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BY SUSAN McCARTHY | The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they're seeing.

A female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.

Six bighorn rams cluster, rubbing, nuzzling and mounting each other. "Aggressosexual behavior," the biologist explains. A way of establishing dominance.

A zoo penguin approaches another, bowing winsomely. The birds look identical and a zoogoer asks how to tell males and females apart. "We can tell by their behavior," a researcher explains. "Eric is courting Dora." A keeper arrives with news: Eric has laid an egg.

They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own), and animals who live in bisexual triads and quartets.

Bagemihl's dry style is obedient to the precepts of scientific writing. He explains why animals can be called homosexual or bisexual, but not gay, lesbian or queer, and he follows the rules -- though "homosexual" frightens some who prefer terms like male-only social interactions, multifemale associations, unisexuality, isosexuality or intrasexuality. (Fortunately, as a book reviewer, I am not bound by this rule. We're talking gay animals!) Yet the book is thrillingly dense with new ideas, and with scandalous animal anecdotes. In other words, an ideal bedside read.