THE SEX DIARIES OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

From:  More Intelligent Life

A KEY FOR THE PRURIENT | January 28th 2008

Leo Reynolds/Flickr

Evan Zimroth has been researching the life of J.M. Keynes and deciphering the great man's sex diaries. One is easy (a lot of Duncan Grant). The other uses a code which, if nothing else, helps break the ice at parties ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
Last week 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 sceptical 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 was never a closeted homosexual, although his colleagues at Bretton Woods in 1945 didn't always realise it, perhaps because at those conferences he was accompanied by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, his wife of twenty years. By then he was the eminent economist and statesman, and possibly no longer on the prowl.
In earlier days, though, from 1901 to 1915 when he was mostly a 20-something, he cruised constantly and kept two sex diaries of his success. Luckily Keynes was a pack-rat, so we have both of these documents, among a mass of J.M. Keynes memorabilia housed in the modern archives at King's College, Cambridge, (They are reproduced in "Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography", by D. E. Moggridge, albeit in an appendix labelled "A Key for the Prurient.")
Keynes obsessively counted and tabulated almost everything; it was a life-long habit. As a child, he counted 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 his sex life.
The first diary is easy: Keynes lists his sexual partners, either by their initials (GLS for Lytton Strachey, DG for Duncan Grant) or their nicknames ("Tressider," for J. T. Sheppard, the King's College Provost). When he apparently had a quick, anonymous hook-up, he listed that sex partner generically: "16-year-old under Etna" and "Lift boy of Vauxhall" in 1911, for instance, and "Jew boy," in 1912.
This list, where he names names but gives no details, Keynes organised 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. An economist to the core, Keynes organized the second sex diary also year-by-year, but this time in quarterly increments.
Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been prurient enough to crack it.
Here's what Keynes' tabulation looks like. For every quarter-year from 1906 to 1915, he tallies up his sexual activities and totals them under three categories: C, A, and W.
For each of these headings, he records the number of times each activity occurred, and also when. For example, between May and August, 1911, he performed (if that's the right word) C 16 times, A four times, and W five times.
Whenever I have had the chance€”as with the Church historian€”I have asked people to free associate to Keynes' code. When presented with "A" they invariable said "ass", which is almost undoubtedly right, but it leaves open the question of who/whom. Is it 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 labour, as happened to Oscar Wilde in 1895 when, to his surprise and eventual devastation, he was put away for two years. So Keynes, understandably, is taking care in this diary to hide his activity. MORE