Jane of The Jungle: Zookeeper Jane Tollini on life, love, and sex in the animal kingdom

Pub date June 15, 2009
WriterMarke B.
SectionSex Blog

By Justin Juul. Read part two of this interview here.

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Woo at the Zoo, the afterparty

Being a part-time sex writer is tough because there’s only so much you can say about the topic. Lovemaking is a lot like eating in that way; we all have peculiar ways of doing it, specific attractions to wildly different things, and often-clashing ideas about what’s good and bad, right and wrong, etc. But it’s not like we’re breaking a lot of new ground when we talk about these things; we’re just sharing stories and ideas about an urge and all the weird stuff that happens when we try to satisfy it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that sex is boring or that I don’t enjoy writing about it; it’s just that sometimes I need a break. That’s why I tracked down this month’s featured sexpot, Jane Tollini. Tollini is not a sex worker. She doesn’t do porn and she doesn’t work for a dildo company. Why interview her for a sex blog then? Well, Tollini offers something that bookish porn stars, ex-manwhores, and transsexual southerners don’t. She offers a sex writer the chance to talk about something other than humans fucking. Instead I get to talk about animals fucking. Yay!

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Jane talks facts of life

As a life-long veteran of the San Francisco Zoo (she lived next to it as a child, served almost 20 years there as a penguin keeper, and now works as a consultant), Tollini has seen it all. From donkey shows, to masturbating raccoons, to highly questionable cross-species relationships; you name it and Tollini’s got a story. By the time she’d been at the zoo for a year, Tollini realized she had enough material to host her own beastly sex forum so she grabbed a microphone and never looked back. Tollini’s “Sex Tour,” now known as “Woo at The Zoo,” is an annual romp through the world of sex in the animal kingdom. It happens every Valentine’s day at The San Francisco Zoo, but you can check it out early this year on June 25th when Tollini will be hosting a special kick-off to Pride Week at The California Academy of Sciences called “How Animals Do It.” Tickets available here.

Part One: Gay penguins, animals with two dicks, and the way it used to be

SFBG: So how did you become San Francisco’s premier animal sex guru?
Jane Tollini: I met a pair of lesbian geese named Alice and Gertrude. They stood out to me because, even thought hey had full access to a male goose named Henry Miller, they didn’t want to be with him. Alice and Gertrude laid eggs for each other and then they took care of them as a couple. It was such strange behavior; I just couldn’t help wondering what other kinds of kinky things animals got into. Well, as an animal keeper, I soon found out. When you get to the zoo first thing in the morning, you see a lot of things other people don’t see, believe me. I remember thinking things like “My God, it’s longer than my arm! It’s got a flowering doohickey on the end of it!” Soon after I started at the zoo, I was put in charge of the penguins and that’s when I really started to notice some weird behavior.