Gerbils and gay men

This means it is a story that is not true. It is the act of placing a gerbil into the human rectum for sexual pleasure. Sarah Bernhardtas for her, would have tried to have sex with a young alligator; an act that is, by the way, anatomically impossible to perform.

This reputation of debauchery was mainly built by French anti-Russian historians. It can easily explain that minor amendment of the original version. Traces of this urban legend can be found back in In The Straight Dopea famous question-and-answer newspaper column, we can read the following question :.

Why not hamsters or snakes? Richard Gere and the Gerbil Hoary urban legend reports a celebrity was taken to a hospital emergency room to have a gerbil removed from his rectum. In the 18th century, it was told that Catherine II of Russia was so sexually insatiable that she used to have sex with animals.

Other small live animals (usually gerbils but also mice, hamsters, rats and various other rodents) are used. At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what happened next. This French fake press release is, in fact, a word of word translation of one of the many versions of this gerbiling hoax, circulating on the American Internet since :.

The taboos highlight by these affairs, such as pedophilia, are however absent from sexual urban legend whose main purposes are to shock but also to make fun of specific social groups and provoke laughter. Before being an internet hoax, this urban legend was and is still today a story spread by word of mouth in two different versions: the first one involving a gay couple and the second one a celebrity suspected to be a homosexual.

The popularity of Darwin Awards in the early days of the Internet in France can possibly explain why this gerbil story traveled from the US to France in the s. Gerbils are barely known as pets in France, which is not the case of hamsters. In passing. I’ve checked with numerous sources in both the gay and medical communities, and gerbils and gay men everybody has heard about gerbil stuffing, every attempt to track down an actual case has come to naught.

Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand writes that the urban legend began in It involved a mouse and an unidentified gay man. This alleged practice even has a name: gerbiling. It should be noted that the only difference between the French and the American versions is the nature of the unfortunate rodent.

Power and sexual desire seem to go hand-in-hand in our imagination and true facts sometimes give credits to hoary legends. According to a famous urban legend, a man had been admitted to hospital after his gay partner put a gerbil in his rectum.

What do gay men : The motivation behind them is often a mystery but there’s little doubt about the homophobia underlying the infamous ‘gays and gerbils’ myth

Same time as the Richard Gere rumor, the idea that some gay couples would use gerbil as an anal toy started to spread. It even had its moment of glory when a radio journalist read this fake press release that he believed was true on air:.

Richard Gere is the most famous victim of this last version, according to Snopes founder David Mikkelson :. That gentleman is now doomed to be tied to a colostomy bag through eternity.

Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract. How are the gerbils inserted and retrieved? Folklorist Norine Dresser collected some of these jokes in Bigger that secret is and stronger are the rumors in their effort to offer an overview of the private life of celebrities … And it is often to describe an out of the ordinary or perverted sexual life.

Although the legend homed in on various targets when it first appeared including a Philadelphia newscasterit has clung tenaciously to Mr. But, as a reporter from the National Enquirer found when he attempted to track down the gerbil story, there were no facts to be had.

Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein used, for example, their power and influence to commit sordid actions which remained cover up for a long time. Gerbilling is an urban legend.