Safe sex and the aesthetics of gay men’s HIV/AIDS prevention in Australia: From Rubba me in 1984 to F**k me in 2009

Introduction

What happens when anal sex between men becomes the subject of health education? The onset of AIDS in the early 1980s provided a context in which moral objections to male homosexuality and its public display were momentarily set aside in favour of ‘broader’ health concerns. In Australia, a fear that HIV might, as Cindy Patton put it, leak out of its sub-cultural spaces into the mainstream, led to public media campaigns targeting the heterosexual majority (Patton, 1996a: 117). However misplaced this heterosexual panic may have been, it led, for the first time, to government interest in gay men’s health (Altman, 1988: 13; Bersani, 2010; Winn, 1991). ¹ If HIV refused to respect the sexual apartheid that had, in the minds of the moral majority, kept heterosexuals safe from homosexual contagion, then efforts were needed to stem the flow of HIV at what was then commonly believed to be its source, anal sex between men.

This article argues that those who took up this challenge developed a new health education aesthetic – a safe-sex aesthetic – that relied on the use of explicit and homoerotic images of sex between men. This aesthetic packaged safe-sex information in ways that were sex positive and appealing to the target audience. At the same time, it presented safe sex as constitutive of a shared gay male identity, based on an ethics of mutual care and support. In deploying a safe-sex aesthetic, however, those working in gay men’s HIV education moved well outside the terms of their original, crisis-driven dispensation. Campaigns were attacked and censored by those claiming that gay men’s HIV education was less about preventing HIV transmission and more about promoting homosexuality. This article argues that those who sought to censor gay men’s HIV prevention campaigns were in fact right in their objections. A safe-sex aesthetic did indeed go well beyond the provision of information alone. It not only promoted a culture of mutual care and support among gay men, but also modelled best practice health promotion nearly a decade before it became official public health policy in Australia.

The article develops the notion of a safe-sex aesthetic through a reading of a range of HIV prevention campaigns, moving from ‘Rubba me’, one of the first campaigns to be run in Australia (Donovan and Chan, 2007; Sendziuk, 2003) to recent campaigns by the AIDS Councils of New South Wales and Victoria (ACON and VAC respectively). The materials discussed do not constitute an exhaustive history of gay men’s HIV prevention education in Australia. Rather, they exemplify the principles underpinning a safe-sex aesthetic and demonstrate how and why that aesthetic has become a staple of gay men’s HIV prevention in Australia.

Tracking a safe-sex aesthetic

According to Parnell (1992), the first Australian-produced AIDS resource targeting gay men was an information leaflet, ‘AIDS: Trying to Reduce the Risk’, funded by the Health Department of Victoria in 1984. In the following year a collection of posters called ‘Rubba me’, funded jointly by the New South Wales Department of Health, the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation, and the Gay Counselling Service, was launched in Sydney (Donovan and Chan, 2007; Sendziuk, 2003: 89–90).

The Rubba me posters consisted of image and text. The images were sexually explicit and homoerotic line drawings depicting two, sexually engaged, naked men. Above the image is the safe-sex message, ‘Rub cocks Rub bodies Use rubbers’ and below, the contact phone numbers for Gay Line and the AIDS Hotline. In these posters, image and text work together to promote condom use. The one cannot be divorced from the other. The visuals work to make the textual message at once appealing and familiar to gay men. Appealing in that condom use is depicted as homoerotic, part of, and not opposed to, gay male sexual pleasures. Familiar in that the image draws on a shared or collective gay identity: the lean but muscular, moustache-wielding San Francisco-come-Sydney clone. This appeal positions condom use as integral to that identity: a sexual and cultural norm and not an isolated individual act or decision.

‘Rubba me’ employed what this article calls a safe-sex aesthetic, a new approach to health education and illness prevention that combined the technical and the erotic, the informative and the pleasurable. At the same time, this aesthetic drew on as it consolidated a sex-positive, shared gay identity, seeking to embed condom use and safe-sex as normative sexual practice within the gay male community. From the outset in Australia, this safe-sex aesthetic became a staple of gay men’s HIV/AIDS prevention and has proved immensely flexible in responding to, and accommodating, changes in both gay community and the epidemic.

