Gerbilling
Gerbilling refers to the supposed sexual practice of inserting small animals, usually gerbils, into the anus. Despite apparently widespread public belief and persistent rumours, especially in the 1980s, no verified medical evidence of gerbilling exists; its status is that of an urban legend.
According to Snopes,
- The notion of gerbilling . . . appears to be pure invention, a tale fabricated to demonstrate the depravity with which "faggots" [sic] allegedly pursue sexual pleasure.
The lack of medical evidence of gerbilling is suspect when one considers that (1) rodents have claws, and (2) frightened animals tend to bite.
In the mid-1980s a rumour began about actor Richard Gere, claiming that he had to have a gerbil removed from his anus at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in California. Snopes writes,
- The rumor's spread was aided by an anonymous prankster who, not long after the film Pretty Woman led to a tremendous increase in Gere's popularity, flooded fax machines in Hollywood with a phony "press release" purportedly issued by the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, claiming that Gere had "abused" a gerbil. But, as a reporter from The National Enquirer found when he attempted to track down the gerbil story, there were no facts to be had.
Former Philadelphia newscaster Jerry Penacoli was also a victim of similar rumors in the 1980s. In the early 1990s a fake United Press International press release appeared on the Internet (sometimes also falsely attributed to the Los Angeles Times) detailing a supposed press conference at a hospital where a gay couple were taken to emergency after a session of gerbilling. Neither the United Press nor the LA Times ever published a news article about these fictitious events (the full "press release" can be seen on Snopes). Nonetheless, recordings exist of radio stations covering the "story", including a memorable recording dubbed "Armageddon!" in which a newsreader goes into near-hysterics as he tries to read out the press release.
Medical literature, which covers examples of items retrieved from patients' rectums in extreme detail, has never recorded a case of an animal being removed from a patient, nor of damage inflicted on a patient's insides due to rectal insertion of an animal.
A fictional victim of gerbilling is Lemmiwinks, a gerbil in the cartoon television series South Park.
