Dolphins have almost every sexual behavior

you can imagine, and they've probably invented

some that humans haven't.

We see things like males having sex,

females having sex with each other,

and also masturbation using things like inanimate objects,

or even dead fish or eels.

People masturbate, animals masturbate.

They love it.

Some of them go beyond that and build their own sex toys.

Now, there are a number of monkeys and ferrets

who will use a beautiful soft, smooth pebble as a vibrator.

[Narrator] Despite all the clearly abundant

queer sex and diversity in nature,

some folks still cling to the idea it is unnatural.

So where does that stigma come from?

The answer, once again,

lies partly in the notes of an old white Victorian man.

Charles Darwin is the most famous biologist

who has ever lived.

A very, very famous man whose name was known

all over the world

and his legacy lives on to this very day.

[Narrator] But it isn't all positive.

Oh God, Darwin.

Charles Darwin made fantastic contributions to science,

but he did have some blind spots.

Darwin was an incredible revolutionary mind of his time,

but he was of his time.

And queerness at that time wasn't something

that people were talking about.

[Narrator] So for the most part,

he didn't, which left a troubled legacy.

Today we talk about people living in the closet.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that Darwin's

writings and much of his science, was kept in the closet.

Darwin imbued his texts

with the gendered stereotypes of his age.

Images of fussy female birds and aggressive male beetles.

[Narrator] And when he did write about queerness,

urgh, it was worse.

So here's an example of Darwin referring to queer behaviors

in very negative language.

He writes in The Descent of Man,

"The greatest intemperance is no reproach with savages.

Utter licentiousness and unnatural crimes prevail

to an astounding extent."

So when you have one of the most famous men on the planet

referring to queer sex

as "utter licentiousness and unnatural crimes"

well that's not something that's easy to fight back against.

For better or worse, our society has been heavily influenced

by the Victorian era.

[Narrator] But you can only deny true nature for so long.

Biological reality explodes the Victorian hetero-nomative myth.

Life if much more complex, beautifully complex

than you've been led to believe.

[Narrator] Darwin may have placed gender roles

on animals that mimicked our own,

but take a closer look at nature

and you'll soon discover,

it couldn't care less what we think.

We've seen plenty of gay animals,

but back in Mexico, one polyamorous bird

is doing its best to upset all our gender norms.

Polyamorous wanacracker.

[Bradley] Jacanas are a tropical wetlands bird.

Huge feet.

You know them immediately, very hard to buy shoes.

[Narrator] But it isn't shoes this Jacana is concerned with,

even though they should be...

They are on patrol.

Jacanas are intensely territorial.

In most pairs or groups, there's one larger individual

and they will roam around the territory defending it

from other individuals of the same sex.

[Narrator] This feisty bird won't take prisoners.

[Jacanas cawing]

[Western-style music]

They have sharp spurs on their feet and wings.

And they can fight to the death.

Now you might assume that that territorial

aggressive individual is the male, but you'd be wrong.

[Narrator] In jacanas, the females are polyamorous

and wear the proverbial pants.

And this one is asserting her dominance.

[Bradley] The libido of the female jacana

is always dialed up to 11.

It's both exhausting and inspiring

to even think about them.

Not only will they successfully court and woo

a large number of males, each of whom

is assigned to look after a nest of her eggs,

they're not satisfied.

They want bigger and better all the time.

So if they find a male that they like

who's already nursing a clutch of a rival female's eggs,

they will stomp on those eggs and smash them to smithereens,

so the male is now unemployed,

looking for a new job.

Guess what, we have an opening and it's very, very sexy.

[Narrator] With her territory secure,

it's down to her harem of males to raise the babies.

[Antonia] We often have assumptions about animals,

particularly watching this kind of behavior

that males are more territorial, more aggressive,

and that females are more responsible for raising young,

and that's definitely not the case when it comes to jacanas.

[Narrator] These queer birds flip the script

when it comes to who does what in a relationship,

and with how many partners.

And there's nothing unusual about that in nature.

Further along the coast, some strange little horses

are bucking gender roles harder,

redefining what it means to be male.

They live in mangrove swamps

where there are these really big trees

with these huge, huge roots.

So they're quite magical, quite mysterious looking.

[Narrator] The mangroves provide a chic home for countless

aquatic oddities,

none more so...

than this male seahorse.

So seahorses are really weird fish.

