This essay is adapted from a piece that first appeared in MoreIntelligentLife.com (Jan. 28, 2008), an on-line edition of The Economist. Published with permission.
NOT LONG AGO, at a drinks event at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on Pall Mall, I had the good fortune to chat about Israel with an eminent professor of ecclesiastical history. His family had always been pro-Israel, he assured me, but now, sadly, things are different. So we had the usual dust-up. Champagne in hand, I jumped in headlong and called him an anti-Semite and he (ditto) countered with the speech that begins “You Americans always…” After the skirmish, though, it turned out that we share a skeptical view of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, me for the good Archbishop’s positions on Israel and my ecclesiastical friend for Williams’ support of the Church’s official position on homosexuality. “Rowan,” he said with evident familiarity, or maybe irony, “doesn’t care for my partner.” Aha! “I’d like to ask you something about John Maynard Keynes,” I said. “Keynes kept these sex diaries…” A little more champagne and we were talking about cock sucking.
Keynes (1883–1946) was never a closeted homosexual, although his colleagues at Bretton Woods in 1945 didn’t always realize it, perhaps because at those conferences he was accompanied by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, his wife for twenty years. By then he was an eminent economist and statesman, and possibly no longer on the prowl.
In earlier times, however, from 1901 to 1915, when Keynes was mostly in his twenties, he cruised constantly and kept two sex diaries as records of his success. Luckily for us, Keynes was a pack-rat, so we have both of these documents among the mass of J. M. Keynes memorabilia housed in the modern archives at King’s College, Cambridge. (These are reproduced in Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography, by D. E. Moggridge, albeit in an appendix labeled “A Key for the Prurient.”) Keynes obsessively counted and tabulated almost everything he did—it was a lifelong habit. As a child, he counted and recorded the number of front steps of every house on his street. Later, he kept a running record (not surprisingly) of his expenses and his golf scores. He also counted and tabulated the elements of his sex life.
The first diary is easy. Keynes lists his sexual partners, either by their initials—GLS for Lytton Strachey (who would become a major critic and biographer); DG for Duncan Grant (later an important painter and Bloomsbury Group member)—or by their nicknames, such as “Tressider” for J. T. Sheppard, the King’s College provost. When he had what was apparently a quick, anonymous hook-up, he listed that sex partner generically: “16-year-old under Etna” or “Lift boy of Vauxhall” in 1911, for instance, or “Jew boy” in 1912.
This list, in which he names names but gives no details, Keynes organized year-by-year. He was scrupulously honest, too, even in times of sexual famine. For three years running, 1903 to 1905, he records no sexual partners: “nil,” he admitted. As he became older, though, the number of his partners increased dramatically, so that for 1911 he lists eight partners (although half of these are probably one-time pick-ups), for 1915 he lists seven, and for 1913 (his highest score) he lists nine different partners. One or two men are repeaters: DG (Duncan Grant), for example, runs throughout.
The other sex diary is more puzzling and, in a way, more informative. Always the economist, Keynes organized the second sex diary year-by-year, like the first, but this time he broke it into quarterly increments. Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been both clever and prurient enough to crack it successfully.
Here’s what Keynes’ tabulation looks like. For every quarter-year from 1906 to 1915, he tallied up his sexual activities and totaled them under three categories: C, A, and W. For each of these headings, he recorded the number of times each activity occurred, and also when. For example, from May to August 1911, he performed (if that’s the right word) C sixteen times, A four times, and W five times.
Whenever I’ve had the chance—as with the Church historian—I have asked people to free-associate the meaning of Keynes’ code. When presented with “A,” they’ve invariably said “ass,” which is almost undoubtedly right, but it leaves open the question of who is doing what to whom. Is Keynes giving or receiving? The legal term for anal intercourse (vaguely defined) is per anum, and in Keynes’ day it could get you thrown in jail with hard labor—as happened to Oscar Wilde in 1895 when, to his surprise and eventual devastation, he was put away for two years. So Keynes was taking understandable care in this diary to hide the specifics of his activities.
As for “W,” everyone says right away “wanking,” a mostly British term for masturbation. The problem with this interpretation is that one would expect the numbers for W to be the highest—how sexually active could Keynes possibly have been?—but in fact the scores for W are the lowest of the three categories. Indeed there are several quarters in which W happened zero times. So either Keynes didn’t bother to masturbate or he didn’t need to because his other numbers were so high.
The trickiest one of all is C. What springs to mind (well, to my mind) is “copulation,” or “cop” as Keynes would have said, but copulation is a very vague term (again, who/whom, and exactly how does this work?). In 1920’s London the word did not necessarily mean sexual intercourse of any variety (as we use it today) but could suggest only a kiss on the cheek (but not that cheek) or even a quick squeeze. In fact, any flirtation beyond suggestive banter could come under the heading of “cop.”
