We are always delighted to receive readers’ letters, but rarely do they contain all the information that a doctor would have wanted if he had met you in the clinic. We don’t know if you and your partner have a clear division between active and passive roles.

In most, but not all partnerships, whatever their preference, both partners play both roles and swap around. In others, one is always active and takes the male part, and the other always passive and assumes the female. Nor do you tell us what sexual activities you included. A large number of homosexual partnerships rarely have only penetrative anal sex. Finally, there always needs to be discussion about what you mean by virgin. Different nationalities, different cultures and even different people from all backgrounds, nationalities and cultures understand the term quite differently.

Was your partner entirely sexually naive, his only previous experience having been solo? If this was his introduction to mutual sex and he was expected to be a passive partner in a penetrative sexual union it might be sur- prising if he had an orgasm at all. This is an acquired taste.

In general, there needs to be an understanding that external anal stimulation is common in heterosexual and homosexual couples as part of foreplay, whereas penetrative anal sex is much less common even in homosexual partnerships.If this is how your partner had lost his virginity, it would be easy to understand that his emotions would be confused and his physiological response weak.

New sexual partners have to discover each other’s needs and adjust accordingly. It would be unusual if two adults had had exactly the same amount of experience that would have patterned their future needs so that they enjoyed identical sexual activities.

Some people, for instance, are happy to be orally active but don’t care for a passive role, whereas in others the reverse is true.

When performing mutual masturbation, techniques may vary. Penetrative sex isn’t, contrary to popular belief, the be-all and end-all of many homosexual sex lives. This was a surprise to me during the years when I saw all the homosexual men who attended the genito-urinary medical clinic at the Royal London Hospital.

Another surprise was the number of times a day many homosexual patients had an orgasm. As I began to know the patients better, and they trusted me more, they became increasingly honest. As one said to me one day: “Doctor, we should tear up the history I gave you the first time we met and I’ll now give you the truth.” The number of partners he’d previously admitted to was a shadow of the true figure.

It is possible that your partner had already ejaculated before he met you so that the great white heat of his passion may have already been partially sated.

In the very unlikely event that your partner is not suffering from anything that won’t solve itself with greater familiarity and more straightforward talk, it is just worth considering the factors that can interfere with ejaculation. The greatest of these are anxiety and guilt.

The other common cause of trouble is drugs, usually those prescribed to treat high blood pressure, anxiety, depression or psychoses. Alcohol and even nicotine can have the same effect.

There are a few drugs that are available that are said to improve ejaculation if your friend’s troubles don’t ease. Finally, remember that low hormonal levels could be responsible for ejaculatory difficulties but this would be revealed by a lack of other physical male characteristics.