Love the new terminology!

Back when I was a young gay man, we talked about this all the time too, we just used different words. It's interesting how a common perception among some gay men is that gay sex has to be like straight sex. That's a kind of cultural heteronormativity, isn't it?

But even though we often talk like this, data show that anal sex is actually the least common form of sex for large numbers of gay men. It all depends on how you ask them the question. Naturally, if surveyors ask are you a top or bottom, they get an answer, even if the permissible range of answers includes vers.

But different numbers start to reveal themselves when they ask gay couples about the last time they had anal sex compared to the last time they had oral sex or some form of frotage or mutual masturbation.

Several studies have put anal sex at the bottom of the list, surprisingly.

I'm not so sure how much that surprises me. I'm genuinely versatile, without a particular preference. In one of my long-term partnerships, my partner preferred to top, and in another my partner preferred to bottom. I didn't really care.

But thinking back about both of those long-term partnerships, anal sex just isn't something that we did routinely. We enjoyed it, but it was reserved as something special. (Perhaps because it requires a little more preparation and time.) Maybe it was something for after "date night" or on a weekend when we didn't have to get up in the morning, when we could give our full attention to it.

Ordinary sex in bed before falling asleep was usually something a lot more casual than that.