The gay penguin love story that melted hearts

Same-sex male couple Sphen and Magic shot to fame when they exchanged their first pebbles, with their union a poignant symbol of equality

It started, as all good penguin love stories do, with a pebble. Sphen and Magic, two male penguins living in Sea Life Sydney Aquarium, met one summer’s day in 2018. Gentoo penguins are typically found on the Falkland Islands and along the Antarctic Peninsula and are known for being rather romantic.
Sphen and Magic began to bow to each other (the penguin equivalent of swiping right on a dating app). Then, they presented each other with carefully selected pebbles for a potential future nest. And the rest, they say, is history. 
Soon, the penguins were inseparable. In a 2019 interview, Tish Hannan, head of penguin supervision at the aquarium, said: “They’ve chosen each other. That’s it. They’re bonded now.”
Six years and two chicks later, their enduring partnership has come to a heartbreaking end as the aquarium announced that Sphen has died aged 11. Magic was brought to his side to help him understand the loss. He looked at Sphen and began to sing. Aquarium staff have said that the rest of the penguin colony joined in and started singing with him.
They may just be a pair of penguins, but to people all around the world, they mean much more than that. Not long after Sphen and Magic exchanged their first pebbles, their love story conquered the country, and soon the whole world.
At the time, Australia had endured a tense, protracted battle to legalised same-sex marriage. Sphen and Magic became Australia’s most famous animal celebrities, and their unexpected union a poignant symbol of equality.
“The loss of Sphen is heartbreaking to the penguin colony, the team, and everyone who has been inspired or positively impacted by Sphen and Magic’s story,” the aquarium’s manager, Richard Dilly, said. “We want to take this opportunity to reflect and celebrate Sphen’s life, remembering what an icon he was.”
Right from the start, the aquarium enthusiastically embraced their pairing. They posted a video of the two penguins with the hashtag #LoveWins. It showed Sphen waddling over to present Magic with a wet, heart-shaped stone. The text overlaid on the video said that this was tantamount to “proposing in the love language of penguins”. 
Aquarium staff referred to them as “love birds”, our “fabulous gay penguin couple”, and wrote posts on social media to celebrate their anniversaries. They are described on the website as “the best foster dads”,  a  “cheeky” couple who are “always up to something… where there is one of them, the other should be not too far behind, and when the enrichment toys are brought out, the pair are always the most excited to have some fun”.
It is not unusual for penguins to form same-sex bonds, but in the wild, they are often short-lived. Nor are Sphen and Magic the first to have embarked on a same-sex relationship in captivity. Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo, became a “couple” in 1998. Their story inspired the 2006 children’s book And Tango Makes Three. 
In 2009, two male penguins named Z and Vielpunkt hatched and raised a chick that was rejected by its parents at a zoo in Berlin. And in Bournemouth, a pair of Humboldt penguins, Diego and Zorro, got together in 2017 and subsequently hatched a chick. Toronto Zoo’s most famous gay penguins, Buddy and Zoro, were controversially separated in 2011 – US TV host Jimmy Kimmel called their story “Brokeback Iceberg.” In the end, their love was fickle, as both swiftly found female mates. 
No penguin pairing has captivated the world like Sphen and Magic. They were dubbed the “penguin power couple” because of the unusual longevity of their relationship. The average life expectancy of a Gentoo penguin in captivity is 12 years, and they spent six in partnership – half of Sphen’s lifetime. The aquarium says they remained together outside of breeding season, which is also unusual, and a tribute to their strong and lasting bond. 
Their relationship was later included in the New South Wales education syllabus to help explain to children that “love comes in all shapes and sizes”. Large, inflatable versions of Sphen and Magic featured on a float at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade in 2021. They drew a crowd of national and international fans to the aquarium, and were included in an episode of the Netflix series Atypical, about a teenage boy on the autism spectrum. They were even given a portmanteau – Sphengic – like any other celebrity couple.
Tributes on the aquarium’s website describe them as “equality icons,” and Sphen as “a champion” who had a “wonderful and positive impact on the world”. “You were just being a penguin, but to us all, your love was so brave and so beautiful,” wrote one user. “You taught the world so much,” said another. 
Not everyone was a fan. The aquarium said some visitors objected to the word “gay” and suggested that maybe Sphen and Magic were “just friends”. Some accused them of politicising the penguins: the now-defunct Right-wing Family First political party in Australia said their relationship was “concocted” propaganda.
And there has long been outrage from conservatives over the children’s book And Tango Makes Three, inspired by New York’s gay penguins, that has seen it banned from some American schools and libraries. It frequently makes the The American Library Association (ALA)’s list of most frequently challenged books. 
But all the while, Sphen and Magic were getting on with filling their empty nest. When they successfully hatched their first chick in October 2018 after a trial run with a dummy egg, they were the only penguins in their colony to do so in that breeding season. Save for a few hysterical headlines about the penguin chick being “genderless” – penguins cannot be sexed until they have reached maturity – it was a runaway success. 
They were given the egg to foster after two young “heterosexual” penguins proved they weren’t up to the job as they would get distracted and leave the nest to go and swim. Their egg was neglected and, if left, would likely never hatch. Aquarium staff noted that Sphen and Magic had the largest nest and were taking turns to sit on it, suggesting they were ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. And so the world’s most famous same-sex penguin parents were born. 
They proved themselves to be doting adoptive dads (although Magic, like many young fathers, initially had to be reminded to to pull his weight). Unlike most mammals, male and female penguins take on the same role in parenting and split duties equally. Penguins are monogamous, but often choose new partners sequentially from breeding season to season. However, Sydney’s penguin power couple stayed the course, and their second chick, named Clancy, was born in 2020. 
Magic, still just eight years old, will now face his first breeding season without his partner. It is early days for the widowed penguin, but the aquarium staff hope that in time, he might find love again. And Sphen’s legacy, as the world’s most famous gay penguin, will surely live on.