You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Love cast at savage.

If you're stuck in a relationship quandary or if you're looking for sexual harmony

while they're sexual harmony. It's well there's nothing you can't ask on the savage love cast It wasn't a bunch of fundy Christians I pissed off when I first started writing about sex.

It was a bunch of gay guys at AIDS organizations.

One of the slogans promoted by HIV prevention AIDS organizations early on in the 1980s

was have more sex with fewer people.

That was a slogan we revived during the monkeypox outbreak a couple of years ago.

But by the early 90s, that slogan, more sex, fewer people,

have been retired in favor of it doesn't matter how many people you have sex with it matters how.

By the early 90s AIDS org seemed more invested in battling shame around gay sex than fighting AIDS

and in an early example of what would now be described as audience capture, AIDS orgs in the 90s stopped

telling gay men what we needed to hear and started telling gay men what we wanted to hear.

And what a lot of us wanted to hear,

maybe most of us wanted to hear,

was that you could safely have sex

with as many men as you wanted

so long as you used condoms.

I was in my 20s then, I'd been to a few hodios, I'd seen some things,

and I'd come to know some things,

and one of the things I knew in my bones,

based on my lived experience and the lived experiences of my friends, was that how many mattered too.

How mattered? Of course how mattered and still does matter. But how many?

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