Comedic actress Jenifer Lewis opened up about her past sex addiction and all the men she slept with until the AIDS epidemic forced her to slow down.
Lewis made the deeply personal revelation during a conversation with fellow actress Keke Palmer. Lewis explained how her sex life defined her and she viewed men as sex objects.
“I slept with 63 men. Now that was fabulous,” Lewis bragged. “I wish I had known my body was a temple. I used to just find a gorgeous man and f—- the sh– out of them.”
Lewis said she soon developed a sense of self that only comes with age and wisdom. It wasn’t about the number of bodies she had, it was about recognizing that what she once viewed as sexual freedom had become an addiction.
“I would have sex. Sex was the drug,” she told Palmer. Looking back, Lewis said she eventually realized she was addicted to sex. It wasn’t until the HIV/AIDS epidemic changed her world that she realized the poor choices she made in life.
“It wasn’t until when life got real and the AIDS epidemic hit where I went, ‘Wait a minute,'” Lewis recalled.
As the epidemic devastated communities across the country and claimed the lives of countless people, Lewis said the carefree attitude she once had toward sex suddenly disappeared.
In her memoir, “Walking in My Joy: In the No Judgment Zone,” she writes candidly about her mental health journey, relationships and decades in the entertainment industry.
Lewis turned to comedy to heal herself. She hopes people hear the lesson behind the laughter.