Gay activist Bill Weintraub began to heavily promote and recommend the gender-specific meaning of 'penis-to-penis rubbing' as frot on Internet forums sometime in the late 1990s, and said he coined the term. One view argued that the popularity of anal sex would decline, presumably with a corresponding drop in HIV rates, if gay men could somehow be persuaded to stop thinking of anal sex as a ' vanilla' practice, but rather as something 'kinky' and not-quite-respectable-as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when gay men who preferred to do only mutual masturbation and fellatio sometimes used the disparaging slang term brownie queen for aficionados of anal sex. The modern definition of frot emerged in a context of a debate about the status of anal sex within the gay male community some in the anti-anal, pro-frot camp insist that anal sex ought to be avoided altogether.
