Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. More often though, truth and fiction become intermingled, sometimes in amusing ways. When millions of opponents of same-sex marriage celebrated “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” in 2012, rallying around the fast-food chicken sandwich chain that has a long history of opposing LGBT rights, one man decided to start a Change.org petition. Titled, “End the hypocrisy! Stop serving gay chickens”, the petition, despite being covered by multiple media outlets with a straight face, was very obviously a work of satire. Citing that “as early as 1764, male chickens have been observed sexually mounting other cocks”, the petition urged the company, tongue-in-cheek, to ensure that they would “only sell animals that are 100% heterosexual”, lest its patrons unknowingly ingest some homosexuality along with their waffle fries.
Not everyone was joking, though. Two years prior, Bolivian President Evo Morales made global headlines by claiming at a climate conference that modern chickens are pumped full of hormones and turning men gay. Needless to say, there’s no evidence for this claim. But there’s a kernel of truth in all of this silliness: gay chickens — or more precisely, bisexual chickens — are very real.
In fact, that satirical Change.org petition was hilariously well-sourced, citing the 2008 book The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (which notes same-sex behavior in flocks of chickens) as well as biologist Bruce Bagemihl’s celebrated 1999 Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. Bagemihl himself was quoting a passage from the naturalist, ornithologist, and illustrator George Edwards’s Gleanings of Natural History (1764), which described young roosters who were observed to stay apart from hens and wanted only to “tread” (an explicitly sexual form of mounting) other roosters, though none of them wanted to be trodden themselves.
It’s not just roosters. Around the same time, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, catalogued in the second ornithological volume of his influential Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1771) that some hens imitate roosters and “would even attempt to perform his office”, an old-fashioned and euphemistic way of saying that these hens tried to mate with other hens.
As it happens, these 18th-century writers were rather late to the party. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch, writing in the 1st-2nd centuries CE in a work called “Whether beasts are rational”, noted as a matter of fact that same-sex behavior among chickens was commonly known and regarded as an “important and terrible omen” that could lead to the animal being burned alive. Perhaps a better title for that text could have been “Whether humans are rational”.
Same-sex behavior in chickens can also be easily induced in experimental environments, such as a 1964 study that found that same-sex mounting and treading among all-male flocks “were frequently observed”. In other situations, this behavior manifests on its own, such as the heartwarming 2020 story of a pair of hens, Domino and Michelle, who fell in love and sent the Internet aflutter.
We’ve known about chickens and their galline bisexuality for millennia. This behavior is understood, just as with most bird species, to play a role in social bonding, dominance hierarchies, sexual outlets, and just the ordinary variance of individual preferences that nearly always occur in populations of animals. Chickens, like so many other animals, cluck around on both sides of the fence.
