Number of Sexual Partners Among Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM)
This deals with sexuality and may not be suitable for younger readers.
It’s amazing how hard this number was to find.
From “Behavioral, Biological and Structural Components of MSM STI Morbidity” by Steven Goodreau and Matthew Golden, University of Washington CFAR. Presented at the 2004 National (USA) STD Prevention Conference, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [PPT]
In this slide from their talk (and probably a summary of their findings reported later in Sexually Transmitted Infections (2007;83:458-462).
- MSM = Men who have Sex with Men
- UMHS = Urban Men’s Health Survey, c. 1998, “a telephone interview of a probability sample of men who have sex with men (MSMs) living in four cities – San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. An MSM was defined as any male who reported same sex contact since age 14 or who self-identified as gay or bisexual.” [Sociometrica]
- NHSLS = National Health and Social Life Survey (“The Sex Survey”). 1992
So around 25% of all males have had more than two partners in the past twelve months, while among just MSM it runs around 65%.
The problem is that NHSLS is representative of the nation as a whole. UMHS only surveyed urban men, and the methodology seems flawed to me, skewing towards MSM who would be heavily sexually active.
This still doesn’t say what the median or modes are.
From Laurie Garrett, 1994, The Coming Plague, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York. Pp. 271.
“Every time we do an NIH site visit the definition of ‘multiple sex partners’ has changed. First, it was ten to twenty partners per year. That was 1975,” [[NIH Advisor Dr. June]] Osborn complained. “Then in 1976 it was fifty partners a year. By 1978 we were talking about a hundred sexual partners a year and now [1980] we’re using the term to describe five hundred sexual partners in a single year.
“I am duly in awe. Perhaps somewhat disbelieving, but duly in awe,” Osborn concluded.
The double brackets are my additions. The single brackets are in Garrett.
Garrett does not provide a source for this, which I think occurred during Osborn’s presentation to her committee at NIH in 1980.
ABC has commissioned a poll on Americans’ sexuality, but because it does not separate out MSM and WSW from the general population, it’s not very useful for this. (“Asked their sexual orientation, five percent describe themselves as either homosexual or bisexual.” [pp. 17 in PDF] They are less than 4% of the earlier and more robust National Health and Social Life Survey, with an odd finding of WSW stopping having sex with women as they age, if I remember correctly.)
From Mercer, Catherine H; Fenton, Kevin A; Copas, Andrew J; Wellings, Kaye; Erens, Bob; McManus, Sally; Nanchahal, Kiran; Macdowall, Wendy; Johnson, Anne M. July 2004. “Increasing prevalence of male homosexual partnerships and practices in Britain 1990-2000: evidence from national probability surveys“. AIDS, 18(10)2:1453-1458
In Table 1: Around 30% of MSM in the past 5 years had had only one male partner. Around 30% of the same had had 10 or more partners. Mean was 24.1 and the median was 4. Upper and lower quartiles were 1 and 15, respectively. Their take on it:
The distribution of partnerships reported by MSM in Natsal 2000 was highly skewed (Table 1). The median number of male partners in the past 5 years reported by MSM was four, but the mean was 24.1 partners. One-third of MSM reported one male partner in the past 5 years whereas nearly one in ten reported at least 50 male partners in this time.
Emphasis mine.
This is probably the nub of the problem. Most Men who have Sex with Women (MSW) still have one partner in a year. Most MSM have more than one partner in a year, although many (~30%) have only one partner. The results above, from the UK’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles II(NATSAL 2000), are consistent with the earlier results reported for the US by Steven Goodreau and Matthew Golden (above).
One would expect UMHS to report higher partner rates, since it is from the four major gay urban areas in the US, in the same way that one would expect higher partner rates for MSW and WSM in urban areas.
From P Van De Ven, P Rodden, J Crawford, S Kippax, 1997, “A Comparative Demographic and Sexual Profile of Older Homosexually Active Men”. Journal of Sex Research, 34(4):349-360.
The abstract describes the research and the group studied.
For an Australian national telephone survey (Project Male-Call), 2,583 homosexually active men were interviewed. Questions about demographics, types of sexual partners, attachment to gay community, HIV/AIDS, and sexual practices were asked. About 10% (n = 256) of the Male-Call men were over 40 years…
The paper in general is interesting, but the results relevant here are as follows:
For the older men [over 50], the modal range for number of male sexual partners ever was 101-500 (21.6%); 2.7% had had sex with 1 partner only; and between 10.2% and 15.7% reported having had sex with the number of partners indicated by each of the following ranges: 2-10, 11-20, 21-50, 51-100, 501-1000, or > 1000….
For these older (50+) MSM, over 40% had sex with 100 or more partners over their lifetime. (Includes “101-500″, “500-1000″ and “>1000″ categories.) Over 20% had had more than 500 partners. That works about to be between 75-100 partners per year for this later group, more or less.
It’s worth noting that about 30% of all age groups had either no sexual partner or a monogamous partnership at the time of the interview. “[A]lmost half (48.9%) of the older men had sex with a casual partner one to five times per month”, which was consistent with the result of other age groups.
I’m ignoring earlier studies of the gay community in San Francisco from the 1970s and 1980s, although they would shed light on the Osborn quotation from Garrett94.
The Januses’ survey isn’t even worth citing.
All of these surveys suffer from a reporting bias that may mean that they skew towards very sexually active MSM, with less active MSM underreporting. Many of the numbers cited by “pro-marriage activists” suffer this problem.
NATSAL, NHSLS and Male-Call seem the best of what’s out there and relatively reliable.
The first study is troubling for the gay community since it concludes that even with “safe sex” practices, MSM are 4x as likely as MSW to contract HIV due to the increased risk caused by anal sexual penetration. Garrett discusses the issue of having homosexual men go from set roles (penetrating or receiving) to being “versatile”, which increases the likelihood of disease transmission. Reports of other sexual practices likely skew towards the hyper-sexual among MSM. Adjusting for that, it still looks like these practices are more prevalent among MSM, and they increase the risk of disease transmission.
It would be interesting to see the numbers for migrant workers in African mines or conscripted troops in African armies. I only note Africa because I know that it has been studied as a result of the massive depopulation caused by AIDS.
NATSAL showed an increase in reports of MSM and WSW from 1990 to 2000, with a greater increase in WSW. There is speculation that this could be a conflation of earlier underreporting due to embarrassment and later increases in same-sex activities.
The methodologies, including how you define “homosexual”, differ from study to study. But at least these are numbers.
Nothing here, other than the very problematical comparison of UMHS and NHSLS data, gives one anything to compare MSM with MSW, or WSW or WSM, although one can get comparison data from NHSLS and NATSAL.
All of this was because I read Internet Monk’s posts and I remembered the quotation from Garrett94. I wanted to get these numbers down so that I would have them in one place, and that led to a chase. It seemed relevant to my understanding of the issue. Note that none of this deals in any way with WSW.