What they are is a fish where its tail sort of disappeared,

turned into like a gripping monkey tail,

so seahorses need something to grab onto with their tails

so that they can stay relatively sedentary.

Doesn't make sense really from, I think,

a physics point of view. That is what they do.

Bit awkward.

[Narrator] For an aquatic animal,

he really is pretty bad at swimming.

When you're surrounded by predators, that's a problem.

[Christopher] They can't cope with lots of currents,

lots of water movement.

[Florence] Seahorses are really good at camouflaging themselves,

really good at hiding.

Of course they have to be if they want to keep themselves

safe from predators.

But that does have the side effect

of making it a bit harder also to attract and find mates.

[Narrator] So when they do stumble upon another seahorse,

they tend to get a bit clingy.

They create monogamous pairs often for life,

and like all good relationships that takes a bit of work.

Every morning they'll meet each other and they will,

they'll actually do a dance to sort of reinforce their bond

and what we find is they let go of the thing

they're holding onto and they can swim out into the water,

spiral around each other,

and just spend a lot of time just basically being

near each other reinforcing this pair bond.

It's really important in these poor-swimming,

quite rare animals.

[Narrator] And it's during this awkward, beautiful dance

that these queer little animals get even queerer.

What's interesting about seahorses is that

they buck the trend of uh... who is pregnant.

Seahorses, when they mate,

will swim together and then the female,

using an organ called an over-positive,

which is a bit like a penis for eggs,

will place them inside the male's brood pouch

which is on his sort of seahorse tummy.

[Narrator] She'll lay up to 1,000 eggs inside him,

and now it's his job to carry them

until they're ready to hatch.

As humans, we tend to presume that sex is male-female

and that birth is the female giving birth to a live baby.

Seahorses are really unusual among fish in the fact that

it's not the female that has babies, it's the male.

So if we're thinking of animals that flip

the traditional gender roles,

seahorses take the biscuit.

[Narrator] But there is one animal

that takes gender inversion and role-reversal

a step further.

And we've met them already...

Spotted hyenas.

Their ruthless cunning is no laughing matter.

[hyenas barking]

People think that hyenas are dirty and ugly and gross,

and that they are only scavengers,

and they're always eating a bunch of crap.

[flies buzzing]

But, honestly, that actually

couldn't be further from the truth.

[Narrator] This clan has a fresh carcass.

But this isn't a free for all.

The alpha eats first.

[Christine] According to western society,

males need to be the biggest,

fattest, the strongest, the ones in charge

but spotted hyenas upend that.

Spotted hyenas are the opposite of that.

Females are in charge,

they're the ones that are calling all the shots.

[Narrator] Their body size is larger.

They're more aggressive.

They also have a penis.

Huh.

[Florence] It's very hard to tell if a hyena

is female or male by looking at their genitals.

You need to be a particularly skilled scientist

to be able to tell the difference,

and the reason for that

is because hyenas have absolutely

massive, massive clitorises.

They actually look almost indistinguishable from penises.

So spotted hyenas, for those of us who know,

are famous for their genitalia.

So female hyenas have what's called a pseudo-phallus.

In fact, the pseudo-phallus is really, really amazing.

But also it does some pretty incredible things.

[Narrator] Like get an erection?

Hyenas have the best genitals,

and I know that's a weird thing to say, but it's true.

[Narrator] But they do have some down sides.

The spotted hyena is one of the only species,

if not the only species, with an internal vaginal opening

so they have sex, they pee and they give birth

through their clitoris basically

which, yes, it sounds absolutely horrific

and it can be, in some cases.

[laughs]

[Narrator] Despite being bigger, more aggressive

and having a larger phallus than the males, atta girl,

these alpha females are also incredible moms.

Raising even their smallest female cub

to be dominant to all the males.

Spotted hyenas are in fact the queens of the plains.

I would argue that they're also in some ways

the kings of the plains as well.

[Narrator] These much maligned and misunderstood animals

are just one more beautiful feather in nature's queer cap.

And a reminder that when it comes to family,

there's no such thing as normal.

I find studying the natural world fascinating

because it helps us to understand what could be,

rather than what is,

especially when we take learning from that into the human world.

Nature is thrillingly inclusive and profoundly tolerant,

and it has to be because every niche in every behavior

in every species somehow

contributes to all life on Earth.

We need everybody. We need everything.

