You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Lovecast at savage.love.

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

while there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast. It wasn't a bunch of funty 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 the 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 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? Yeah, that mattered too.

Because the more people you had sex with, the more strangers you let into your apartment or your ass,

the likelier you were to wind up having sex with someone who was terrible, someone who didn't

...