Sixteen-year-old Billy spends the summer with his gay uncle in Tucson and works at a racetrack, where he falls in love with an outspoken horse exerciser named Cara Mae.

Drawing upon a rich body of zoological research spanning more than two centuries, Bruce Bagemihl shows that animals engage in all types of nonreproductive sexual behavior. Sexual and gender expression in the animal world displays exuberant variety, including same-sex courtship, pair-bonding, sex, and co-parenting - even instances of lifelong homosexual bonding in species that do not have lifelong heterosexual bonding.