In Australia, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a growing appreciation of the ways in which differences within the gay community influenced rates and patterns of HIV transmission among gay men (Commonwealth Department of Health and Family Services, 1998). These included not only differences in age, race and ethnicity but also differences in HIV status (Sendziuk, 2003: 199–223). In 1992, the AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON) released a set of five posters, by David McDiarmid, addressing HIV-related prejudice among gay men. The posters were a sexually graphic and provocative illustration of the need for HIV prevention to target both HIV-negative and HIV-positive men and for all gay men, irrespective of HIV status, to work together in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

In a number of the posters the serodivide is etched on individual bodies, a reminder that HIV is, as Donovan and Chan remark, everyman’s business (Donovan and Chan, 2007). In one poster, two anonymous male bodies, each imprinted with a positive and negative symbol, are engaged in anal sex. On one body is written ‘safe-love’, on the other ‘safe-lust’. In another poster, a HIV-negative male body holds his HIV-positive double in a casual, but tender embrace. Both bodies are confettied with the word ‘yes’. The background consists of men’s names – Kai, Tony, Paul, Ari and company – a pictorial rendition of the sexual and social networks that constitute the gay male community of which this couple is a part. The tag line reads ‘HIV, discrimination and grief threaten our community/Support each other – share the responsibility’.

In that same year, 1992, ACON released a second series of posters under the title ‘Our love’. Quoting in full Donovan and Chan’s excellent summary of the aims of this HIV/AIDS prevention campaign (2007):

In the ‘Our love’ series of posters, Sydney’s inner-city gay community was portrayed as diverse, yet integrated by shared experiences and responsibilities. The posters played with the stereotypes, pairing the Muscle Mary with the Drag Queen, the Bear with the Asian Youth, the Aboriginal with the Grey Gay, the Male Nun with the Leatherette. Whatever form love and romance might take, the message was to play safe and not act foolishly or impulsively.

The two poster campaigns relied on very different artistic styles. While the ‘Our love’ posters used photojournalistic realism to highlight the socio-cultural diversity of Sydney’s inner-city gay community, McDiarmid deployed painterly abstraction to divest his male figures of any reference to this same diversity. In so doing, his figures embody, as they represent, a single difference, a difference in HIV status. ‘Our love’ is gentle and playful in its invitation to its gay male viewers to see themselves represented and find their place in Sydney’s gay-male patchwork. McDiarmid’s posters, by contrast, through their shocking use of colour and sexually explicit, if not porno-graphic, images, demand that the viewer confront HIV-prejudice head on. They challenge the viewer to consider how a safe-sex, anal erotics undermines the power of HIV-prejudice to divide gay men from each other and from themselves.

Although the two poster campaigns use very different artistic styles both are examples of a safe-sex aesthetic. Both rely on a marriage of the technical and the erotic to present safe sex as attractive to their respective target audiences. At the same time, each represents safe sex as a shared responsibility, what might be characterised, following Foucault (1988), as an ‘erotics come ethics of care’ that draws on, as it draws together, the differences that constitute gay community (Race, 2008).

As gay men’s HIV prevention entered the mid to late 1990s there was increasing emphasis on using text that, like the visuals, was both familiar and appealing to the target audience. Gone was the technical and impersonal language of medical texts and health education, replaced, increasingly, by what Patton (1991) refers to as ‘gay vernacular’, the everyday language and terms that gay men use to describe their sexual and social lives. ² Rubba me used everyday speech (albeit in an Americanised form) in its short and sharp exhortation to gay men to ‘Use rubbers’. However, subsequent campaigns came to rely more heavily on gay vernacular to communicate increasingly complex messages in the light of changing gay community attitudes toward HIV and AIDS, and the introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapies (HAART).

In 1999, the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO), in collaboration with the National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAPWA) and the Australian National Council on AIDS, Hepatitis C and Related Diseases (ANCAHRD), developed a series of four information pamphlets with the common tag line ‘Lower risk does not mean no risk’. Each of the pamphlets included elements of the same graphic, pieces of a puzzle that suggested two men engaged in anal sex. Three of the pamphlets dealt with misconceptions regarding the risk of HIV transmission associated with certain sexual practices. In one, the headline reads ‘Is it safer to fuck than be fucked?’ In another it asks, ‘If he doesn’t cum inside, will this stop HIV?’ followed by, ‘No. Pulling out before cumming is not an effective way of stopping HIV’. The fourth was directed at HIV-positive gay men following the introduction of HAART and read ‘Can I still pass on HIV if my last viral load test was “undetectable”?’ ‘Yes’ the pamphlet concluded, followed by information on the ways in which zero viral load does not equate with zero HIV infectivity.

