Are there any gay cats?

The answer, as the image on this page states, is yes and no. It seems that domestic cats can behave as gay rather than heterosexual when they are sufficiently frustrated because they are unable to mate with the opposite sex. Under these circumstances their behavior is called an ‘overspilling of sexual activity’. It is probably fair to say that all domestic cats prefer to mate with members of the opposite sex. Gay sex acts are second best.

These sorts of gay behaviours may occur when:

• Two sexually aroused male cats are together but they lack a female mate. Under these circumstances one of them might switch to becoming a female and behave as such. One of the males may crouch like a female and perform female-like behaviour while the other mounts him.
• A female may mount another female even going so far as to bite the neck of the other female to keep them still as she mounts her and makes the typical thrusting actions.
• Sexually thwarted a male may mate with an inanimate object like a teddy bear or as is the case with my cat mate with my right arm. This is not that uncommon. It would seem that there is quite a lot of domestic cat sexual frustration. This might be in line with frustrations over other ‘raw cat’ behaviours such as hunting if the cat is kept indoors all the time. It is why you see cats chattering at birds on the other side of a window leading to a backyard.
• In laboratory studies where one male cat lives in a cage which is his much-compressed home range and another male cat is placed in it, the resident cat might ‘rape’ the incoming cat even if the resident is smaller than the outsider. The territory owner always came out on top (literally).

Somewhat belatedly it occurred to me that the purest forms of gay human sex is conducted within genuine mutual love which cannot said about the feline behaviors described above. But can cats love each other? That’s another topic.

P.S. Some humans are ‘asexual’ – disinterested in sex. This condition does not, it seems, apply to domestic cats.

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