What’s ‘A Lot’ Of Sex Partners For A 30-Year-Old Gay Man?

During a recent broadcast of the popular Kyle and Jackie O radio show in Australia, a conversation about numbers of sex partners left one of the hosts speechless. According to The Daily Mail, Jackie ‘O’ Henderson asked both her co-host Kyle Sandilands and the show’s newsreader, Brooklyn Ross, how many sexual partners they’d each had. Henderson didn’t go for a specific number per se, but did ask Ross, “What would you say – less than…?” After a second, Ross (who’s openly gay) slowly replied, “Less than… 200?” That apparently surprised Henderson who could only muster a stunned, “Wow!” Sandilands, who has discussed his own past sexual addiction on the show before, defended Ross saying, “Let the guy live a life!” Ross, who is 30-years-old, justified the number pointing out, “There’s 52 weeks in a year!” Sandilands jumped back in with, “And there’s only seven days in a week!” Henderson, still shocked, came back, “Yeah, but you’re working five days of those as well!” Umm, you can go to work and have sex in the same day, can’t you? This all comes just a week after Ross shared with the show’s listeners that when he was younger, his mother considered sending him to so-called ‘conversion therapy.’ Related: LubeLife Teams Up With Campus Pride For Sex Positive Campaign Doing the math here, if you guess a young man began having sex at, say, 18-years-old, over the course of the next 12 years that’s 144 months. Two hundred divided by 144 months would mean an average of 1.3 different sex partners a month. Does that sound like a lot of sexual partners for a gay man who’s 30-years-old? I have to admit I don’t think I was quite “1.3 different sex partners a month” busy when I was in my 20s, buuuuuut that was basically the late 80s/early 90s and the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Much has changed since that time with the advent of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and anti-viral medications which can keep viral levels undetectable in those with HIV. These days I’m pretty much on the sex-positive bandwagon. If folks want to do their thing, I have no judgements about it.