THE HISTORY OF CONDOMS

Condoms may be thousands of years old, but gay men have had a very brief relationship with them. It began in the 1970s and already it may be coming to an end. David McGillivray unravels the full story

Words David McGillivray

Illustrations Ego Rodriguez

Ever since it was first written about well over 300 years ago, the condom has been the butt of jokes. In his poem of 1706, Lord Belhaven ridicules his political rival, the Duke of Argyll, who mistakenly called the device a “quondam”. A 2016 piece in Esquire is headed “A brief history of men wrapping their penises in weird shit.”

But for a relatively short period, when Aids was the worst thing to happen to us since buggery was made a capital offence in 1533, the condom was no laughing matter for gay and bisexual men; it meant the difference between life and death.

It’s precisely because of its God-like capability to prevent both (new) life and death (from venereal disease) that the condom was condemned by the Church. This in turn restricted the wondrous contraceptive/ prophylactic to the secret world of philanderers and prostitutes, to be sniggered about in private.

The word “condom” didn’t appear in a major English dictionary until 1961. By then, its origin had been lost in the mists of time. For hundreds of years, a story circulated that condoms were named after Charles II’s physician, one Dr Condom, who invented a sheath for the king to use when having sex. But in his exhaustively researched book, Looking for Dr Condom, William E. Kruck finds no record of such a man. “It is as if he had never existed,” he concludes.

Almost all histories of the condom – including the latest, published earlier this year on the BBC’s Future site – begin with Homer’s Iliad, written circa 800-700 BC. The epic poem relates how King Minos (son of Zeus, father of the Minotaur) used a goat’s bladder to protect his wife Pasiphae from his poisonous semen. Other ancient civilisations alleged to have been condom-savvy range from the Cro-Magnons to the Egyptians. But the evidence doesn’t hold much semen.

The first description of what is indisputably a condom dates from 1564 — although they weren’t yet known by that term. It was said to be an infallible safeguard against syphilis (the scourge of Europe since around 1494) by Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, he of the fallopian tube. He trialled a treated linen cap tied on to the penis with ribbon.

Before the 16th century, we suspect — there’s no proof — that Minos-style animal intestines had been in use. The earliest remains of a condom to be found date back to 1640, and were discovered in Lund, Sweden; while another was unearthed at Dudley Castle in the West Midlands, in a latrine that was known to have been sealed in 1647.

The next published treatise on the condom came in 1717. English physician Daniel Turner claimed that “by reason of its blunting the Sensation, I have heard some [men] acknowledge that they had often chose to risque a Clap.” Upper-class reprobates were not discouraged. Two notable libertines wrote about condoms: Casanova in 1789 and the Marquis de Sade in 1795. As neither man, as far as we know, died of a sexually transmitted infection (STI), their faces ought to be on condom wrappers.