Queer Ducks (and Other Animals) by Eliot Schrefer

PFEIFFER: What's funny - well, what's interesting about these animals are they - as you said, they're very promiscuous. So I knew they had to be in there, is an early chapter. The bonobos are famously promiscuous, and the majority of their sexual activity is between females. Well, the hard part starting to write this book was figuring out which animals to focus on. Do you have a favorite or one of your favorites that you could tell us about? As we said, every chapter basically tackles an animal and something about the sexuality of that animal. And so the bonobo takes a turn introducing how her family works, and then the doodlebug and the dolphin and so on. And so they're each taking a turn introducing themselves. PFEIFFER: A gender sexuality alliance meeting. So it's - the premise is that it's an animal GSA. There's an artist, Jules Zuckerberg, who did a one-page comic for each of the animal species that we discuss. I sort of imagine, like, we're kind of sitting in the science classroom, passing notes back and forth, and it even comes down to the doodles. Tell us a little bit about how you decided to make it accessible because, again, you're aiming for adolescents, as I understand it, in a nonfiction way, and they might be inclined to think nonfiction equals boring, dry textbook. But you also have these wonderful illustrations. It's basically an animal per chapter, in a way. I really liked the way you structured your book. Eliot Schrefer is with us to explain more.

It's a young adult book filled with comics and humor and accessible science, and it's filled with research on the diversity of sexual behavior in the animal world. His book, called 'Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Natural World Of Animal Sexuality,' is designed to be teenager-friendly, for one thing. But that's not the kind of book Eliot Schrefer wrote. At its worst, a nonfiction science book about animal sexuality could read like a dry biology textbook.

Queer Ducks (and Other Animals) by Eliot Schrefer