While we have some impression that changes have occurred, we know strikingly little about why sexual minority men have changed their behaviors.
A third study of sexual minority men in the United States conducted in April and May 2020 found an increase in the number of sexual partners but not in sexual risk behaviors (condomless anal sex) with casual partners, with risk behavior associated with perceptions of local COVID-19 epidemic severity (Stephenson et al., 2021). A month later, most sexual minority men in two national studies reported having fewer sex partners and adopting COVID-related risk prevention behaviors (McKay et al., 2020 Stephenson et al., 2021). In the context of the first wave of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many did so quite rapidly in the United States by the first 2 weeks of April 2020, approximately half of sexual minority men reported changing their sexual behaviors or number of partners (Sanchez et al., 2020). After decades of navigating HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (Parsons et al., 2005), gay and bisexual men are again responding to new and uncertain risks in a novel pandemic by adapting aspects of their social and sexual lives.