It’s nearly impossible to take a penguin seriously. Perhaps it’s the way they waddle. Perhaps it’s their bowling pin heads. Perhaps it’s that, like the chicken, for all of their engineering, they still cannot fly. I wonder if penguins take each other seriously. Perhaps there has been a Charles Darwin type penguin or a Plato type penguin but none of the other penguins listened because it’s impossible to take a penguin seriously. Penguins are just so funny. Not Danny Devito. He wasn’t remotely funny. Conversely, I think that a dead penguin might be the saddest thing ever.

In fact there’s nothing much funnier than a penguin. Except maybe a gay penguin. Now gay penguins are really funny. A zoo in Germany, the Bremerhaven Zoo, has three all-male penguin couples. Funnier still, the six queer penguins kept their lifestyle a secret from the zookeepers. One of each of the pairs pretended to hatch eggs that were actually rocks. So, for years, the zookeepers naturally thought the 3 couples were boy-girl couples.

The zoo, when this was discovered, attempted to intervene. What do you do with six gay penguins? Well, you fly in exotic fancy Swedish female penguins eager to get in a family way to try to turn them. But the happy gay penguins could not be turned.

And this is when people started taking gay penguins seriously which is not so easy to do. Gay rights groups protested. So now the zoo has six gay boy penguins and four randy girl penguins and no way to incite reproduction. They also have angry letters from gay rights groups. So they flew in some confirmed heterosexual penguins to tend to the girl penguins. The gay boys have been left to live as they please.

This is how it works: if you’re gay and you happen to be a penguin in Germany – not a country historically known for tolerance – , your relationship will finally be recognized and your lifestyle choices will be protected. But if you’re not a penguin and you don’t live in a German zoo, you might not be so lucky.

SS