My Church historian pal suggested “cock-sucking,” which is an appealing idea, but rather less likely, I think, than the more general (and flirtatious) “cop.” For one thing, according to Keynes’ tabulation, what he did most frequently and consistently was C. It happened seventeen times from May to August of 1908, 28 times (!) from August to November of that year, twenty times from February to May of 1909, and so on. That’s a lot of C. The high tallies for C correlate loosely (but not consistently) with university holidays, the break at Easter, and the longer summer holiday, when Keynes would have had more leisure to pursue and enjoy his bouts of C. Consequently, C could be a general act—a “cop”—a sweet time, maybe a kiss, maybe a little more, with a hoped-for return on the investment. C could also stand for “cruising” or even “cottaging,” which in Brit-speak means looking for sex in a public bathroom.
By the way, lest you think that “cruising” and “cottaging” are merely recent terms, allow me to suggest that you brush up on your “Polari,” which has been called “the lost language of gay men” by Paul Baker in his wonderfully readable lexicon of that name (2002). Polari was the secret jargon with which gay men communicated among themselves during much of the 20th century. According to a recent article in The Guardian (“What brings you trolling back, then?” by Colin Richardson, 1/17/05), this idiom flourished between Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895 and the decriminalization of homosexuality (in England) in 1967. But Polari-speak is not so much “lost” today as it’s part of our common culture, as words such as “cruising,” “cottaging,” and even that most basic gay word, “camp,” have entered the general parlance. By the way, the next time you “cold call” someone looking for a positive outcome, you’re speaking Polari.
At any rate, if C is cruising, this could also account for its frequency. Keynes, like other Englishmen of his time, was a big walker, and Cambridge is a grand place to walk, as is the countryside around it. London, too, is a walkable city, and, according to Matt Cook in his London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (2003), it was in Keynes’ day a city dotted with a vast number of well-known pick-up spots. Green Park, for example, was heavily trafficked, as were Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, Leicester Square, and, if you were well-educated and preferred to be indoors, the British Museum. On the other hand, because A and W are most likely specific acts, not general categories, it’s tempting to side with the Church historian and go with “cock” (sucking, or whatever). But I think I’ll hedge here and choose “cop,” which could include cock-sucking but could also just be kissing and fondling. The point is, Keynes engaged in a lot of C; it’s consistently his highest total.
Would Keynes have known these terms? (“Cock,” by the way, doesn’t turn up in the Polari lexicon, maybe because it was a common obscenity, not limited to gay men.) It depends on how cutting-edge he was, how hip. I suspect he did know these expressions, because Keynes knew practically everything. He also was notoriously “naughty” in his speech, sharing a love of obscenity with his best friend (until Lydia), Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
My further guess is that this coded list has nothing to do with the specifically named lovers recorded on the first list, but instead records only anonymous sex, and that therefore C, with its high tally, is something that happened easily, often, and surreptitiously. Why keep a lengthy, specific tally, indexed by activity, if you’re doing “it” every day anyway with the same person? If most days you have a bit of A and you don’t have to resort to W, why bother to note it? Not interesting. It would make more sense, as I see it, to keep a list of how often and under what circumstances you could possibly have sex, and then how often you scored. Seeking anonymous sex would be sort of like investing in the stock market (which Keynes did obsessively, trading daily before he even got out of bed): invest often, hedge your bets to avoid substantial loss, and hope for the best.
To buttress my theory that the second diary records anonymous sex (or attempts at anonymous sex) rather than ongoing sex with a stable partner, there is another, very puzzling number attached to each quarterly increment. First, Keynes adds up all the three categories of activities—C plus A plus W—and then he attaches a number that doesn’t seem to relate to any of them. These numbers range from 65 to 100. Doesn’t that sound to you like a grade? Keynes was a young don, barely out of university, so my guess is that he was grading himself on performance. Most of his grades (if that’s what they are) are in the seventies and eighties. That is, he attained pretty good sex but nothing to write home about. Only rarely does he award himself a grade of 95 or above (no grade-inflation here), but there is a 100 and there’s even one 104. That 104 either disproves my theory or indicates a quarter-term of quite spectacular A+ sex.
What we do know is that, in the years Keynes was lecturing on economics at Cambridge, serving on the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, working on the book that later became A Treatise on Probability (1921), advising the Treasury during the run-up to the First World War, and speculating enthusiastically in the stock market, he had much more than just a workaday life. You might say that Keynes was at least as invested in the sex market as he was in the stock market.
Evan Zimroth, novelist and poet, is a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge (UK); in the US, she is professor of English and Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York.
