There may be no animal species that can boast as many celebrity bi couples as penguins. Here at Bi.org, we’ve covered the most famous of these, Silo and Roy, a pair of male chinstrap penguins whose heartwarming relationship in New York City’s Central Park Zoo made headlines around the globe in the early 2000s. But they’re far from the only bi penguins to enjoy fame and notoriety. It’s a phenomenon seen across the world.
In 2017, Thelma and Louise, two female king penguins, raised an adopted egg together in a New Zealand zoo. In 2020, another pair of gals, Gentoo penguins Electra and Viola, raised a chick of their own from an adopted egg in a Spanish zoo. In Berlin, male king penguins Skipper and Ping became proud papas in 2019. And Australia’s Sea Life Zoo produced not one but two famous same-sex penguin couples: Sphen and Magic, and Klaus and Jones.
In some zoos, 5% of all pairs of Humboldt penguins are same-sex, and 12% of all sexual behavior occurs between males. Penguins of the same sex also engage a variety of courtship displays toward one another, including bowing, allopreening (a form of grooming), and pressing closely together while vibrating their flippers.
Many of these couples are described in the media as being “gay”, though they are in fact bisexual. As the science journalist Emily V. Driscoll correctly wrote in her coverage of Silo and Roy in Scientific American in 2008:
An animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones.
This isn’t just a quirk developed in captivity, as was once commonly believed. Penguins in the wild display bisexual behavior as well — only, for a hundred years, the evidence was hidden. As the 2025 documentary Animal Pride covers, the British naval captain and explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1910–1913 gave his crew a front-row seat to penguin behavior. One member, the British photographer and zoologist George Murray Levick, documented all sorts of bisexual mating among Adélie penguins. But while the Victorian Age was a lot sexier than people remember, it was still the era of stodgy respectability, and queer penguins were most assuredly not respectable. As a recent CBC article put it:
His [Levick’s] field notes described ‘hooligan’ male penguins engaging in same-sex couplings and other behaviour that he considered ‘depraved’ at the time. Levick’s potentially scandalous research on the penguins’ sex lives was never published in full and most of his observations were eventually buried in the archives of London’s Natural History Museum for decades. His complete account only came to light in 2012, when it was rediscovered by curator Douglas Russell and finally shared with the public.
As we’ve covered with the case of elephants, this kind of erasure is sadly common. Most of the same-sex animal behavior observed by scientists in the field is either not recorded, not documented, or not published. But the truth always has a way of coming out, no matter how long folks put it on ice.