Archaic Adonians

NICK CORDINGLY asks whether the the infamous Adonians are as archaic as we think.

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As a gay man in Cambridge, I have never been afforded the doubtful ‘privilege’ of being invited to the infamous and elusive Adonian Society, which invites gay undergraduates to dine and possibly do more with like-minded fellows.

However, a friend of mine recently attended the induction dinner.  And while he seems to have had a relatively uneventful time of it (he noted most feeling up of students was occurring towards undergraduates who had been before) I think the continued existence of such a society poses some interesting questions.

Giving Aloysius a hand out of the closet…

Now, it’s fine for a group of consenting adults want to get together with the possibility of having sex: it breaks no laws and if they really want to do it then they are perfectly free to.  Yet, as a friend of mine who does law remarked, the very idea of it seems like it should be illegal.

If we were to reverse the genders of the undergraduates involved, and imagine a group of young girls who were invited to a meal because fellows wanted to feel them up and possibly have sex with them, I’m pretty certain it would cause far more of a scandal and be shut down immediately.

To me, the fact that such a society exists in the 21st century is mostly an indictment of the antiquated attitude towards sex that still persists among some gay men.  The furtiveness of the whole thing seems to be an attempt to bring a thrill of illegality to sex such as existed before homosexuality was legalised in the 1960s.

It’s the same reason that some gay men continue to cottage: they seem to get kicks from trying to make sex as covert as it had to be before 1967.

Frankly such gay men need to give up on their clandestine fumbles and enter the modern world, go to the Cow on LGBT night or download Grindr.  We’re allowed to have sex as much as we like now. Stop complicating things by insisting on living in the past.