Norway's Gay Animal Display

It's odd: as I've said before, something about the thriving avant garde music scene, the abundant fjords, the weird night-day stuff (which I do not fully understand) and their weird, backwards insistence on whaling makes Norway somehow singularly appealing to me (well, the whaling I could do without, but still...). Maybe it's just that Norwegian art I care about has reached some sort of critical threshold (Knut Hamsun, Edvard Munch, Odd Nerdrum, Fe-mail and Spunk, Supersilent, and so forth start to add up -- and it's not like I've gone out LOOKING for things Norwegian to like): for a country that is fairly far down on the usual tourist's idea of European cultural centers, there's a whole lot goin' on that I find interesting.

Well, add one more feather in Norway's crazy cap: they have a newsmaking museum display -- well, it's linked on the Fortean Times site, anyhow -- on animal homosexuality. I don't particularly concern myself with human homosexuality -- I'm at a bit of a remove from Vancouver's gay community, and other than standard liberal well-wishings, don't really have any interest in it; but animal homosexuality -- because it fucks up SO many preconceptions about what is and isn't natural -- absolutely delights me. I mean, think of it this way: two male humans fucking aren't going to do a single thing to shut a homophobe up, but two male MONKEYS fucking are gonna force him to actually sit and THINK a bit. So I'm all for it, this animal homosexuality thing... I even sometimes whip out a book I have on the topic in my ESL classes, to give my more conservative students something to ponder (fun review of that book here).