Birds & The Bees: Stories about sex

You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals, and in this week on the podcast, both of our storytellers share some Discovery Channel worthy tales about coitus.

Part 1: A new baby and a new job make Edith Gonzalez feel distant from her husband, so she decides to spice things up.

Edith Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Critical Museum Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY. She studies the global flow of ecological knowledge within the context of transatlantic slavery. Edith is a Fulbright Scholar of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, will be a Research Fellow at All Souls College - Oxford University in 2024, and is committed to decolonizing the spaces in which she works. Her current NSF-funded field research takes place on the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda in the Eastern Caribbean, but she is not there on vacation no matter what the photos of pina coladas might indicate. She is a two-time champion of the Smut Slam sex storytelling show because of her creative use of profanity and complete lack of shame. Her dedication to logic and sci-fi fangirldom have earned her the nickname of "the Puerto-Rican Mr. Spock.”

Part 2: While working at the zoo, Lee Osorio learns a lot about zoo animal sex and himself.

Lee Osorio is an actor and playwright based in Atlanta, GA. You can catch him Guest Starring on NBC's Found, or make the trek down to Savannah to catch him in his one person show, Prisontown, premiering at Savannah Rep in May. To learn more visit his website at LeeOsorio.com.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

In the year 2000, I had two life‑changing events. The first one is I married the absolute love of my life, Christopher. The second is that Google just exploded and, all of a sudden, I could just find out how to do anything in the universe.

Christopher and I got married and, during that first couple of years of marriage, you go through what's called the honeymoon phase. And because I do understand how human evolution works, there is something called serial pairbonding. It means that in human evolution, couples would get together for about four years and have children, but at about year four, about year five, they start to lose interest in one another and will then procreate with another partner.

Edith Gonzalez shares her story at Burdock Brewery in Toronto, ON in October 2023. Photo by Glenn Pritchard.

I'm in 2004. I have not only gotten married, I've started teaching, I've had a baby and bought a house in the suburbs. So, I realized that Google was my friend. Google helped me do things I never thought in a million years I could do.

I'm afraid of electricity, like the microphone is terrifying me right now. And I learned how to change things a light switch in this 1920s house. Thank you.

But here I am in year four with this little baby and feeling really overwhelmed, kind of like I'm spending all of my time being a mom and trying to be a professor, starting a new job and doing all of these things that I felt myself sort of slipping away. I felt becoming more distant from my husband who I thought was the sexiest, most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a profile like a Roman coin. Like, I could be so angry at him and still want to jump his bones every night. That when, now, he'd look at me and be like, "You wanna?”

I would be like, "You wanna what?" Like, I have no… no.

I realized this was a problem, so I decided Google would be my friend. I Googled, “How to bring a little more spice back into your marriage for Valentine's Day,” which led me to a YouTube video of how to give your husband a lap dance.

And I thought, “This is a great idea.”

We have spent months restoring the ground floor of our house, and here he is. He's a writer. He's upstairs working in sort of this dingy environment on a little cheap IKEA office chair, typing away at the desktop computer. The floors are unfinished. They're still kind of like plywood and splintery old flooring. I think, “I will just surprise him when he's up there.”

So, in the morning I kind of bring up a little boombox and some CDs, you know, it's still the art of CDs, so, it's up there.

And I can fit into my skinny jeans again. Again, the art, the skinniest jeans you can imagine, with lots of Lycra in them. I wear a good rock & roll T‑shirt and I'm thinking, “This is it. I am gonna remind him of the woman he married. I'm gonna remind him of the girl he knew in 1989, dancing in a cage suspended over the dance floor at a nightclub in a former church. That's the girl he married, so here I go.”

So, I'm kind of up there and I wait. He's sitting there and he's typing away and kind of like, yeah. He's like, basically, “Why are you in my space?”

I had put the baby down for a nap and I hit the button on the boombox and what begins to play is Prince singing, "You sexy motherfucker…", and he kind of turns around slowly.

Now, also in my deep dive into Google, I questioned the load‑bearing capacity of a cheap plastic IKEA office chair. I discovered that it would support the weight of two people and it also had these beautifully‑engineered locking wheels, so that should two people sit down on it with a significant weight, the wheels would lock in place. So I thought I had this all figured out.

I know you're seeing my fatal mistake, which is the music starts going and I'm like trying to be all seductive, dancing. Have you ever tried to take off a pair of very, very skinny jeans rhythmically in a sexy way? There is no way.

So, I'm kind of taking the jeans down, and it's like, "Oh, you sexy motherfucker.” Sexy motherfucker, shaking that ass, shaking that ass, shaking that ass. Sexy motherfucker. And I managed to get one foot out of the jeans.

Now, we have not made an attempt to have a romantic experience in a while, so he's just sort of overcome by the generosity of this gift. He basically grabs me and pulls me onto the chair, where we begin to have a wild and lustful experience on the IKEA office chair.

