I thought huddling together for warmth in cold weather was a survival technique: a method for staying alive, rather than counting as a sex act.
And two males bringing up an orphaned child seems like a jolly nice thing to do for the child and the community. If an orphanage is staffed by one sex, does that make the whole place a massive L/G orgy even if nobody is having sex with anyone else?
The gesture almost can't mean the same thing to a creature that doesn't have a pair of soft appendages with some of the densest nerve clusters on its entire body in that specific location. But yeah raising a child together is pretty darn gay. I guess they could be platonically coparenting but tbh that seems like an even bigger anthropomorphization. "They're gay, Karen" is honestly just occam's razor for this situation.
Humans cuddle platonically/familially. I also wonder if it's maybe not more like holding hands which isn't always romantic among humans depending on culture. Again, arguing 0% on the gayness, my only beef is with the anthropomorphization, and the whole point of acknowledging in the first place is that no human has any real way of knowing what's going on in an animal's head.