I have four fish tanks in my house: a five gallon tank with a Beta and five guppies (this sits right here on my desk); a 20 gallon tank with 18 guppies and 12 neon tetras; and a 55 gallon tank with eight really big angel fish and about 14 platies. Then I have the monster, the 205 gallon tank with an assortment of fish.
Platies are live bearers and, although this is gruesome, my angels have gotten huge because they devour the platies’ constant supply of babies. Between the flake food and platy babies my angels have a good, clean, healthy diet. The 55 gallon tank is right behind my desk in my home office.
So the five, the 20, the 55 and the 205 gallon tanks are in my office.
Today I got in an order of 12 more really, really fancy guppies for my 20 gallon tank, four males and eight females You always need more females because the males are maniacs when it comes to sex—they must have 100 orgasms a day! Then I noticed something—one of my new, magnificently beautiful male guppies is gay, I kid you not.
After they got used to the tank, which for guppies takes about five minutes, the other male guppies were nailing the female guppies all over the place. These fellows have constant boners. They are like 12-year-old human males.
But this particular guppy didn’t go near a female. No. Instead he’d go under the male guppies and try to copulate with them (dare I say this?) anally. I mean, guppies do have, uh, openings and you should see how long and fearsome their do-do’s are but this guy was going for the exit. He totally ignored the females. (You cannot mistake a male guppy for a female. They are two totally different looking fish.)
I watched for a good half hour and not once did he give a damn about the females scurrying all over the place trying to escape the rapaciousness of the other male guppies. This guy just kept trying to plow the other guys. I’ve never seen anything like it. A gay fish! It has nothing to do with his upbringing or a desire to turn his sexuality in a different direction. His DNA simply said, “Yay, gay!”
Then I noticed something else—something amazing—one of my new female guppies is a lesbian, I swear to God. What the hell was going on? There was one female Guppy who fought—and I mean went head to head—with the male guppies trying to, uh, court her. She was a tough gal. The male guppies were much smaller and actually afraid of her. Of course, the raging boners of the males made them go to her time and again and she just violently shoed them away.
The male guppies had to avoid the jabs of my gay guppy and then they had to be really wary of the big female guppy who seemed to have murder in her heart.
It is possible that this is an evolutionary breakthrough—although I don’t know how the gay guppy and the lesbian guppy will reproduce more of their kind. I only have this to say, God created these guppies so He must approve of them and want them to (you know) do whatever the hell they do.
(My new book Confessions of a Wayward Catholic is now available at Amazon.)