I'e been thinking a lot about the main argument used by homo-phobics "it's not natural to be gay" and I already knew that wasn't really true as I knew of Roy and Silo, the 2 male penguins that raised a chick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_and_Silo), so I knew that it wasn't just humans that have the capability to be homosexual. Being me I thought I should look into it some more before writing on it. It turns out that homosexual behaviour has been observed in around 1500 animals, which makes it seem fairly natural.
Although strictly speaking it's more often bisexual (except in sheep where 10% of males are exclusively homosexual), in black swans for example a male will mate with a female, wait until she lays eggs and then drive her off for another male. The signets raised by the two males are more likely to survive than those raised by a male-female pair. So male-male pairings are not just natural but beneficial to the young. In fact humans exhibit a much lower rate of homosexual behaviour than many other species (the highest is in bonobos where 60% of all mating rituals are between 2 females)
So if homosexual pairings are so common across the animal kingdom I think its fairly safe to say that it's perfectly natural to find homosexuality in our species. Homophobia on the other hand, like all prejudices, is an exclusively human idea. It's strange to think that the people who pride themselves on being the natural type of human are the only ones exhibiting unnatural behaviours.
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