You know how, when you go to bed with a guy, there’s the kissing and the nipple tweaking and then almost always the next thing is the cock rubbing? You hold his. He holds yours.

And if you’re in the right position one of you can hold both cocks and rub them together. This is standard stuff. We’ve been doing it for years, right? Wrong. This activity, called “frot”, was only invented in 2000. And you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Pressure groups want us to give up bum sex altogether and replace it with frot and intercrural. Don’t bother going to the dictionary. You won’t find either of these words. Fortunately I can explain.

Let’s begin with intercrural, which means “between the legs”. You put your penis between your partner’s thighs and start thrusting. Yes, it’s that one. People have been doing it for thousands of years.

The Ancient Greeks used to do it. It’s popular because it’s safe. Where men and women are concerned there’s no chance of an unwanted pregnancy. So naturally the God Squad decided it was a sin.

It was equally safe for us when AIDS raged in the 1980s and 90s. A lot of gayers switched to intercrural sex and many are still doing it. Not tried it? It’s very intimate because you can do it face to face without interrupting the snogging business.

Let’s move on to frot. This gay word was inspired by a straight word, frottage, which means “rubbing”. Because I used to get a kick out of reading medical books when I was a kid I came across frottage quite early on.

Basically it’s a kink. Some straight blokes can only get their rocks off by rubbing themselves up against women, often in crowded places. I once watched some scumbag grinding his crotch against the bum of the woman in front of him in the bus queue. He wouldn’t stop even when she turned round in anger. He was like the Duracell bunny. It’s a hetero thing. Yuk.

So that’s the background to this frot that most of us do. Now we come to the man who claims it was his idea. Kind of. Bill Weintraub is an American gay rights activist who’s never really got over the thrill of that juvenile game of “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

More to the point he doesn’t like the way that gay men are defined by the fact that we have bum sex.

This is fair enough. After all, not all of us have bum sex. And hetero couples have bum sex. Bill thinks that men who have sex with men (he doesn’t believe that labels like straight and gay have any meaning, also fair enough) should rejoice in frot and intercrural. “What is the anus”, he asks, “but a sorry substitute for the vagina?”  Now he’s getting serious.

In 1982 Bill was fortunate enough to meet Brett Averill, a golden-haired youth who was the editor of a gay newspaper in New York. Brett liked cock rubbing too. He and Bill were together until 1995, when Brett died of AIDS.

This tragedy convinced Bill that he had a mission to convert all men to cock rubbing. He published his first manifesto in 1999. He said that he was against “the cultural tyranny of butt-fucking”, which separates men into tops and bottoms and feminises the passive partner.

Bill admitted that he’s fucked and been fucked. But he never got anything out of it. “I wanted the union of equals that, for me, could only be expressed by cock rubbing”, he declared.

Furthermore he felt he wasn’t alone here. He claimed that “gay” men are encouraged to think of bum sex as the be all and end all of gay sex and everything else as foreplay.

He also proposed that “straight” men would get it on with other men much more than they do now if it weren’t for the stigma of the bum sex, which they think is too “gay”. Here again he’s probably right.

In 2000 Bill wrote another essay in which he refined his revolutionary philosophy for men who have sex with men and gave cock rubbing a new name. He didn’t want to use frottage because of its hetero connotation. So he coined frot.

Everything’s spelled out on his website, www.heroichomosex.org. It starts out sensibly enough. “Not into anal? Gay, bi or str8 curious?

You don’t have to surrender your masculinity to be sexual with another man.” But then it becomes a bit cultish. Bill draws a lot of classical allusions. The name of the website is an example. There are also pictures of Greco-Roman wrestling, which Bill sees as the criterion of male physical contact.

“PRESSURE GROUPS WANT US TO GIVE UP BUM SEX ALTOGETHER AND REPLACE IT WITH FROT AND INTERCRURAL.”

But actually this appears to be another hangover from his youth, when, as he admits, he got turned on by wrestling. He even met lover Brett at a self-defence class. Nevertheless the bottom line (no pun intended) is that if frot is a cult, it’s a harmless one.

Bill does have our best interests at heart. He knows that bum sex isn’t going to vanish up its own arse (actually that pun was intended). But he’s worried that fucking can lead to barebacking, which is as risky today as it’s always been. Cock rubbing is low, low risk. And it’s fun!

I wouldn’t say that frot is exactly catching on. But it’s come a long way in just eleven years. There are now cock rubbing books and DVDs. Martin Finn has been making frot and intercrural porn since 2007.

At www.cock2cock.com he also describes other movies that will appeal to frot fans. Take One for the Team sounds like a good bet. (“They make out feverishly and bump and grind against each others’ stiffening jock bulges.”)

Strangely I can’t find any mention of director Kristen Bjorn, who often features frot. Message boards prove that frot has gone global.

At www.frotfrat.com there are posts from Frotgoy in Brisbane, Australia (“I’m looking for guys who share my fetish for cock to cock frot and even arse to arse frot. This is really all I do”) and Mrkrisons in Ljubljana, Slovenia (“I love frottage, cock2cock, cockfight. It’s so hot. I would love to meet guys who likes the same, but it’s hard to find someone like me in my country.”)

There’s also a more extremist site – www.g0ys.org. Yes, that’s “gay” with the “a” replaced by a zero. There’s pages and pages of stuff here that comes across as really angry (“GOYS detest the concept of playing in another person’s butt.”)

Unfortunately nothing’s more likely to encourage someone to do something than to tell them it’s detestable and that they mustn’t do it. It’s also simplistic to say that the passive gay partner is automatically the equivalent of the subservient female.

A lot of power bottoms will tell you that they wear the trousers in their house. And in any relationship – even that of the most devout frotteurs – there’s going to be a dominant partner. Let’s not get so obsessed with frot that we can’t get our jollies any other way. Let’s just rub our cocks together every so often. Mmmmmmm!