Older Gay Men More Sexually Active Than Older Straight Men: Survey
By DONALD PADGETT for the Advocate
A recent survey found older gay and bisexual men in the U.K. had more sex partners and more sexual encounters than straight men of a similar age.
The study, entitled “The relationship between age and sex partner counts during the mpox outbreak in the UK, 2022” and from the University of East Anglia, was published in the journal PLOS ONE, and surveyed 5,164 British people during the recent outbreak of monkeypox, now referred to as mpox. The survey included 1,036 men who have sex with men (MSM) recruited via advertisements on Facebook and Instagram and another 831 people recruited via advertisements on the dating and hookup app Grindr.
“Most respondents had zero or one recent partner, all distributions were skewed,” the studyobserved. “There was a relatively linear declining relationship between age and partner counts for heterosexual partnership groups, but a peak in partner counts and concurrency for MSMs in middle age years (age 35–54), especially for MSM who seemed to be in a highly sexually active subgroup.”
“Before this study, many models about sexually transmitted diseases assumed that everyone over a certain age – say 40 or 65 – stopped being sexually active, or at least stopped having multiple partners. Or there might be an assumption that young people have the most sex,” Dr Julii Brainard of the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School and lead researcher on the study, said in a statement. “But the answer is more nuanced, and it partly depends on people’s sexuality.”
