WHO’s COUNTING?

The weekly questionnaire in the Saturday Weekend magazine that comes with The Guardian includes, as one of its standard questions, “How often do you have sex?” It always strikes me as a preposterous impertinence to ask – my answer would be “Do you really think I keep count?” – but respondents generally answer it reasonably seriously, though few of them allow themselves to be precisely tied down. (Last week, Graydon Carter’s answer was “With other people, you mean?” but then, to the semi-literate question “Which words or phrases do you most overuse?”, he replied “Oh, really it’s not that big”, which is the witticism of a 16 year-old).

The Guardian compounded the offence this morning – or rather, looking at the clock, yesterday morning – with a cover feature on its daily magazine G2 under the heading “So, how many people have you slept with?” This was illustrated with agency photographs of individuals photo-shopped to appear to be holding up placards with numbers scrawled on them ranging from 0 to 35. Inside were an article and various quotes attributed to vox pops taken largely in London, Manchester and Sheffield. The hook on which this important sociological investigation was hung was a rather incoherent exchange between Piers Morgan and Nicholas Clegg in the magazine GQ wherein the Liberal-Democrat leader confirmed his reputation for unguarded remarks by answering “No more than 30 … a lot less than that” to Morgan’s harassment based on the question “How many women would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?”

The “a lot less than that” part of the answer seems to have been discarded in the fallout from the interview. A pastily unattractive man, I would have said, with the look of a time-serving estate agent about him, Clegg is evidently thought rather a sport in some quarters, especially as he was married at 24. He’s now irrevocably marked as a 30-lovers man, as if somehow this makes him a more interesting politician. Mind you, this isn’t hard. So far, Clegg has seemed the least diverting leader of his party, certainly since World War II. He’d have to claim a lot more achievement than this to interest me.

Indeed, as a gay man I find the whole subject perfectly bewildering, like a report from another planet. To begin with, the numbers we’re talking about seem beyond comprehension until you note that there’s a big assumption lurking in the phraseology: “good in bed”, “slept with”. Of course, gay men have a huge proportion of their sexual encounters without recourse to a bed. On the al fresco cruising grounds, in the bath houses and disco or bar back rooms, in the public lavatories and across the furniture or on the floor in grabbed moments in houses, offices, hotels, shops and every other kind of meeting place, gay men couple (and more) on the wing. You don’t have to pursue that kind of sex for long before you rack up rather higher numbers than 30.

Back in the mid-1970s, before there was a big commercial gay scene but also before the spread of Aids, one of my gay friends was asked by a doctor at a clap clinic if he was promiscuous. You don’t hear that word much any more but back then it was bandied about, it carried an implied moral judgment and it was one of the sticks with which to beat gay men. My friend reasonably replied: “It depends what you mean by promiscuous”. The doctor gave her objective, professional assessment as an expert in sexually transmitted diseases: “we consider a gay man promiscuous if he has ten or more different sexual partners every week”. Now that’s going it some. Any active gay man, especially when young and blessed with stamina and full of his oats, will have sex with ten or more men one week in a while. If, in those years before London and other British towns became so gay-friendly, he was occasionally slipping off to Amsterdam or San Francisco or Berlin, he’d certainly see a lot of action in a short time. But every week? That suggests a certain application. You’re into four figures within two years,

That gay men have always had a lot of sex is clearly the case. When the big gay discotheques opened in the late ‘70s, I used to stand gazing at the hundreds of men bopping away and savour the atmosphere of supercharged sexuality and think how lucky we were. Straight men going to a straight disco looking to get laid would mostly go home dissatisfied. Even if the men to women ratio was as favourable as 60:40, the proportion of that 40 percent who were available would be low and the competition for their affections fierce. At a gay disco, everybody was a potential partner. No wonder straight men hated us.

There are certainly heterosexual men who pursue sex for its own sake the way most gay men do and, the evidence seems to suggest, far fewer women do, and do it far less. Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, notoriously claimed to need to get laid at least three times daily and to have pleasured more than 10,000 women. But by all accounts the Labour politician Tom Driberg, whose appetite was certainly the equal of Simenon’s, had no trouble finding on a daily basis men who were happy to be fellated through several decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967.

The argument that men over-egg the pudding of their sex lives because they like to seem to be cock of the run and women downplay their experiences because they don’t want to appear too easy clearly has merit. Gay men, I can report with confidence, are blissfully happy to remain outside that sort of tension. Sure there are gay men – lesbians too, though I would never claim to speak for them – who prefer to be chaste or monogamous or modest, for whatever reason, all of them good ones except for fear of what people will say. But I can’t remember the last gay man I spoke to who was in any discernible degree competitive about his supposed conquests. To just about any gay man, the question “how many men would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?’ simply wouldn’t compute.