Bisexual Squid

Amorous Squid Seeks Partner: Any Sex Will Do
James Gorman
New York Times
September 20, 2011

Deep water squid have joined a long list of species known to engage in bisexual behavior. It turns out that male squid are quite happy to ejaculate on other squid, regardless of whether they are male or female. Of course, scientists don’t really know whether the squid experience anything analogous to sexual desire or pleasure, or whether they can even distinguish between male and female partners in the dark of the ocean depths.

Other species known to engage in bisexual behavior include mammals with relatively large brains, such as bonobo apes and bottlenose dolphins, but also herd mammals and birds.  And of course anyone who has a pet dog or cat has observed bicurious behavior in the natural world. Scientific manipulation of hormone levels in rats can also induce more homosexual behavior, though it’s not clear what this tells us, if anything, about behavior in humans.

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Married Man Discovers His Flexuality

The Secret (Sex) Life of A Middle-Aged Married Man
Rex Oso
October 6, 2011
Huffington Post

Thanks to a reader of the blog for tipping me off to this post by a man who has fallen in love with another man late in his marriage.

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Rimbaud

The publication of a new biography of — and a new translation by John Ashbery of the poems of — Arthur Rimbaud, the prodidgy of French modern poetry, have been the occasions for several articles about the poet and his life.

Rimbaud was notorious as a youth for his homosexual relationship with the older poet Paul Verlaine, who left his wife to be with him. Rimbaud spoke graphically about engaging in sodomy with Verlaine, and complained that Verlaine sometimes expected him to top, when he would prefer to bottom. But about a decade later, after giving up life as a poet and becoming a trader in Africa, Rimbaud settled down with a local woman.

Disappointingly, the reviewer of these books in the New Yorker needlessly characterized Rimbaud as really heterosexual, suggesting that his earlier homosexual relationship was just a bit of performance art. The reviewer in the New York Review of Books more properly avoided imposing modern assumptions onto the sexuality of either poet, both of whom were clearly capable of having meaningful relationships with either sex.

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