AFAO’s series of pamphlets was indicative of a range of Australian gay men’s HIV prevention campaigns developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Donovan and Chan, 2002; Donovan and Chan, 2007). While these campaigns relied increasingly on the text to communicate the complexities of HIV prevention and risk reduction, they nonetheless continued to present this information in a language that was drawn from and familiar to its gay male audience. In turn, the textual information played off and with the explicit visuals, demonstrating the flexibility of a safe-sex aesthetic in accommodating changes in gay men’s sexual practices and knowledge and treatment of HIV (Donovan and Chan, 2002; Guzman et al., 2005; Hurley, 2003; Kippax and Race, 2003; Van et al., 2002; Zablotska et al., 2009).

Closing the circle

In 2007 the Victorian AIDS Council (VAC) launched what was at that time its most sexually explicit and provocative gay men’s HIV prevention campaign. The campaign signalled a return to the origins of a safe-sex aesthetic. The materials consisted of a series of posters which bear a striking similarity in content, design and layout to the ‘Rubba me’ leaflets produced over 20 years earlier. Like ‘Rubba me’, they consist of sexually explicit line drawings of sex between men, top-and-tailed by information on condom use, and a contact web address for additional safe-sex information. However, the two campaigns differed in the VAC’s explicit, if partially hidden, depiction of anal sex between men. In the VAC posters the scene of anal intercourse is tactfully cloaked by a red dot, containing the question ‘What’s going on inside?’ The red dot is connected to an answering-text box, with the words ‘Condoms and water-based lube.’ ³

The two campaigns also differed in their distribution. While circulation of ‘Rubba me’ was restricted to gay venues and sexual health clinics, the VAC’s posters also appeared as one-page inserts in both of Melbourne’s major GLBT weekly newspapers which are distributed widely in the GLBT and mainstream communities.

Like ‘Rubba me’, VAC’s dispensation to include images of anal sex was crisis driven. ‘Rubba me’ was a reaction to the advent of HIV and AIDS, fuelled as much, if not more, by heterosexual panic than by a concern for the lives of gay men. Similarly, the Victorian Government’s support of VAC’s 2007 campaign was a reaction to data showing rising rates of newly acquired HIV infection among gay men in Victoria since 2000–2001 (Leonard, 2008). According to Hurley and Croy (2009), this support was driven as much by government paranoia over growing media disquiet about its handling of this new crisis, as it was by a concern for the well-being of gay men.

In 2008, the VAC went one step further in its use of sexually explicit images in gay men’s HIV prevention. A growing body of research has linked recent increases in rates of HIV infection among gay men in Melbourne with the emergence of new sexual subcultures taking shape at the intersection of the gay commercial and sex party scenes (Hurley and Prestage, 2007; Leonard et al., 2008). They cater to gay men with a taste for what McInnes, Bolen and Race (2002) have called ‘adventurous sex’, including barebacking, fisting, and the use of sexual prosthetics such as sex toys and performance enhancing drugs. Hurley and Prestage (2007) have coined the term ‘intensive sex partying’ to describe these subcultures.

The research suggests that the men who are part of these subcultures are often sexually experienced and knowledgeable (Leonard et al., 2008). In order to engage effectively with this audience, the VAC lifted images directly from gay pornography and combined these with safe-sex information. In one sense these campaign materials are the apotheosis of a safe-sex aesthetic, what might be called educative porn. The erotic is replaced by the pornographic because it is assumed to reflect more accurately the shared sexual interests, practices, and subcultural identities of the target audience. In turn, the use of pornography means that, perhaps for the first time, publicly circulated, government-funded HIV prevention posters carry pictures of real men having anal sex, even if this reality is itself staged within the fantasy world of the pornographic.

At the same time, however, this campaign wants to disavow both its dependence on, and status as, pornography. The tag line at the top, ‘Sexual health message’, tells the viewer that this is not pornography but rather health education. However, this assertion is undermined by the closing credits which acknowledge the porn film from which the still is lifted and the film’s distributor. The image itself is subject to an act of censorship, which replays this tension between the pornographic and the educative. Like the cartoonish, stick figures of the VAC’s preceding campaign, the final, public unveiling of anal sex between men, is obscured by a text box. In one example the box reads ‘I’m HIV positive’. Below the image is the health education message that addresses any misconceptions that might arise from the information in the text box, in this case ‘Just because you’re HIV positive don’t assume he is as well’. The poster uses the masturbatory promise of porn to draw the viewer in, only to disavow, or perhaps delay, this pleasure in the service of a greater good, the dissemination of safe-sex information.

From safe sex to risk reduction

Over the course of the epidemic, gay men’s HIV prevention has accommodated an understanding of not only how differences within the gay community affect rates and patterns of HIV transmission, but also of how these differences interact with advances in HIV treatments and knowledge of their side effects to produce new ways of being and doing gay (Rowe and Dowsett, 2008). In particular, HIV prevention has had to respond to an increasingly complex, and diffuse, set of attitudes among gay men toward HIV and AIDS and the risk of HIV transmission (Hurley, 2003; Kippax and Race, 2003). In Australia, HIV-positive gay men are leading longer and healthier lives, and, for many, the introduction of HAART has led to a significant and sustained reduction in their viral load (Sheon and Crosby, 2004; Zablotska et al., 2009: 502). Increasing numbers of gay men no longer rely solely on ‘Just say yes to condoms’. Rather, they are using knowledge of their HIV status and/or viral load and that of their sexual partners, and strategies such as negotiated safety and serosorting, to minimise the risk of HIV transmission (Donovan and Chan, 2002; Guzman et al., 2005; Van et al., 2002; Zablotska et al., 2009).

The development of more complex and nuanced approaches to gay men’s HIV prevention over the last 10 to 15 years in Australia reflects these changes (Allan and Leonard, 2005). Organisations such as the VAC have developed new and varied approaches in an effort to address the different risks of HIV transmission associated with the various contexts in which gay men, and different subpopulations of gay men, socialise and ‘sexualise’. These include the use of pornographic images in campaigns targeting sexually adventurous and knowledgeable gay men, and the VAC’s most recent, full-page, GLBT newspaper inserts (2009–2010) that targets the different locations in which gay men engage in sexual activity, from clubs, beats and saunas, to airport lounges. This multilayered approach reflects a shift from a time when HIV infection was perceived as a death sentence to the current historical moment, where, in a number of western countries, including Australia, many gay men perceive HIV infection as a manageable, chronic condition (Elford, 2006; Halkitis et al., 2004). In terms of HIV prevention, this may signal a shift from a safe-sex aesthetic to what might be called a risk-reduction or harm-minimisation aesthetic, from the singular and unambiguous message of ‘Rubba me’, to the multiple and layered messages of current campaigns.

From health information to health promotion

In Australia, the turn to a safe-sex aesthetic at the very outset of gay men’s HIV prevention was paradigmatic of major changes occurring within the field of public health in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Approaches to health education and illness prevention – including sexual health education and the prevention of sexually transmissible infections – had been dominated by what Aggleton (1997), Hart (1997), Scott (1992) and others refer to as the health belief or health information model. Rimer and Glanz (2005) claim that this model was first developed in the USA in the 1950s ‘by social psychologists who wanted to explain why so few people were participating in programs to prevent disease and illness’ (2005: 13). According to this model, health consumers act as rational and autonomous beings: when confronted with information and data linking accepted or unquestioned practices to poorer health outcomes, individuals will change their behaviours accordingly. ‘In crude terms’, writes Cindy Patton ‘the health information model locates the unhealthy behaviour as an effect of ignorance. The solution is [more] information’ (1996b: 126).

However, by the late 1980s the health belief model was under siege from the emerging field of health promotion. Health promotion drew on a renewed interest within social research and health policy on the social determinants of individual behaviour and population-based health inequalities (World Health Organisation, 1986). Unlike the health belief model, which constituted the autonomous, rational individual as the locus of health education, health promotion began to explore the relationships between individual behaviours and broader socio-cultural processes and structures (Lawson and Bauman, 1998). In particular, it began to look at how shared cultural norms, values and practices could be mobilised as sites of health education to influence the health behaviours of members of different populations or population groups. Over time this socio-structural account displaced, or perhaps subsumed, the health belief model as the dominant approach to health education and illness prevention in public health.

According to Andreasen, population-based health promotion relied on principles imported from social marketing and advertising (Andreasen, 1995). Rather than appealing to a belief in a shared or common rationality, this approach adopted the logic of social marketing: designing targeted campaigns that address the specific health needs of different segments of the population (Grier and Bryant, 2005; Rimer and Glanz, 2005: 7, 37). At the same time, the health message is packaged in a way that draws on, as it reflects, the shared norms, values, and practices of the target group. According to the theory, this approach increases the effectiveness of any given intervention or campaign (Leonard and Mitchell, 2000: 6–7). Packaging material in ways that are both familiar and appealing to the target audience is assumed to increase the likelihood that members of the target audience will engage with the health message. At the same time, by locating the health message within the existing cultural repertoire of the target audience, this approach seeks to make adherence to that message a cultural norm, and not an optional extra or matter of individual choice.

The shift from health information to health promotion involved a significant change in the aesthetics of health education and illness prevention. The health information model had relied on a minimalist, scientific aesthetic, one in which information is presented in a neutral and dispassionate manner (Leonard and Mitchell, 2000: 3). Attempts to tart up health education by making it appealing, if not sexy, were understood to interfere with the viewer’s capacity to absorb and act on the information provided. In this model, rationality and enjoyment are not so much discrete as contradictory capabilities. Drawing on the latter to supplement the former is not only misguided but potentially dangerous. Health promotion, by contrast, relied on an aesthetics that disregarded the division between rationality and pleasure. It assumed that a marriage of the two was a more effective way not only of promoting behaviour change but of sustaining changes in behaviour over time. ‘Many people think of safe sex as unfulfilling, boring or unsatisfying’, wrote Whyte (1988). ‘Factual information may impart knowledge about what is safe, but it does not change attitudes about what is satisfying and erotic’ (1988: 387). In its quest to make health information appealing to its target audiences, health promotion drew on an ever-expanding orbit of disciplines, from advertising, to art, cinema, graphic design, and semiotics. In so doing, it rejected the hegemony of a minimalist or scientific aesthetic while opening the field of health education and illness prevention to the very influences that aesthetic had sought to keep at bay.

Many of the now canonical critiques of early work in gay men’s HIV prevention, particularly in the UK and the USA, centre on its reliance on a health belief model. Hart (1996) argues that early campaigns were ‘individually-oriented’ and failed to appreciate the role that ‘structural location and group membership’ played in ‘determining risk exposure’, as well as how they could be mobilised as potential sites of health education and HIV prevention (1996: 88). Homans and Aggleton (1988) argue that these campaigns failed to understand ‘that within the context of AIDS education, the provision of information on its own [is] not effective’ (1988: 161). Writing 10 years later, Aggleton (1997) concluded, ‘Simply providing information about HIV and AIDS has few predictable effects on behaviour’ (1997: 12).

The degree to which these critiques apply to early work in gay men’s HIV prevention in Australia is an open question. Clearly, a safe-sex aesthetic did not conform to the health belief model. Early campaigns such as ‘Rubba me’, engaged, to varying degrees, with gay men’s social and structural location. ‘Rubba me’ appealed to, as it consolidated, an emerging collective gay identity, even as its unapologetic and positive depiction of gay-male sex challenged homophobic beliefs and discrimination. Furthermore, a safe-sex aesthetic went well beyond ‘the provision of information on its own’. In its use of homoerotic imagery, ‘Rubba me’ ensured that its safe-sex message was not only culturally appropriate but also attractive or appealing to individual gay men. Clearly, a safe-sex aesthetic is consistent with the principles of health promotion. In this respect it was ahead of its time, a driver, and not simply an effect of, the changes taking place in health education and public health policy in Australia during this period.

Patton (1996a: 137) argues that by the mid to late 1980s, key research institutes in the USA were calling, unsuccessfully, for the use of sexually explicit and homoerotic materials in the national fight against HIV and AIDS. Palmer (2004) notes that across the USA a number of communities managed to develop sex-positive approaches to gay men’s HIV prevention but that their success relied on the capacity and strength of local gay and lesbian organisations. What is perhaps unique to Australia is that, from the very outset of the epidemic, a safe-sex aesthetic became the mainstay of gay men’s HIV prevention, nationally.

