John Maynard Keynes: All The Way With JMK

Keynes collected and catalogued his sexual activities as obsessively as other men did postage stamps (indeed that was an early hobby of his – make of it what you will). He kept detailed records of encounters, with names or initials of partners, allocated by year from 1901 – his first sexual experience, with a fellow Etonian, at age 17 – though the classification had ceased by 1925, when he married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. She was no beard – they were deeply in love, and apparently greatly enjoyed foreplay: "I want to be foxed and gobbled abundantly," he once wrote, while she referred to his "nimble fingers". He wasn't a perfect lover, however, and was rumoured to suffer premature ejaculation. Wittgenstein went on honeymoon with them, which can't have helped.

Bi, bi-curious, gay, straight, or what? Keynes seems, successively, predominantly homosexual and then mostly heterosexual, changing his mind – radically – about the balance of his sex life in middle age, much in the way he rejected classical economics for his new theories. ("When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?") Before then – it's not known whether he was monogamous after his marriage – he was promiscuous and in Edwardian times, as now, there was plenty of cruising, if you wanted it. And Keynes did. He went "feasting with panthers" in railway carriages, Cambridge colleges, and across London  – Soho and Bloomsbury were centres of this demi-monde, as were public parks and baths. One list reveals his catholic tastes: "Stable boy of Park Lane; The Swede of the National Gallery; The Soldier of the baths; The French Conscript; The Blackmailer; sixteen-year-old under Etna; Lift boy of Vauxhall; Jewboy; Grand Duke Cyril of the Paris Baths…" He had 65 encounters in 1909, 26 in 1910, 39 in 1911…

From The Independent's review of Richard Davenport-Hines' Universal Man: The Seven Lives Of John Maynard Keynes

And here's The Guardian's Seven Things You May Not Know About John Maynard Keynes, written by RDH.