I need to get myself a gay sex fetish. It seems anyone who’s anyone has their own personal, sexual idiosyncrasy – it’s all about finding your niche.

Over brunch and a catchup yesterday with three of my gay mates the conversation, as always, turned highly explicit over eggs and the weekend supplements – for once I was glad about the screaming child a few seats away, stealing attention and covering up our gay sex talk. I forget why, but the subject of fetishes came up: turns out Jason is a foot guy; Karl isn’t averse to a bit of hard spanking and Chris revealed a previously unsaid fondness for leather and latex (among other things), which sounded like it was just the tip of the iceberg, so the rest of us left that thread unpicked in case we were asked to leave.

When it came to my turn to answer I couldn’t think of any favourite, unconventional sex acts that I perform often enough and enthusiastically enough to class as a fetish; nothing that I pursue with relish and think about all the time – I’m more of the sort that just goes with the flow and whatever feels good at the time. I’d like to think I have a pretty open mind when it comes to gay sex and I have tried various kinky things over the years, even developing a few tricks, but I couldn’t think of a recurring area of unique sexpertise that tops my list.

At the time this left me feeling a bit boring in the bed department. See, even thinking ‘bed’ is just so conventional when there are myriad places one could have sex and call it a fetish: in a lift; in a carpark with a crowd watching; anywhere there’s a danger you might get caught; on public transport; at grandma’s house…

If I had to pick a fetish it wouldn’t be feet: I once dated a guy who developed a fungal toenail infection which kind of put me off feet as a sexual thing for life – you never know what might be lurking under those socks. Pissing I’ve never found particularly erotic as part of sex play, although the voyeur aspect of watching a guy take a piss is kind of appealing. I have taken part in some water sport before, letting a guy urinate on me, but I found it more funny than horny and the biggest reaction it got from me was the need to pee myself.

Again, I can see how watching some hard guy smoking could be sexy up until the point he starts coughing his guts up, and I’ve done the gay sex + smoking a joint thing, which was nice, but there’s always the problem of what to do with the butt.
Spanking can feel nice, but I don’t find red-raw buttocks very attractive on a guy; serious bondage always seem like too much prep and hard work to me, and, I’m sorry, balloons have no place outside a kiddy party – that’s as perverse as sex with a pussy.

My friend Linda has an anal sex fetish that is big enough to swallow up the industrial sized dildos she likes her fuck buddy to push up her arse – the size of them made me wince – and I once met a German guy who was crazy about opening up buttholes with the kind of surgical equipment I would only expect to see near an operating table.

So it seems that reaching a point where you can happily have regular gay sex is not enough these days: you’ve got to tick a sub-category box too. Maybe my thing can be that I like to talk – ‘cos if you ask the right questions, you’ll find out exactly what the guy you’re fucking likes to do and by exploring his fetish you’re guaranteed a really hot fuck.