Urban myths have an extraordinary capacity to travel and, even more amazingly, be accepted as truth by people who really should know a lot better. The motivation behind them is often a mystery but there’s little doubt about the homophobia underlying the infamous ‘gays and gerbils’ myth.

First recorded in 1984, this is a tale of one gay man inserting a live gerbil into the rectum of another for the purpose of sexual pleasure. This pleasure, allegedly, arises from the stimulation of the prostate and rectal wall as the gerbil scratches and scrabbles to escape its hideous surroundings. (The internal injuries that would inevitably be caused by the  creature’s teeth and claws always seem mysteriously absent from the story.)

The reason this intensely personal behaviour came to light was because hospitals in the USA apparently see a regular stream of gay men unable to retrieve expired gerbils from their rectal passages.

Over the decades the tale has been told by a range of people to ‘prove’ the inherent callousness and perversion of gay men. And in the early 80’s – when some commentators were already portraying AIDS as the physical manifestation of our intrinsically dark and deviant lifestyle – this was just the ‘scientific evidence’ that was needed to reinforce that case. There were, after all, a number of documented cases of this from those hospitals where gay men had presented to have the entombed rodent removed: in California there was the “gay male celebrity”, in Philadelphia a TV broadcaster.

The most detailed case was that of two gay men in Salt Lake City, who were both brought into hospital for treatment following their misadventures. Having used a cardboard tube to insert their pet gerbil into one man’s anus they were, apparently, surprised when the little creature didn’t scurry out when they called it’s name. Fearing that the little creature had got lost, the ‘inserter’ promptly lit his cigarette lighter and held it up to the tube in an attempt to illuminate the interior.

He hadn’t reckoned on the escaping methane gas, which promptly ignited – expelling the rodent and burning both men in the process.

It was all documented in hospital records – as was the case of actor Richard Gere who was (allegedly) secretly treated in a California hospital for the removal of a deceased gerbil in 1986. The only reason it’s no longer a secret is because someone who was there told a friend, who told a friend and so on.

In fact, there’s no evidence to support any of these stories. Researchers have screened hospital records across the USA for evidence of such cases and failed to find a single one – even in Salt Lake City. As for ‘someone who knows someone who was there’, this is the very essence of urban myths. They’re always sustained by the claim that it happened to, or was witnessed by, someone on the periphery of the teller’s social circle.

And when they’ve got a particularly high propaganda value, no amount of counter evidence will shake them. In the early 80’s it got to the point where some were claiming that ‘gerbil insertion’ was actually the cause of AIDS. Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, there’s some evangelical nutcase in the USA who’s using it as ‘evidence’ against marriage.

If only common sense could endure as strongly.