Don't assume that just because I'm gay, all I want is sex

Oh come now, you expect us to believe that all homosexuals aren't degenerate lust-ridden sodomites perpetually in search of boyflesh with the single-mindedness of some James Cameron-inspired cyborg from the future? I mean, by golly Focus on the Family and Jan and Paul Crouch say so, and God himself told them.

Actually, I suffer from the opposite problem. Many of my misguided fuzzily liberal friends expect me to be some sort of saint. I once admitted to a trio of lady friends that I had had a casual fling with someone, and these women (all of whom go through men quicker than I can go through kleenex) acted as if I had just proclaimed that my new sneakers were made out of human skin. I mean, really, just because I've never gone tap, tap, tap in a Glory Hole and never turned tricks on a street corner doesn't mean that I'm some sort St. Ignatius of Perpetual Virginity. I blame television for this trend. Outside of eurotrash TV, when was the last time a gay guy on a sitcom or drama got laid? Dharma and Greg go at it at like bunnies, but Greg's gay counterpart Will from Will and Grace might as well don a cassock, shave a tonsure into his head and begin chanting in latin. Don't get me started on Matt from Melrose Place, even Jane got lucky more often than he did.

But that's precisely the problem with stereotypes, even positive ones rob people of their individuality and attempt to force randomly associated people into some sort of homogenous blob. Gays come from every socio-economic and cultural background imaginable, it's entirely too ludicrous to expect us to follow some sort of uniform standard of behavior.

The statistics justifying this particular prejudice are common, but the most popular seems to be from the "classic" 1978 Bell and Weinberg study, which found that:

Of 685 homosexual men, 589 (83%) had 50+ partners in their lifetime, 497 (73%) had 100+, 394 (58%) had 250+, 284 (41%) had 500+, 182 exceeded 1000 partners, an astonishing 26%. And 79% noted that over half their sexual contacts were total strangers.

However, this data is not really accurate of the gay population as a whole, since (a) the homosexual sample used was not random, but taken from people found in gay bars, personal referrals, gay organizations, public advertising, and mailing lists, and (b) the heterosexual sample (which was random) was not given by comparison to provide a control group. (Jeramy Townsley, http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/tidh/jones_yarhouse.htm)

A later study by Laumann in 1994 discovered that "Homosexuals still have 3-4 times as many partners as heterosexuals." However, as Jeramy Townsley also pointed out:

...what Laumann fails to explore is the radically skewed nature of the data. Typically this indicates that the mean, the statistic presented by Laumann, may not be the best measure to report. A further analysis of the GSS data (on which Laumann based his results) indicates that the median (50th percentile) number of sexual partners for heterosexuals is five and for homosexuals is six (http://php.iupui.edu/~jtownsle/gss/partners.html). The discrepancy between the mean and median is indicative of a small sub-population of gay males who tend towards high rates of sexual partners, skewing the mean, while the majority of gay men tend to have rates about the same as heterosexual males.

In other words: yes, there is a sizable subculture of homosexual men who are extremely promiscuous. The odds are, though, that the gay guy living on the next floor isn't one of them.