Amazon.co.uk Review
The claim that homosexual interactions among people are unnatural depends on the assumption that homosexual interactions between mammals and birds are rare. Bagemihl has an unabashed agenda, which is to demonstrate the contrary--he convincingly demolishes many of the standard zoological accounts and provides coherent evidence for bisexual and exclusively homosexual behaviour among many species. Where zoologists have admitted this, they have tried to explain it away as dominance behaviour, or the result of sexual monopolies; Bagemihl argues that homosexual interactions are particularly common among species like the small chimpanzees, the bonobo, whose behaviour patterns are not hierarchy-related. He has much fun in the process; this is often a very funny book in its demolition of standard scientific paradigms. Bagemihl provides an extensive gazetteer of species of mammals and birds; why, somehow, is it unsurprising about flamingos and sparrows and giraffes? And why are the photographs of walruses and elephants at it so charmingly comical? Bagemihl offers hostages to fortune in providing so many line drawings of gay sex among species where there happen to be no useful photographs and in his philosophical perspective--an assumption of neo-vitalism that comes perilously close to talking of the Life Force--but his principal case is well and clearly made. --
Roz Kaveney
Publishers Weekly, 21 December 1998
"A brilliant and important exercise in exposing the limitations of received opinion, this book presents to the lay reader and specialist alike an exhaustively argued case that animals have multiple shades of sexual orientation... What might so easily have turned into a tub-thumping activist tract hitched to the need for acceptance of homosexuality in humans, is instead elevated to a hugely inclusive, celebratory biological interpretation of the world."
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