Truth, Golden Rules, and the Bonobo Handshake

Nat’s professor, Doris, seduces him and announces that she’s a bonobo. Over the next two years, Nat explores whether to become one, too.

Filled with sex, humor, and philosophical musing, Bonobo! presents people struggling to find the balance between settling and seeking, flatlining and fireworks, ‘porn’ and drama.

In Tucson, Dale and other anthropology students create a utopian movement emulating bonobos–the peaceful, promiscuous, and matriarchal ape. It devolves into !Bonobo!®, an island resort near Playatlan, Mexico. Its slogan: We come in peace. Can leading this liberation-by-sex movement bring Dale satisfaction?

Nat moves to Playatlan for ethnographic fieldwork. He gets to know Dale and the Bonobo movement and has adventures with beauty queens, drug traffickers, tourists, prostitutes, college administrators, and the Baby Jesus. At every turn, he must make a fateful choice: the siren song of social expectation or the perpetual pursuit of a panoply of loves.