Fast food, gay sex and the tearoom trade

Sex, food and recreational drugs raise similar ethical issues:self control, regulation of appetite and consideration for others

The language of lovers, from the Song of Solomon onwards, is filled with images of sweetness and nourishment. Analogies between food and sex, between hunger and thirst and sexual desire, are fundamental to our understanding of what sex is. We could hardly talk about it otherwise. Freud put his imprimatur on this metaphor in the first of his three essays on the theory of sexuality, where he defined the release of sexual tension as “a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger.”

There are languages where this notion is built in to everyday speech. In Brazilian Portuguese comer, to eat, also means to take the active role in sex. Comer and dar—to eat and to give—are reciprocal verbs for sexual acts between all genders.

We should not be surprised, then, that Ron Davies, the British government minister whose misdemeanours have been in the news, seizes on the image of food when seeking to explain his walk on the wild side. The former Secretary for Wales asserts, somewhat implausibly, that when he went home with strangers he met in the gay cruising area on Clapham Common—who later robbed him at knife point—a shared meal was all he had in mind.

We can assume that this is code for the pursuit of other desires—sex is a realm of dissimulation and double-talk for most of us, after all. But such deceptions are exacerbated when political ambition clashes with carnal appetite. If we should need reminding of this, in the United States there’s been a year-long public seminar, sponsored by Congress, with the President as the case study, concerning the precise definition of having and not having sex.

Unlike President Clinton, it seems, Ron Davies has not got away with it. Is this because of the gender of the participants, or the nature of the act? And do we have a proper moral language to differentiate between these two different aspects of the event?

Love as an orchard of pleasant fruits

There’s no doubt that if Bill Clinton had been carrying on with a male Congressional page rather than a female intern, the outcome of his case would have been different. But what bothers people in Britain most about the Ron Davies affair, I’d venture to guess, is not the gay thing as such. It is, rather, the association with cruising and cottaging—that is to say, sex between strangers in public places.

Despite the fact that the song of Solomon compares the beloved to a garden—and the act of love to an orchard of pleasant fruits—anonymous al fresco sex of any kind is not something most people are comfortable with. And sex in parks and public conveniences makes generally tolerant people uneasy—including, let it be said, many gay people.

What goes on between men in such places is no dinner party. It’s more like fast food. Fast food may not be good for you, but it has its allure. And cottaging, while it may offend sections of the public, is not self-evidently harmful. No rain forests are felled for it; no animals die; and no lies are told, since it takes place without much talking. The lies start later.

Studies of cottaging, beginning with Laud Humphreys’s classic, rather comically solemn sociological work, Tearoom Trade (1970), stress the high proportion of married men involved. For men who want sex with men but who have no desire to embrace a gay identity, cruising and cottaging provide a swift and convenient resort. So Mr Davies may well be telling the truth when he stresses the importance to him of the love of his wife and family. Most of the men who frequent the cruising area of Clapham Common and places like it are not looking for love. What they are doing is snacking. The thing that repels other people—that the sex is summary, anonymous and potentially public—is what is attractive. The sex that cottagers have is something apart from their domestic lives. It occurs in the liminal zone between work and home, involving people with whom they have no social or affective relationship. It happens in a different moral space.

A BBC TV reporter repeatedly asked Ron Davies if he was gay. But this isn’t the appropriate question. Gayness is a social identity; Ron Davies isn’t gay until he decides to say he is. The question is rather whether he has sex with men. And that is a question we may have no obvious need to know the answer to. The important question in Mr Davies’ case is this: is the moral discontinuity involved in consorting with strangers in parks unconducive to the proper regulation of desire in general, and, specifically, with holding public office?

Not necessarily. It can be argued that Mr Davies has a right to respond with silence in this respect, just as President Clinton’s supporters assert his right not to come clean about Monica Lewinsky. In both cases, they would argue, the act itself is none of our business. But wasting police time is a different matter. And Mr Davies’ deliberately misleading statements to police about the theft of his car by the man he met on the Common make him guilty of this. Lying to the police is stupid and—at least in countries where the rule of law prevails—wrong. Such stupidity—an error of judgment, a moment of madness, call it what you will—is proper cause for concern in a public figure.

Being a politician does not necessarily make you a liar. The shade of another Labour MP may be called in evidence on this point. The late Tom Driberg was a celebrated cottager; he didn’t try to hide it (though he did pull strings to avoid prosecution). And, even back then in the 1960s, when all gay sex was illegal, he got away with it. No one ever stole his car. The reason Ron Davies did not tell the truth is not because he is gay; it is because he is Ron Davies, a flawed and frightened politician in a country where hypocrisy and double standards still prevail, one whose instinct is to lie to the police when he is in trouble, and who does not know when the lies have to stop.

The limits of metaphor

In our thinking about sex, cottaging may seem to mark the limit of the analogy between sexual desire and hunger, and the beginning of an analogy with addictive behaviour and drug use. At this point sex appears less like food and more like a fix. If cottaging strikes most people like this, as an addiction rather than an appetite, it is, to an extent, because of the legal risk cottagers are prepared to run, which suggests a compulsion to pursue sexual gratification notwithstanding any reputational dangers it may involve.

Yet moral risk is equally high in other kinds of sexual adventure—probably higher. Such heterosexual adventures—office romances, extra-marital affairs—may be pursued just as compulsively as cottaging, but they are not normally regarded with the same opprobrium, even though they have, if anything, still greater potential for damage to families and spouses and other third parties, threatening domestic arrangements in a way that cottaging may not.

The fact is that any kind of sexual desire, homosexual or heterosexual, can overwhelm the person who entertains it, can become addictive or compulsive. The capacity for self-control is distinct from sexual object choice. And it is the capacity for self-control that should be considered more important, both in the personal and in the political realm. If there’s something wrong with a government minister cruising strangers in a park, it’s not primarily because the object of his desire is male, or even because he is doing it on Clapham Common. It is because he cannot draw the line, because he allows it to lead him into other deceptions, because he lets it suborn his sense of responsibility, as drugs can also do.

It seems that we are driven to invoke addictive drugs to describe this kind of desire. A metaphor drawn from food cannot fully convey the disruptive power of sex. Sex is too big for the box. If sex was an appetite similar to food in all respects—if it occupied the same moral category—people of a regulatory bent would have been inclined to regard, say, vegetarianism in the same way that they do homosexuality. Culinary deviance would be as disturbing to them as sexual deviance. Vegetarians would have been subject to persecution and information about vegetarianism would be banned from schools.

The food metaphor has its limits, then. But the analogy with drugs is also problematic, tending to extremes. In public discussion of sex it is sexual minorities, gay men in particular, that tend to provoke this shift of metaphor, from food to drug, from nourishment to ravishment, from reasonable to reprehensible desire. Since drugs are themselves the subject of a peculiar anxiety in the public mind this means that the perception of sexual minorities comes to be characterised by a double dose of irrationality and panic.

In truth, it’s the same with drugs as it is with sex—and food too. It’s not the drug you use, nor the kind of sex you have, nor who with, nor yet the food you like that is the most important thing. It’s whether you permit your preferences to dull your moral awareness, that is to say, your knowledge of their effect on you—and your responsibility for their effect on other people.

Self-control, regulation of appetite and consideration of others. Whether it is drugs, food or sex, these are the issues. They’re the issues with Ron Davies. And they’re the issues with you or me. ✭