There were only two "homosexual" animals anyone was talking about earlier this year: Buddy and Pedro, a pair of male African penguins who lived in Toronto Zoo. Together. In the same nest.
Dubbed "Toronto's gay penguins", they provoked mixed responses from the press and the public, with certain right-wing US pundits decrying the situation, whereas others just thought it was pretty goshdarn cute.
All this has been rendered pretty much irrelevant with the news that Buddy and Pedro have "split up" after being, well, purposely split up by zookeepers to encourage breeding.
To make matters worse for the pair of sexually ambivalent aquatic birds, Buddy has taken to the whole getting-a-female-partner game quite happily, matching up with a lady penguin by the name of Farai after just 72 hours.
As for Pedro, he's taken a shine to another female, Thandiwey, but the match hasn't quite worked out yet. That said, it's not for the lack of trying on Pedro's part...
"Pedro is very ready to go, per se, but his prospective mate Thandiwey is a little shy," Tom Mason, the zoo's curator of birds and invertebrates, said on Monday. "She's not quite ready to go yet but they're beginners, they're just starting life as a pair."
As for whether Buddy and Pedro were ever really an item, it seems it was much more of a bromance than a fully-fledged love affair.
"We don't think of gay penguins," Mason added. "They're bonded pairs, they break up in the wild, they break up in captivity."
Come up people, it's just guy love. You know, love between two guys...