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Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor. This is a special edition of the column in honor of National Coming Out Day.
Gay guys have been marked safe from the sex recession. According to our recent Gen Z Sex Survey with The Kinsey Institute and the reproductive health brand Julie, gay men between the ages of 18 to 29 were more than twice as likely as their heterosexual peers to have had 10 or more partners in their lifetime, and nearly four times as likely to have had 10 or more partners in the last three months alone. Meanwhile, one in five straight people have never had sex at all, and nearly 30 percent haven’t had sex in the last three months.
So what is it that gay men know about sex that the rest of us don’t? I asked a few in an effort to find out.
“Gay men put more emphasis on ‘sex is fun and meaningless.’ Straight women put more emphasis on ‘energy exchange and connection,’” a bisexual guy, Christopher, tells me. “Fun/meaningless sex leads to more sex with more people and also no slut shaming. I think the healthiest path is somewhere in the middle, a little bit of ‘who cares’ mixed with a little bit of connection.”
Writer and gay man Moises Mendez II seems to agree: “Sex is so much less serious than they [straight people] make it out to be,” he says.
Ok, be less serious. Noted! But, what else? While 21.5 percent of gay men reported having had zero partners in the last three months and 40 percent have had only one, they are still statistically beating out everyone else—including lesbian and bisexual respondents—in terms of general sexual frequency. Is it all just a matter of horniness? That’s obviously a part of it. But it’s also a matter of culture and access, too.
“I think gay men have relational scripts, platforms, places, and infrastructure for casual sex that straight people (and also queer women/non-gay men queers) don’t,” Ewan, a gay guy, tells me “I hear so many of my straight friends and also queer women friends talking about their desire to have casual sex and relationships but very little supports them to actually do that — either materially or culturally. By contrast gay guys have been fucking casually and have generationally deep norms, customs, and both physical and digital infrastructure to facilitate it.”
Plenty of women, myself included, love sex. Women are often hornier than we’ve culturally been led to believe. But even so, there remains a difference in how men and women broadly experience desire. Namely, men are more likely to experience spontaneous desire, whereas women’s desire is often responsive and context-dependent. On an even more basic level, our sex drives are dictated largely by testosterone—something men typically have much more of.
Some of the disparity is a matter of culture than physical desire, though. Men can have casual, anonymous sex with relative safety and little threat of danger or shame—in other words, it can be just fun. For women, that is not always the case. Even if a woman does have the opportunity to pursue one-night stands or casual encounters as she pleases, she remains at higher risk for physical violence than men who do the same.
Beyond safety, the threat of social stigma lingers, too. “So many of the cis women I meet these days are so concerned with their body count going up,” Kaelyn, 29, tells me. “I thought we were past all that! Meanwhile, every gay guy I know is proud to add another notch to their bedpost, no shame attached.”
Nothing speaks more to the unique realities of gay sexual culture than the existence of Grindr, the gay hookup app. Grindr has outperformed mainstream dating apps like Tinder and Hinge on both revenue and user base growth over the last several years. While Bumble’s stock value continues to decline, Grindr’s continues to hit new peaks.
Grindr itself confirmed that gay men are bucking the sex recession. “Grindr app usage data pulled from October 2025 to July 2026 does not indicate a sex recession in the gay community,” a representative from the app said via email. “Every generation’s app usage from Gen Z (18+) to Millennials and Gen X to Boomers, on the platform is trending upward, with users in their 20s and 30s growing the fastest of all.”
The sex recession isn’t the result of women wanting less sex than men, but more so about the cultural realities that young people as a whole face today. The sex recession is the product of digital isolation, economic decline and heightened anxieties towards sex, ourselves and the future. These are problems regardless of orientation. But with all these issues, maybe we at least owe it to ourselves to treat consensual sex with a little bit of gay levity. Not every woman wants to have sex like the gay men with 10 or more partners in the last three months, and that is perfectly fine. That was the case before the sex recession, too. We don’t all need to be on Grindr, but we do all probably need to lighten up.