What’s in a kiss or Who gives a f**k – Tales of censorship

Many of the major public objections raised against gay men’s HIV prevention campaigns in Australia have centred on their use of sexually graphic and homoerotic images and text (Leonard and Mitchell, 2000). It is telling that few, if any, of these objections have considered the effectiveness of this approach in stemming the flow of HIV among this population group. The objectors argued that the use of homoerotic images and text is extraneous to the health message and that these campaigns were less about HIV prevention and more about promoting homosexuality, and homosexual conversion.

In September 1990, the Advertising Standards Council of Australia (ASCA) banned publication in the mainstream media of an HIV/AIDS prevention poster showing two men kissing (Donovan and Chan, 2002). The poster was produced by the VAC and carried the headline ‘When You Say Yes…Say Yes to Safe Sex’, and included a brief commentary on safe sex (Commonwealth Department of Health, Housing and Community Services, 1992: 10–11). The ban was in response to a complaint by a coalition of churches and community groups claiming that the poster breached several clauses of the Media Council Code. The poster was banned under clause 6 of the Code, which states:

Advertisements shall not contain anything which in light of generally availing community standards is likely to cause serious offence to the community or to a significant section of the community. (McKenzie, 1992)

Although the ASCA noted that it was the type of advocacy advertisement where the Council had traditionally allowed wide latitude to advertisers, in this instance it concluded that the material ‘went well beyond the bounds of advocacy and acceptability to community standards’ (McKenzie, 1992). The ASCA claimed that the advertisement was ‘less concerned with the prevention of AIDS and more concerned with encouraging homosexuality’ (McKenzie, 1992).

In 1996, the Queensland Minister for Health, Mike Horan, refused to launch a multicultural sexual health calendar for AIDS Awareness Week on the grounds that it was ‘ultra-pornographic’. ‘My health policy’, he trumpeted in the Western Australian, ‘is that we’re about prevention, not promotion of a lifestyle, and that’s the reason why I haven’t launched it’ (National AIDS Bulletin, 1996: 4–5). In the same year, Horan refused to provide Queensland Health Department funds for the distribution of two HIV/AIDS information booklets for gay men, which were part of the Do Choose…Enjoy campaign developed by the VAC (Meese, 1997). The resources were pornographic, he claimed, promoted homosexuality, and made reference to ‘disgusting sexual practices’ (Meese, 1997). In 1998, Horan banned an advertisement directed at homosexually active men in rural Queensland on the grounds that ‘it encourages men who are married or have girlfriends to engage in sexual activities with other men’ (Scott, 1998; HIV/AIDS Legal Link, 1998).

Patton (1996b), King (1993) and Brown (1997) look at how similar arguments have been mounted in other jurisdictions to censor or ban specific gay men’s HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives. Brown (1997), for example, argued that in Vancouver in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, government officials withheld HIV/AIDS education funding from the gay community sector, claiming it was being used as a front for recruiting homosexuals. On a sliding scale of moral reprehensibility, recruitment was more damning than promotion. As the then Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, suggested in his open letter to The Age, May 1999, recruitment implied the existence of a gay mafia after the bodies, if not souls, of the most vulnerable in our community. ‘Instead of accusing the churches of homophobia’, wrote the archbishop, ‘which we condemn roundly, we should be seeking the real reason for youth suicide’. That reason, he smugly concludes, is the ‘gay agenda [that] aims to lower the age of consent and recruit new members to the subculture’ (Pell, 1999: 15).

There are a number of commonalities in these attempts to censor or ban specific gay men’s HIV prevention campaigns. At one level, these objections seek to put gay men’s HIV prevention back into its health belief box. What is being questioned is not the health information, per se, but rather the mode of that information’s presentation. It is the homoerotics that are being objected to and, in particular, the positive, unproblematic portrayal of sexual intimacy between men, of men fucking and kissing. If a safe-sex aesthetic exemplifies health promotion principles, then it was precisely the application of these principles in gay men’s HIV education that was being questioned. The public objectors wanted to consign gay men’s HIV prevention to a perpetual ground hog day, caught in, as it is destined to repeat, the crisis conditions of its own emergence. In this 1980s’ retro fantasy a health belief model acts to contain the threat posed not only by HIV but by homosexuality itself. Its minimalist aesthetic reduces what can be said and seen to the technical alone, and fails to consider ways of being gay that are not associated with contagion, illness and death.