[Narrator] And that includes a whole bunch of weird,

wonderful and unsettling creatures.

You might not think that queer insects exist

but, in fact, within the insect world

there are loads and loads of different ways of being

a gender or having sex.

You can add up all of the different species of mammals,

of birds, of reptiles, fishes,

even things like worms and slugs and snails,

and that number doesn't come close

to the number of different ways of being an insect.

[Narrator] Female hyenas might run the show,

but one group of insects have gone a step further.

They've gotten rid of males almost entirely.

You find leaf cutter ants in lush rain forest environments,

places like Costa Rica, and they're very noticeable

because you might not see them

but you'll see little pieces of leaf walking around

on the forest floor or in the branches of trees.

[Narrator] There are so many ants here

that they outnumber every other species combined.

Although lots of people find insects small and annoying,

they are insects.

This isn't planet of the apes. This is planet of the bugs.

[Narrator] Millions of these ants are basically cutting

and carrying literal tons of leaves back to their nest,

but life isn't that simple.

Worker ants are incredibly strong.

They chop pieces of leaf and carry them,

which are up to 20 times their own body weight

but, unfortunately, they're also the target

of lots of different predators. Everything is out to eat ants.

And so to try to solve this problem,

the ants have evolved to have guards within their own colony.

They're huge bruisers of ants.

They've got massive heads, huge jaws and I can tell you

that they give a really nasty pinch.

What's surprising is that despite looking completely

different, those two ants are nearly genetically identical.

They're both from the same species, the same colony,

they're both female and they're sisters.

[Narrator] In fact, all the ants in the colony

are female.

It's a remarkable asexual single gender society,

and you can't get queerer than that.

The nest of a leaf cutter ant is like a giant

subterranean society,

it's about all of these individuals inside that colony

are female, and each one of them has a slightly different role.

[Narrator] And at the heart of the colony,

lies the queen.

[Antonia] The queen's job is to lay eggs.

She lays up to 20 eggs every minute,

which is nearly 30,000 eggs every day.

Every individual that you see, those are all of her daughters.

The sex of an ant doesn't depend on its sex chromosomes

but the number of copies of chromosomes that it has.

So if a queen fertilizes an egg, it becomes female,

and if she doesn't fertilize it, it becomes male.

That also means that male ants have no father.

[Narrator] Males are only created once every year or two.

Their sole purpose is to migrate to a new colony,

have sex with the queen and add some genetic diversity.

[Tim] For a male ant, life is kind of tough.

They don't last for very long, most of them they die virgins.

[Narrator] The incredible thing is ants aren't the only animals

to have single gender societies.

Bees...

Wasps...

Even termites all have same sex families,

but it isn't just insects who do this.

There are some incredible mammal families too.

Like the one living beneath the sandy soils of Southern Africa.

Okay, how to describe a naked mole rat?

A naked mole rat looks a lot like a human phallus.

They don't have any hair, they're kind of wrinkly

and they have these giant teeth that's not like a human phallus.

[Narrator] A penis with teeth.

No, thanks.

This male mole rate might look remarkable

and remarkably familiar,

but his looks are not the most unique thing about him.

Some of my favorite qualities about these

extraordinary ugly but emphasis on extraordinary

little mammals is that, first of all,

they can tolerate very low levels of oxygen.

They don't need to breathe hardly at all.

Number two, they have almost no pain receptors.

[Narrator] And, number three, well, they behave

like a giant colony of insects.

Like ants, only the queen and a couple of males ever have sex.

Basically you have this queen mole rat

that is significantly bigger and gets bigger every year

than all the other mole rats.

Everybody else, asexual worker bees effectively

except they're little sort of tiny fleshy beanbag mammals.

[Narrator] The queen's hormones suppress the sex drive

of the rest of the colony, stopping any infighting.

As a result, they're highly inbred.

In fact, they're almost clones of each other.

[Narrator] These super close siblings cooperate to ensure

the colony can survive the harsh desert environment.

Nature is full of surprises

and often not what it seems to be.

That's the glorious thing about it.

[Narrator] A lot has changed in the past century since Darwin.

We've moved from the nuclear norms of Queen Victoria,

to perfectly permed Stepford wives.

Darling, you couldn't be clumsy. You're perfect.

[Narrator] Free-loving hippies, and into the modern millennia.

But we've also had time to take a closer look at nature.

