I’ll tell you why cats can’t be gay. There is quite a lot of talk on homosexuality in cats: gay males and lesbian females. A lot of cat owners claim that their cat is gay, male or female. They judge by their behaviour and not by their cats declared preferences! It is guesswork, then.
They claim that their male cat is gay because they try and have sex with another male cat. On the face of it, it looks true as homosexuality is being sexually attracted to the same sex. But because a male cat tries to hump another male cat, does it mean that the cat is sexually attracted? That’s the 64,000 dollar question.
I will say through hard personally experience that it does not because my cat likes to have sex with my dressing gown when my arm is in it. He is not attracted to my dressing gown in the shape of a cat. He is simply following through instinctively without rational thought to a desire to procreate on the nearest object available.
My dressing gown covering my arm is not a cat of the same sex therefore this is not an act of homosexuality.
Let’s look at it from a different perspective. Let’s say he regards me as a cat and that he is confused enough to regard my arm as my body even though it clearly is not. Does he regard me as a male or female cat? Logic indicates that he is more likely to regard me as a female because he wants to procreate. In which case under this scenario he cannot be said to be gay.
I think the trouble with classifying cats as gay is that the word describes human behaviour. In fact the label ‘gay’ is a poor description as it is pigeon holing human behaviour into a binary choice when nowadays people are more enlightened. They declare themselves ‘non-binary’ which reflects the true situation with humans namely that there is a continuous spectrum of sexuality and sexual desires. Sexual attraction to another is non-binary making the label ‘lesbian’ or ‘homosexual’ outdated and crudely incorrect.
If the label ‘gay’ is wrong for humans it is wrong for cats. I need to touch on female cats acting like lesbians. Owners judge this because female cats groom each other (called ‘allogrooming’ in the cat world). They judge this to be like humans dating. Allogrooming is fairly common in male and female cats. It is a sign of friendship.
Another person says that his cat has lesbian moms. He claims this because two females share the parenting of their 15 kittens. This is not lesbian cat behaviour. It is normal female mother behaviour. They often share parenting as it helps with survival. It is much more akin to human wives with young families helping each other out in one way or another rather than acting like lesbian humans.
I want to emphasis the point I made in the middle of this post. The concept of being queer is a human construct and it is already outdate and intrinsically incorrect. Humans have a habit of projecting human concepts onto their companion animals.
Touching on other animals, female macaques monkeys are seen to stimulate the genitals of other females. But can they be described as lesbian monkeys? It was decided (Vasey) that they were not truly homosexual. They were simply applying functional mutual masterbation (my description). And this is far more likely to be true from a Darwinian perspective. Lesbianism goes against the survival of the species. If all macaques were lesbian females and gay males the species would die out pretty fast.
P.S. This is a provocative topic and the conclusions are up for grabs. People will have their own views. These are mine and they are not necessarily correct.
The reasons why humans are sexual attracted to humans of the same sex should be dealt with on another website.
SOME PAGES ON ANTHROPOMORPHISING THE CAT:
