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In a wide ranging interview with Vulture, director Joel Schumacher talked about his career, his movies, stars he has worked with, the AIDS crisis, Fire Island, and his sexual history as a gay man.

Asked if he’s ever guessed the number of sexual partners he’s had, Schumacher responded that “It would be in the double-digit thousands, but that is not unusual.”

Schumacher pinned it around 10,000 or 20,000, saying “It’s not [amazing] for a gay male, because it’s available.”

Schumacher said he had a number of “lost years” on Fire Island between 1965 and 1970 and shot liquid Methedrine, “the mother drug of meth.”

“You’re just starving for sex all the time,” said Schumacher. “Every drug, in my mind, was a pathway to sex. So was alcohol. There was an adventure going on, and sex would be the cherry on that sundae.”

Schumacher talked about the sadness of the AIDS crisis and how reckless he was, even after testing negative for HIV: ‘After [the negative test] I think I got wilder. What my psychiatrist said that was really fascinating was, “No, you are desperately afraid of death. It’s like swimming out further and further every night in the ocean and seeing if you can get back, and when you get home, it’s like, ‘I f**ked death again.’”’

Schumacher also talked about his movie Batman & Robin, and assertions that he made the franchise “gayer.”

Said Schumacher: “If I wasn’t gay, they would never say those things. … There’s always been this thing about Batman and Robin being gay.”

Read the full interview here.