So many different ways in the animal kingdom

of having a family.

One male and one female, two males, two females,

groups of females, groups of males, single parents.

There's so many different ways to have a family.

[Narrator] It's taken us quite a while

to catch up with the wild,

who have been happily raising diverse families

for millions of years.

Normal does not exist anywhere, especially not in nature,

and it doesn't even exist among people.

[Narrator] We've seen that animals can be gay,

bi, pan and even asexual.

So what other surprises does this queer planet hold?

The best place to continue our search for queerness

is one of the most diverse habitats on the planet.

Fish are the most diverse group of vertebrates on the planet.

Of things that have got a backbone,

half of those things on the planet are fishes.

[Narrator] Nearly 80% of all animals

live in the ocean,

and they rarely follow the rules...

especially when it comes to sex.

Take Hawksbill turtles.

This female is on an epic migration

back to her birth place.

However, she wasn't born a female, but intersex.

Neither male or female.

Her gender determined by the environment.

They can't lay their eggs under water,

so this female will do so at night on land.

And that's no easy task

when you've got flippers instead of feet.

Turtles have got to find not only the right beach

to lay their eggs on,

but the right place on that beach.

They've got to go up the beach far enough,

so that the eggs don't get swamped at high tide,

and they need to be able to dig a hole deep enough

to maintain the temperature that's good for the eggs.

[Narrator] Which is unfortunate as the sea turtle's sex

is determined by temperature.

[Tim] If the temperature's low, they turn into males.

If the temperature is high, they turn into females

and there's a sweet spot right in the middle

where you get some males and some females,

the kind of normal way of hatching as a turtle.

[Narrator] The sweet spot is around 86 degrees.

3 degrees more, or less,

and they all end up a single gender

but for the baby turtles

that's the least of their worries right now.

First, they've got to make it to the ocean.

And everything wants to eat them.

[seagulls squawking]

In the entire life span of a female turtle,

she might lay thousands of eggs but, on average, of course,

only one or two of those are likely to survive.

[Narrator] And that creates a bigger problem.

You might think that hatching on this really dangerous

beach environment is the biggest peril

that these babies face

but, in fact, there's another thing.

The temperature of the nest in which they're laid.

As the climate is heated by human activity,

the temperatures are increasing,

and we're finding more and more nests that hatch all female.

[Narrator] Without our help,

it may not be long before these aquatic wonders

disappear entirely.

But turtles are far from the only aquatic species

whose sex is flex.

On the other side of the ocean

lies one of the most colorful places on the planet,

full of wonderfully queer creatures.

If you're lucky enough to submerge yourself

in the aquatic wonderland that is a coral reef.

One of the first things you notice,

there's just this cacophony of the noise that's going on.

And what you're listening to,

a lot of different marine animals,

specifically fish, having sex

and they're quite vocal about it, which I love.

[Narrator] And not just having sex but changing sex too.

The majority of organisms on coral reefs

are actually hermaphrodites.

Whether that means they change sex

or are multiple sexes at the same time.

More than 500 species of fish alone change sex

at least once in their life times.

[Narrator] And one trans fish is pretty famous in its own right.

Now I happened to have some small roles on Finding Nemo.

It's a wonderful, Academy award-winning film

but there are a couple of factual errors.

[Narrator] For a start, clown fish family life

is nowhere near as straight as most of us think.

So they don't have what we would describe

as like a traditional family unit.

They've got one female, one male,

and then many juvenile males all taking care of babies together.

[Narrator] No joke.

The male clown fish do most of the housework,

keeping the eggs and the anemone clean.

The female does the fighting.

So clown fish live in an anemone.

The stinging tentacles mean that other potential predators

are put off attacking the clown fish,

but it's not just a one-way interaction.

The clown fish also helps defend the anemone.

They can attack surprisingly viciously.

I have a friend who has a scar from a clown fish.

[Narrator] But stray too far from safety...

[Jaws-type music]

...and the family can end up without a matriarch,

which is a problem.

These feisty females stay in their own anemone

their whole lives so another won't swim over and replace her.

So, in the movie, when Nemo's mother, Coral,

unfortunately is killed what would actually happen was

his father would then become his new mother.

[Narrator] They physically change sex, genitals and all.

His father would change gender

and become the dominant female in the group.

And Nemo would become a suitor to his new Mum.

It's awkward.

