Word of advice to young, unknown, wannabe serious writers: if you really want to get noticed, write something about bestiality. Even more than incest, this is the ultimate taboo. You can tells that this is true because this very play contains either mention of or representation of both bestiality and incest, but most people tend to gloss right over the more shocking representation of incest and go straight to the referenced-only topic of bestiality when discussing its shocking content.
And that, of course, is the point. Bestiality in literature has been around for about as long as literature itself: Zeus turned himself into a swan to seduce (rape) Leda in a union that produced Helen of Troy. And in that story the bestiality isn’t really about something else; it is just plain old sex between a human and a swan. Well, technically, a god who is taking the form of an animal, but that really only kind of makes it worse.
Bestiality will the work noticed and perhaps even protested against, but the point is not to make the story actually about a sexual paraphilia. That is still the domain of pornography and likely will be for some time to come. Albee’s engagement of a man having a sexual and romantic relationship a goat serves the purpose of showing the hypocrisy of overlooking the very same man acting out a passionate kiss with his own son right up there on stage. If there was no bestiality, then that scene would be the real shocker and the thing that everybody remembers about The Goat. It wouldn’t be Sylvia. As the ultimate taboo—as one of just a very few handful of topics that almost literally the entire world can come together in agreement upon as beyond all boundaries of taste, health, and mental well-being—bestiality is a powerful act that still quite effectively serves a specific purpose. It can be used to point to how ideas about what the boundaries of taste, health and mental well-being really are and how every single line in the sand is eventually erased or moved back a little bit.
The playwright was a gay man and the obviousness that he was writing about homosexuality rather than bestiality is of the coconut falling down upon the head variety. It makes a thudding sound that everyone around can hear. In the space that bestiality still occupies, homosexuality once stood alongside it. In fact, in some places in the world, the two are still sharing a common location. But in most of the world, that is no longer true. Morality shifts, traditional mores become outdated and people just learn that some things really do not matter all that very much in the long run, especially when it has absolutely nothing to do with their own life.
The question here is not whether one day bestiality will no longer be the ultimate sexual taboo. Put on a lock, twist the dial and leave in confidence: that is a fact that is almost certainly never going to change and if it does, the change won’t be by much. Remember always: the way to tell the difference between literature about bestiality and pornography about bestiality is that it isn’t about bestiality in the literature. It is always about something else.
