here are numbers that come from a study of a couple of thousand swedes with no reference to sexual preference that i could find the point would seem to be that NUMBER sexual activity follows a power curve with a few people a la wilt chamberlain having an extaordinarily large number of sexual contacts ev en in a short period of time and NUMBER a tendency for men to have more partners than women i have no idea being a statistical ignoramus whether the fact that there seem to be more men than women at the extremely promiscuous end of the sex partners distribution curve means that you d get even more extreme results in a group of men who chiefly have sex with other men URL for example the mean number of partners since sexual initiation for women is approximately NUMBER and in a sample of less than NUMBER swedish women we find an individual with NUMBER partners for men the mean is approximately NUMBER and we find an individual with NUMBER partners which is almost NUMBER times larger than the mean so somehow don juan was not such an extraordinary case but just one data point in a wide spectrum of behaviors that can be observed as for gay men there is indeed anecdotal evidence of cases of extreme promiscuity among gay men you can read about it in randy schiltz s and the band played on he writes about bathhouse culture pre hiv he also discusses how in the gay politics of the time there was a sub culture of what you might call radical gay men who argued and acted on the argument that having many partners was an essential part of what being gay actually was it was an explicitly political statement monogamy is an artifact of straight culture that view seems to have died in more ways than one part of the point of schiltz s book was to condemn the role that it and bathhouse culture played in spreading the aids epidemic that eventually killed schiltz among so many others this doesn t let eugen off the hook but it is accurate to say that there was a cult of promiscuity that was particular to the gay community tom 