So it's basically, you know, your traditional

boy meets girl story except for, you know,

the female dies and then the male turns into a female.

Then the boy that was hanging around will then grow up

into a man, and then they'll have sex and this will go on forever

with constant changing in from male to female,

and then getting eaten and disappearing.

Thanksgiving is a little bit weird for them,

but that is exactly how it happens.

[Narrator] Reefs are a lot queerer than Hollywood

would have you believe.

Even the coral is in on the action.

You might not think that the aquatic wonderland

that is coral reef is a haven for physical sex change

but it absolutely is.

Coral generally looks a bit like a colorful,

maybe a little bit slimy rock.

But what it actually is, it's a little bubble

with tentacles and a mouth/anus in the middle.

For the most part, corals do just sit there.

They just sit on a reef, they're glued down,

literally cemented down.

[Narrator] But that all changes in the dark

when the party gets started.

[party music]

[Goatley] You'll see them with their tentacles out feeding.

Some of them will vomit up their guts.

They can fight with their neighbors.

[Narrator] They also have sex with them.

And while their bodies are far from flexible,

sexually they're anything but.

70-80% of corals are hermaphroditic,

meaning that they are multiple sexes,

whether at different times in their life, or at the same time.

[Narrator] Giving the sedentary filter feeders

a much higher chance of finding a partner of the right sex.

And on a warm spring night they all spawn together,

increasing those odds even further.

You have this great, vast aquatic ejaculation,

a clouding sea, and any eggs laid in that time

will be fertilized, but by whom?

We don't know and we don't care as long as it works.

[Christopher] Everything's floating up,

it's a pretty incredible spectacle.

Until you realize that you're swimming around

in coral sperm and eggs.

[Narrator] In this upside down, underwater world

it's clear that things are far more complicated

than once thought.

Turtles aren't born male or female.

Fish change sex, and coral like to do it together,

no matter the sex they currently are.

Everything you were taught as a kid is wrong.

The facts are this.

The gender-sex spectrum is real

and it's not a straight line from straight to queer.

It's a halo. A sphere if you will.

There's so much room, and nature is constantly changing

and you and I, we all fit together in there somewhere.

As humans, we've got this innate need to categorize things,

to put them in boxes.

In reality, we're trying to put lots of things

that are actually spectra into categories

where they just don't fit.

The notion that you would just have

one sexual identity or preference

is very, very rare

but the point is animals change their gender and their partners.

It's normal, it's life, it's how things work.

[Narrator] It's clear that sex and gender

are incredibly flexible in the wild,

so it begs the question

how much more fluid can they be?

It's time to find out.

[Narrator] Hiding amongst the sea grasses

lurks a creature with a surprising number of genders.

My favorite example

of "queer behavior" in animals is in cuttlefish.

One of the most remarkable things about cuttlefish

is their ability to change color.

They can even change the texture of their skin.

It's like a high definition television suit and, you know,

it's used for camouflage

but it's also used for sexual advertising.

[Narrator] This little male is currently using both

to approach a female,

but he isn't alone.

Other males are interested in her too.

And they are much bigger and showier than he is.

So these adult male cuttlefish will display different colors

and they'll often be quite bright reds and whites,

showing that they're strong and fit.

[Narrator] But little guy can't compete directly,

and never will be able to.

So he doesn't.

These can become what we call sneaker-males.

Small sneaker-males could be considered a third gender.

[Narrator] These permanently smaller,

third gender cuttlefish really are masters of disguise.

So these males pretend to be female

to avoid having the stuffing beaten out of them

by these big, brawny, beefy males.

Sneaky males will display female coloration on one side,

and even pretend to hold an egg sack

to complete the illusion of being female,

sneak past the larger male and then display

typical male colors in order to woo females and reproduce.

I think that's a brilliant example of adaptation

in the animal kingdom in a queer way.

[Narrator] And they are remarkably successful,

perhaps a little too successful.

[Antonia] The camouflage is so effective that males will often

mistake other males for being females and,

rather than just let them pass, will actually mate with them.

What we find, these small males are that good at this behavior

that they can't even tell each other apart and we end up seeing

about 40% homosexual interactions

between sneaker-male cuttlefish.

[Narrator] Which may come as a bit of a surprise

for both parties.

And cuttlefish aren't the only animals

redefining our narrow notion of gender.

Back on dry land, and you couldn't get any drier!

