Gay penguins?!

Apparently, it's fairly common for penguins frustrated in their hopes of parenthood to try to satisfy their nurturing urges by adopting a nice round stone and trying to look after it as if it were an egg.

The craftier - or less scrupulous - of these eggless penguins may even on occasion steal an egg from another penguin couple and leave a round stone in its stead, in the hope that the theft won't be noticed.

Now, it seems, a male homosexual penguin couple at the Polar World zoo in the China's north-eastern city of Harbin have developed this naughty habit - and it's been pissing off the other penguins so much that their keepers have decided they need to be segregated from the rest of the community.

Yes, so many layers of potential symbolism in this story. I picked this up from the Gay & Lesbian column in this month's Time Out Beijing (don't jump to any conclusions; I read the entire magazine, OK?), but I suspect they got it from this piece in Britain's Daily Telegraph at the end of November. I'm not sure how much coverage it might have received in the domestic Chinese media.

I gather same-sex couples amongst penguins are not so very uncommon: there used to be a celebrated pair at New York's Central Park Zoo, much reported in the early noughties. Their keepers allowed them to adopt abandoned eggs and found them to be excellent parents (though it seems the couple split up a few years ago, after more than 8 years together). This would seem to be a rather more positive approach than that being followed so far in Harbin; but then, these two had tried to satisfy their parental instincts by looking after stones, and hadn't enraged the rest of the colony with rampant egg-stealing. Their names, incidentally, were Roy and Silo. Silo?! Ugh, that has some unfortunate potential connotations!

On the one hand, I take it as quite a positive sign that the Chinese media will acknowledge there is any homosexuality in China - even among penguins. On the other, though, I fear that this story is less an indicator of dawning enlightenment with regard to gay issues here, and more about advertising. I suspect the Harbin Polar World hasn't been doing so well lately, and was looking for a new draw: "Where can we find something that's still polar, but more of a unique attraction? Could we get an anorexic seal or a right-handed polar bear? Wait - those gay penguins were gold dust for that zoo in America a few years ago! Why don't we get us some of those??"

Am I a hopeless cynic? Perhaps, perhaps.