The second commonality follows from the first. Claims that particular images and text are pornographic are notoriously difficult to establish (Attwood, 2002; Cameron, 2005; Kipnis, 1999; Levinson, 2005). The line between erotica and pornography in art, for example, is slippery and hard to police as the recent controversy in Australia over Bill Henson’s photographs of naked adolescents highlights (Marr, 2008). In the USA, anti-pornography feminists have managed to have anti-pornography legislation introduced in a number of states. They define pornography as the sexualised objectification and denigration of women and statutes against the production and circulation of pornography are aimed at countering the sexualised abuse of women by men (Dworkin, 1987; McKinnon, 1987). However, it is difficult to see how such legal objections could be applied to gay men’s HIV prevention, or to the examples of censorship addressed in this article. The images in these campaigns are not of particular sexual acts, the sex of the bodies depicted and that of the intended viewer are the same, and the intention of the material is to educate and not to objectify or denigrate.

Similar concerns can be raised regarding claims that gay men’s HIV prevention materials are obscene or disgusting. Martha Nussbaum argues that disgust and shame should have no formal legal status (2004). According to Nussbaum, they do not refer to harms caused to individuals but have often been used, in law, as a way of surreptitiously securing and policing normative boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’. She argues that disgust and shame have been used to instate the values and beliefs of the moral majority as normative. In so doing, the law is open to abuse as an instrument for ostracising, marginalising and, as Rubin (1984) argues, punishing those whose values and practices depart from these norms.

In Australia, those who have sought to censor or ban particular gay men’s HIV prevention campaigns have rarely engaged with the theoretical and legal complexities of what constitutes pornography, obscenity or disgust. As Horan’s comments make clear, any positive representation of homosexuality, of what he refers to as ‘the promotion of a lifestyle’, is by its very nature ‘ultra-pornographic’, regardless of whether or not it is sexually explicit.

Clearly this was a view shared by ASCA in its decision to ban the VAC’s poster of ‘Two men kissing’. The poster consisted of a sexually naive image of two men, fully clothed, caught in an intimate embrace. The text was no more sexually explicit than a raft of other campaigns that had not been subject to censorship. The scene could have been lifted from any romance, Kate Winslett and Leonardo Di Caprio as they embrace on the prow of the ill-fated Titanic. The image embodied the romantic ideals of tenderness and intimacy that certain viewers might mistake as hetero, and not homo, sexual. Perhaps what was so unsettling about this image was precisely the possibility of misrecognition, the power of romance to cross over, if not out, the homophobic division between us and them, between homo and heterosexual. Perhaps this image, rather than the anonymous male figures fucking in McDiarmid’s posters, was in need of censorship because it had almost nothing to do with the sexually explicit and everything to do with romance and love.

Conclusion

What happened, then, when anal sex between men became the subject of health education in Australia?

Those from outside the gay community who objected to gay men’s HIV/AIDS prevention materials because they went well beyond the provision of information alone were clearly right in their objections. The deployment of a safe-sex aesthetic in gay men’s HIV prevention not only provided technical information on the ins and outs of safe sex. It used overtly artistic modes of representation to package that information in ways that were at once familiar and appealing to its target audience. At the same time, it portrayed safe sex between gay men as indicative of mutual respect and support, an ethics come erotics of care on which to ground a shared sense of identity and community.

In so doing, a safe-sex aesthetic prefigured modes of being and doing gay that exceeded the terms of its own genesis, an aesthetics that was open to, and opened onto, a world ‘post–AIDS’ (Dowsett and McInnes, 1996; Rowe and Dowsett, 2008). It laid the groundwork for the public circulation of other positive depictions of gay men and gay community no longer defined solely, if at all, by the weight of HIV, AIDS or homophobia, from the communities of Queer as Folk to the folked-up bodies of DNA Magazine Australia. Finally, a safe-sex aesthetic drew on the power of art to challenge established borders, to escape the control of the censors, and undermine the divisions between them and us on which prejudice and bigotry feed.