And I don't know if I mentioned he's a big man. He's like six‑foot‑three and tall, well‑formed and fit, strong. And as I'm sort of straddling him, for lack of a better term, on this office chair, he's pushing off on the floor and manages to overwhelm the locking wheels. So the chair moves and gets wrapped into the Lycra jeans that are still attached to my left foot.

As we begin to have our fabulous experience, and it was fabulous, with one spectacular motion, the Lycra acts as a slingshot and yanks the chair out from under him and he reaches up and grabs the desk and manages to kind of stop some of the impact, but we crash to the floor with me on top of him. My knees hit the splintery plywood. There's a huge crash. The baby wakes up, crying.

And he says to me, “We're not going anywhere.”

And we just roll over and finish in this, like, fireworks of love and lust.

So, we're there kind of catching our breath and I managed to get my foot out of the jeans. I think I have a sprained ankle at this point. I sort of limp downstairs and get my robe on and get the baby. I get him all resettled and back to bed. I come out and my husband is still upstairs.

I'm like, “Huh? Okay.”

I walk upstairs and he's still sitting on the floor next to the desk. He's holding his shoulder in a way that makes me think, "Huh. Okay."

I quickly google "Torn rotator cuff" and "Where’s the nearest emergency room?", and he just looks at me and says, "It was worth it."

Part 2

I am at work. Specifically, I am standing in front of the orangutan enclosure at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. It is summer, but it feels like fall, because it always feels like fall in Seattle. Always.

I am at work but I am not working at the zoo in any way that you are probably imagining. I am not a zookeeper. I am not a veterinarian. I am not selling hotdogs or popcorn or stuffed lions and tigers and bears. I am teaching summer theater camp. Yes, at the zoo to first and second graders. We do these creative drama activities, solving animal‑related mysteries and it is very, very, very cute. Usually.

Today, I am standing with about a dozen six or seven‑year‑olds in front of the orangutan enclosure, watching a male orangutan go down on a female orangutan as if someone has shoved a very dry muffin inside of her. And he cannot stop licking until he gets every last crumb.

Lee Osorio shares his story at Underground Atlanta in Atlanta, GA in December 2023. Photo by Rob Felt.

“What are they doing,” one of the campers ask me and I say, “Um, he's grooming her. He just really wants to make sure there are no insects down there.”

I don't think she's buying it.

Full disclosure, I never anticipated working in a zoo. But as any actor will tell you, the number of theater‑adjacent jobs that you end up taking are incredible, especially when you are new in town. And I am new in Seattle. In fact, I have just moved there with my relatively recent boyfriend. For the purpose of this story, why don’t we call the boyfriend Walker.

Walker and I actually met here in Atlanta. I was working at the Caribou Coffee at the corner of 10th and Piedmont. He was working at the Trader Joe’s down the street on Monroe and so we would see each other at work. We would flirt a little bit. We started hanging out and our relationship developed in the way that only a 25‑year‑old gay boy’s first real relationship can, incredibly quickly.

Like, one minute we're making out on the dance floor and we're tripping on shrooms in the park, the next minute he's saying, “I think I wanna move. I think I wanna leave Atlanta. I think I wanna leave the south. I want something new. Do you wanna come with me?”

We have so much in common. I mean, we both like making out on the dance floor. We both like tripping on shrooms in the park. This must be true love. Of course, I say yes.

So Walker convinces me to move as far as the continental United States will allow us. We move to Seattle, Washington.

There are a couple of red flags that I probably should have paid more attention to. For instance, the night that we're supposed to pack up the car and get everything ready to start the drive across country, Walker is laid out on the floor with bad gas. He cannot move.

I am 25 at this point. I have never had paralyzingly painful gas. I'm 39 now. I still haven't. But that is the situation we're dealing with. So, I pack the entire car by myself and I clean Walker's entire apartment by myself. Just like I booked all of the hotels and found our studio apartment all by myself.

So, I'm in Seattle and I'm working at the zoo. The longer that I'm working at the zoo, the more I start to envy the animals there, because my life has started to feel like a snow globe that someone shook really fucking hard and then threw out the window of a semitruck barreling down the highway.

I just moved thousands of miles away from all of my friends and family, and in case you have not spent a lot of time in Seattle, the Seattle freeze is real. People are not unfriendly, but they're distant. It's really hard to make friends.

And in case you didn't know, being a summer camp counselor at the zoo does not pay very well. So, even with Walker's 10% discount at Trader Joe's, it has become really tight financially. To top it all off, I find out one of the reasons that we got the studio apartment so affordably is because they are building a light rail station right next door, underground. And so the entire apartment shakes from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM.

These animals, they don't have to worry about construction noises. They don't have to worry about making rent every month. They get nutritious and delicious meals delivered to them right at their door three times a day.