In the deserts of Arizona, an otherwise unremarkable lizard

is playing a remarkable game... of genders.

[Western music]

I'm always hunting for the small things that people don't notice,

the small lizard that might run away as you walk near it,

or the little lizard

hiding underneath a branch in the shade.

[Narrator] This female is looking for a mate,

and while you might find dating hard,

for a side-blotch lizard, it's uniquely tricky.

It's amazing that these unremarkable lizards have

one of the most complex mating strategies on the planet.

They have up to five genders.

Three different types of males,

and two different types of females

and they each do things that impact their ability

to mate with the opposite sex.

So these are not just five different ways of behaving,

they are physically different.

The males have different penises, for example,

as well as being different colors.

[Narrator] The physical differences including size

are determined by their genes,

and each gender has different survival advantages

depending on the environment.

They're often called the Rochambeau

or Rock Paper Scissor lizards

because of the mating game the different genders play.

The rules of the game go like this.

Well, you know, your orange throated male's

you're a machismo.

He's gonna be the male that's out there to mate

with as many females as he possibly can.

Your blue throated male's probably your sensitive

newage guy, but that really just wants a partner.

Your yellow male on the other hand,

he's like living loose and fancy free.

He doesn't really have any ties whatsoever.

[Tim] Orange beats blue,

blue beats yellow, but yellow beats orange.

[Narrator] And that doesn't include the two female genders,

who wear two different colors and lay different size eggs.

Successfully mating means finding the right match,

and she's spotted a blue throated male.

[Dan] The blue males tend to defend areas that are smaller

and may contain only a single female.

[Narrator] Unfortunately, an approaching orange male

has his own ideas.

[Tim] They will aggressively defend their territories

and woe-betide any other male that comes into their territory.

[Narrator] But the game's not done yet.

Here comes yellow.

The yellow throated lizards.

Now these are the sneaky maters.

They'll hang around the territory of those dominant

orange male lizards and they'll try to sneak in

and mate with one of their females.

[Narrator] It's an ever evolving competition

allowing the local population to quickly adapt

to different environments.

[Antonia] What happens in nature is that in these

polymorph populations these different types fluctuate.

So it's this kind of circular game of sex,

and it's a game that the lizards have been playing for millennia.

[Narrator] While nobody likes games and relationships,

these lizards challenge our notions

of what gender really means.

But if you think they have a lot of genders,

then hold onto your genitals

because they've got nothing on the woodlands.

Where deep in the leaf litter

lives some incredible organisms

with a mind bogging array of non-binary sexes.

So it's easy to be enamored with, like, big species,

like lions, tigers, bears, right,

and fungi maybe don't have that immediate shock value,

but once you really start to pay attention to them,

you see all sorts of beautiful,

magical things that they're doing.

They can be yellow, they can be white, they can be pink even.

They come in all sorts of sizes, shapes.

[Narrator] In fact, these other worldly oddities

are essential to life on Earth.

They are everywhere you can imagine.

The surface of your hands, inside your stomach, the ocean,

the tops of trees, they're everywhere

doing so many critical functions for our planet

and for our survival.

[Narrator] And to fill all these roles,

they need to be super diverse... sexually.

Fungi have, as far as we know,

up to 23,000 sexes and maybe more.

That's just what we've discovered so far.

[Narrator] Fungi are neither plants nor animals,

so don't have sex chromosomes.

Instead, small regions of their DNA determine their sex,

which creates a ton of physical variation when they mate.

Allowing them to thrive almost anywhere on the planet.

Everyone should have a fungus that they're in love with.

[Narrator] With so much fluidity,

it's clear that nature is non-binary

when it comes to sex and gender.

So what is the most common lifestyle in the wild?

[Narrator] Despite appearances,

this lonely leopard slug holds a clue

to Mother Nature's preferred number of genders.

Molluscs are a vastly underappreciated

group of animals.

All terrestrial snails, for example,

are hermaphrodites, and intersex.

In many cases, their actual sex is determined during love making

as to whether or not (a) one set of genitals is chewed off

or (b) they are injected with a chemically coated dart.

You might feel that you have to give a lot to your partner,

but at least in the human kingdom

we don't have to detach our genitals.

[Narrator] All that pales in comparison

to this slug's love making.

One of the more extraordinary and slimy sights in nature.

If you thought human sex was weird, try being a leopard slug.

