Panthera @ MindSay 
So I was at the St. Petersburg zoo w/ Titus on my birthday and a lioness started roaring. Only the sounds she was making weren’t so much roars as deeply frustrated, grunting bellows straight from her colossal diaphragm, like she was despairing of life and begging whoever had the courage, the mercy, and the means to end her miserable existence now… It was unpleasant to hear, so it didn’t surprise me to see the people around her cage getting a little uncomfortable at the sounds… they were grinning and giggling nervously and casting sidelong glances at each other.
So whatever… I looked over at Titus, somewhere nearby, and caught him laughing so hard at something that he couldn’t stop to explain the joke.
“Eugggghhhh!” bawled the lioness. “Ghhhrrrooouuuughhhh!!!”
Her roars gradually subsided into quieter -- but still clearly audible -- throaty sighs of resignation. I felt my heart breaking. But Titus still couldn’t control his laughter.
I was about to ask him what was so funny, when he rolled his eyes heavenward and groaned, as if in the throes of passion, “Oh God! Oh yeeeaaaaahh!!”, accompanying the lioness’s last heaving moans… and it hit me that every teenager and adult at the damn zoo (the kids, like me, hadn’t been laughing) had been in on a joke that had gone right by me:
That lioness’s solo had been a perfect imitation of a man’s climax, only it would have to have been a particularly large, deep-voiced, and especially lucky man to have made sounds like she was making.
Funny, I thought, that almost everyone except me in that zoo old enough to make the comparison, whether Russian or *other*, had instantly registered the likeness of the frustrated, caged lioness’s solo to the equally passionate roars of a man having an orgasm. And that everyone had found it equally hilarious: I saw a girl laughing as hard as Titus, (but more self-consciously) and smacking her friend on the arm for saying something lewd during one of the lioness’s several operatic performances that afternoon.
And I thanked the lioness for reaffirming my faith in the underlying connection of all of mankind’s consciousness. Bryan and Ljudmila Petrovna had both told me sex was still more of a taboo subject for most Russians than it was for most Americans, Russia being a more traditional society and all that. I thought male orgasms would have been a little more, y’know, <out of Russian sight (or discourse), out of Russian mind…>
And I wondered: was there any zoo in the world where people (or at least, most gay men and straight women) wouldn’t have immediately noticed and permitted themselves to laugh publicly at the resemblance between a lioness’s roars and a man’s moans of pleasure?? In Bolivia, that Catholic backwater (ya don’t get much more “traditional” than Bolivia, lemme tell ya) where everyone is still probably as shy about publicly acknowledging the existence of sex as our Bolivian Araceli… Would such a pious young Catholic maiden as Araceli, upon hearing an analogously angry lioness in her own hometown zoo, have thought to herself, “I say, that frustrated lioness sounds just like a man whose partner really knows what she’s doing!”? (Most Bolivians’ thoughts still run, I believe, in traditionally heteronormative grooves.) And had she thus reflected, would she have then permitted herself a sheepish chuckle in full view of the zoo’s other patrons, or stifled it in shame for having allowed such a sinful notion to occur to her?? I hope she reads this some day, and will oblige me by letting me know.
A FINAL NOTE: The reason this blog entry is about St. Petersburg and not Buenos Aires is 'cuz I ain't in Argentina yet keep your shirt on. Jesus. I think Annie is the only one reading this blog anyway, so she and I will have to fix that by letting other people know it exists. Like Araceli, Valentin, and other worthies. The problem is finding people who'd CARE enough to read it... Any ideas Annie? I don't have to mention... never mind you know who I'm talking about. And he's planning to read this, too.