And, as I watch Mr. and Mrs. Orangutan, they are having a lot more sex than I am, because it turns out that Walker is suffering from some pretty severe depression. His primary coping mechanism is some pretty severe alcoholism. So, every day he comes home from work, he will have two to three Simpler Times. If you don't know what those are, those are Trader Joe's brand of lager, if by lager you mean fermented urine.

Then he'll start in on the wine. There's always, I notice, a half bottle of wine around our apartment because he'll finish off one bottle and then just have a couple of glasses from the second. It's not like he's having a whole bottle everyday by himself, which of course he is. Then after that, sometimes, we’ll go out too for drinks.

To say that our sex is infrequent would be a bit both an over and an understatement. So, it is with no small amount of envy that I am watching Mrs. Orangutan.

It is right about then that my co‑counselor comes up to me and he says, "Hey, you know those Orangutans are mother and son, right?”

And that was my reaction. “Oh, eww. What the fuck?”

Then the second thought that I had was, “Well, he is certainly earning the name of Oedipus.”

He goes on to explain something that I never really thought about before, which is animals have sex. Duh. And when animals have sex, they have babies. Also, duh. That’s science. But at any given zoo, there's a relatively small gene pool. So, oftentimes, animals that are related to each other will be put in the same enclosures and that means they end up having sex.

So, to prevent a bunch of inbred, two‑headed, many‑nippled animals running around— well, lots of animals have lots of nipples, so like what would many nipples look, like 80 nipples?

Anyway, to prevent the inbred animals with all the nipples running around, the animals are on birth control. Of course, they are. Of course, they would be, but it never occurred to me before. It is him saying this that starts me wondering, along with the lack of sex life in my personal life, it kind of gets me obsessed with the sex lives of zoo animals.

I learned that for every species at every zoo, basically around the world, there's a huge genealogical chart, like a huge family tree for every species to make sure that when you want to breed one animal with another animal, that they're not too closely related.

For instance, the Seattle Zoo in 2001 they had an elephant calf born. It was this huge deal. There are very few elephant calves that are born in captivity. Her name was Hansa and people came to see her and the community loved her. Then in 2007, when she was six, she got sick. They gave her fluids and they gave her antibiotics, but she didn't get better. One morning, the keeper came into her barn and they found her dead.

It was very sad. The community was very upset. But by the time that I got there, three years later in 2010, there were talks about how maybe it's time to try again with Hansa’s mother. Maybe it's time to impregnate her again.

So, what do they do? They go to this giant genealogical chart and they find an elephant bull at one of the zoos across the world that isn't too closely related to the female elephant that they have. They find this male elephant I think in Cincinnati. So, you have a male elephant in Cincinnati and you've got the female elephant in Seattle and what do they do now? Because that is a very long distance to go for a booty call, for like a one‑night stand for a massive bull.

So, what do they do? I learned that they FedEx-ed the semen. They FedEx-ed the semen overnight from Cincinnati to Seattle and then they inject it into the female.

This brings up so many questions. Like, who is masturbating this elephant, right? Do you buy him dinner first? Does he buy you dinner? Like, two hands, right? We're talking like this is a two‑hand job. For a male human, you use like a tiny little cup. Do you use like a five‑gallon Home Depot bucket or like a bathtub? And is there like elephant porn that you put on while you're doing this?

The more that I learned about zoo animal sex, the less certain I am that I want to be one. Free rent and free food sounds great, but if it comes at the cost of having to go down on your mother and get jerked off by a random keeper, I am not so certain it's worth it.

Then one morning after a long night of fighting with Walker, I sleep through my alarm. I miss the bus. I have to get to work. The only way to get there on time is for me to ride my bike. So I start pedaling as fast as I can.

It has just rained a little bit. It hasn't rained for a while. The roads are super, super slick. So when I take a turn, a little too fast, my bike, it slips out from under me and my chin hits the pavement. My bottom teeth hit my top teeth and they break my two front teeth. One vertically, one horizontally.

It doesn't hurt, miraculously. I don't even realize that I've broken my two front teeth until I feel them with my tongue.

This teaches me two things. One, if you are going to knock out your two front teeth, do it while you are teaching six and seven‑year‑olds, because they will love it. They will come up to you very excited and say things like, “Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, we're missing the same tooth.”

Two, I don't live in a zoo. I live in the wide and wild world where any second you can have your two front teeth knocked out. And even when you think you have had as much change as one body can possibly handle, the world is always right there waiting to tell you there's more. So, you can cling to what is known, even when what is known is making you miserable, or you can embrace change. Change is going to come either way.

And so I make the decision to embrace change. I break up with Walker. It's actually a bit of a wakeup call to him and he gets sober eventually. And me, I get new teeth. I eventually stop working at the zoo. I eventually leave Seattle and make my way back home to Atlanta. I am still single, but I am enjoying the wide and varied gene pool that this wild world has to offer.

Thank you.