Leopard slugs mature at different times of year,

so when they're old enough to mate,

first of all their male sexual organs mature.

So they're essentially male slugs.

But then later in the year, their female organs mature

and so then they become essentially male and female

at the same time.

[Narrator] And when that happens on a warm summer's eve,

they go looking for a mate.

When they find one, they have to seduce them

by biting their bottom.

It's testing the water, is this a viable mate?

Is this other slug ready for action as well?

So if the bum-biting has been accepted as a form of courtship,

they will allow that biting to continue

and they will crawl up to the nearest tree.

[Narrator] And this is where it gets a bit kinky.

They start to writhe around, the heads touch each other,

and they twist round in this kind of serpentine motion

and then, all of a sudden,

the males drop down on this very,

very strange thread of mucus.

They construct this really long dangling mucus trapeze.

It's like a high-wire for sex,

and basically the slugs will then entangle each other

around their bodies.

[Narrator] And then their penises will...

come out of their heads.

And they're like dick unicorns basically with their,

with their penis heads.

Let's just remember how weird this is,

the human equivalent would be like having

a 15-foot translucent penis projecting

from the side of your head.

This is really weird stuff, and then for about 20 minutes

these two penises intertwine and splay out

into what's been described as a love orb.

Then they will inseminate each other

and then one of them will drop off the slime onto the ground,

the other one will go down the tree

and they'll go their separate ways

to have their babies independently.

[Narrator] Though they can both get each other pregnant,

they don't have to.

So slugs are a good example of a group of organisms

that have both sexes in their bodies.

[Tim] But there's another twist to the tale because

even if a leopard slug doesn't manage to find a mate,

and mate in this really strange way,

well it's both a male and a female at the same

time and so it can just reproduce on its own.

[Narrator] Which isn't as lonely as it sounds.

Not all animals need to have sex at all.

We see lots of the time where there's either one gender

or one sex of animals that can reproduce by itself,

or we get organisms that just reproduce

by asexual reproduction

which means they just clone themselves.

It's called parthenogenesis,

and it's not just weird little creepy-crawlies,

we're talking sharks, we're talking birds,

we're talking amphibians, we're talking bees.

All sorts of creatures can just produce these clones.

[Narrator] In fact, the number of organisms

that are multiple sexes simultaneously,

or able to clone themselves, outnumber

all the rest put together...

And one group of them make up 80% of all life on the planet.

When we talk about queer behaviors,

we're not just talking about animals,

we're talking about all living things period.

Plants. Oh my God, flowers, trees, shrubbery.

Nothing is as oversexed as a shrubbery.

It would blow your mind, and just because they're fixed

in place doesn't mean that they don't have

incredibly active sex lives.

[Narrator] And while we might see plants as objects of beauty,

the reality is a little more... messy.

What we often don't think about is the fact that flowers are,

first of all, the sex organs of plants

kind of dangling on the top of these stems.

Here's a bouquet of vulvas.

Have a dick. I love you that much.

You can have male structures in one or both the female and male

are in the same structure, they can come in any different form.

Plant reproduction is very exciting and extremely variable,

but they're basically just having sex all the time.

Especially in spring.

Right with your hay fever,

that's a lot of plant sex going on.

Your nostrils are rejecting this extraordinary

blizzard of genetic material.

Eggs and sperm just racing into your airways,

and your nose isn't ready for it.

[Narrator] It seems that in the natural world,

the idea of just having two fixed sexes

is clearly out of style.

There are queer cuttlefish with three, lizards with five.

Fungi with thousands, and billions of plants,

corals and assorted animals

which can be multiple at the same time.

So much of what we as humans

think is true in nature turns out to be false.

But we've got to have covered everything by now, right?

Or have we?

[Narrator] If our journey has shown us anything,

it's that things are never quite how they seem.

Even here in the Rockies.

The rugged all-American heartland where we began.

There are surprises in store.

[crowd cheering]

Welcome, y'all, to the rodeo.

[Narrator] At the 39th annual Rocky Mountain Gay Rodeo,

some of the best cowboys in the country

are vying for the prize of rodeo king...

or queen.

Or even Drag Queen.

And in the nearby foothills another contest is afoot.

With everything we've learned,

it's time to take another closer look at these iconic animals.

Big horn sheep are one of the ultimate masculine symbols.

We're talking 300 be-horned pounds of don't argue,

throbbing and thrusting their way through the Rockies.

They're very impressive animals.

[Narrator] Each fall, for a few days,

while the females are fertile,

the males compete to mate.

They have a double layer of bone through their skull,

and that means that they can ram each other literally,

no pun intended, at 40 miles an hour,

skull to skull and you and I end up with horrific brain damage,

and they're just fine, they don't feel a thing.

[Narrator] But despite how it appears,

and how they are presented in the media,

these animals are actually some of the queerest alive.

I think people might be surprised

if they look a bit closer at big horn sheep behavior,

because they'd find that it's more diverse

than they might expect from that stereotypical image.

[Narrator] For most of the year,

this macho male never sees a female.

They live completely separate in bachelor herds,

and during those times, they can be "very social."

[Antonia] Almost all male big horn sheep

engage in homosexual courtship

and in homosexual copulation.

Genital nuzzling, licking,

and even surprising behaviors like kicking each other

in the testicles to get each other's attention.

[Narrator] Ouch!

After such a loving courtship, who could refuse?

A 2004 study showed that 8% or even more of big horn sheep

were only interested in other males.

70% of male-male interactions in big horn sheep

involve some sort of courtship.

These activities are not just physically pleasurable

but also diffuse potential tension

where these guys would smash each other to smithereens

on top of these mountains so it's basically a gay rugby club!

[Narrator] But big horns have another hidden aspect

to their lives.

So, in big horn sheep there's three genders.

Females live by themselves.

They only accept mounting three days of the year,

then there are males which are the more typically masculine,

they engage in the same sex activity,

and they engage in intercourse year round.

Then there are male-bodied individuals

who live with females, who aren't as aggressive,

they crouch and urinate like females,

and also, like the females, they only accept mounting

for about three days of the year.

They're, for all intents and purposes,

female except for their basic physiology which is 110% male.

So they're a very unique animal

and, as a symbol of masculinity, astonishingly progressive.

These remarkable queer animals remind us to constantly question

what we think we know,

and never to judge a book by its cover.

It's clear that no matter where you look on our planet,

nature is full of queer surprises.

Our trip has taken us from the southern oceans,

to the Great Barrier Reef, the plains of Africa,

to the salt pans of the Yucatan,

and every habitat in-between.

We've met gay penguins, bisexual lions,

pansexual primates,

sex-changing clown fish,

and a rainbow's worth of other queer creatures

big and small that show the true diversity of our world.

But there's still one animal left

that we've hardly mentioned...

Us.

Within the human world there's a massive amount of diversity,

more diversity than we see

in any other species on Planet Earth.

That's the key ingredient in our evolution.

Humans have not invented queerness, evolution has.

Human sexuality is diverse.

It is expansive.

It is a spectrum, and it is beautiful.

So many different sexualities,

there's so many different ways of being,

and all of them are equally human.

[Narrator] But it's not without controversy.

Queerness in humans has always existed,

what hasn't always existed is acceptance and tolerance.

I am a queer woman,

a little bit of a gender-bender myself.

For so long people have looked at their fellow human beings,

who are queer, or trans, or somewhere in that realm,

as being unnatural, as being against nature.

It's not necessarily safe to be out in academia.

I still don't feel comfortable being out about my sexuality.

In a sense I felt lonely.

I didn't see many other faces like me in academia.

When I came out, one of the things I heard

was it's not natural, or you don't see the animals doing this

and that's ridiculous because you really do.

There was nothing on the biological side

that's a downside to being gay.

It's only on the cultural side.

And fortunately, that's something that we can change.

[Narrator] And the best way to do that

is to show the world for how it truly is.

So nature is not some abstract concept, it's you.

You are an extension of nature, nature is an extension of you.

The more that we can get that information out there,

the more we're gonna be able to show people

that queer is natural.

One of the great experiences of my life has been seeing

the tremendous changes that have come

with a new queer generation,

so much more true to what is out there.

If you look at the most successful ecosystems,

what you see is an abundant array of cooperative behaviors.

When communities work together, they thrive

and I can't think of a more important time

in Earth's history for us to acknowledge

that it is natural to accept

that everybody has a part to play

and be grateful for their contribution

regardless of how they lived their lives.

And for God's sake, how they choose to have sex.

[Narrator] In the known universe,

there is only a single place where life exists

more diverse and wonderful

than your wildest imagination.

A place we should all be proud to call home.