Safe Sex in the 1970s: Community Practitioners on the Eve of AIDS.

In the 1970s, groups of gay and gay-allied health professionals began to formulate guidelines for safer sexual activity, several years before HIV/AIDS. Through such organizations as the National Coalition of Gay Sexually Transmitted Disease Services, Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, these practitioners developed materials that would define sexual health education for the next four decades, as well as such concepts as "bodily fluids" and the "safe sex hanky." To do so, they used their dual membership in the community and the health professions. Although the dichotomy between the gay community and the medical establishment helped define the early history of HIV/AIDS, the creative work of these socially "amphibious" activists played an equally important part. Amid current debates over preexposure prophylaxis against HIV and Zika virus transmission, lessons for sexual health include the importance of messaging, the difficulty of behavioral change, and the vitality of community-driven strategies to mitigate risk.

Cartoons and AIDS: safer sex, HIV, and AIDS in Ralf König's comics.

Ralf König is the best-selling author of comic book novels, and his stories of gay men coming to terms with contemporary society have resonated with hundreds of thousands of German readers and film-goers. König's characters, like the author himself, have great difficulty adhering to the demand that condoms be used. The article describes how König develops this theme through a variety of works from 1985 through 1999, and analyzes the intertwined relationships among the author, his characters, and the society that is both portrayed in his works and that reads his works.

"The string of this one story": erotica, HIV, and the construction of safe sex in gay male popular memory.

Recalibrating the critical consideration of popular memory, this essay rehabilitates the erotic narrative as an object of critical study and as a political practice via an examination of John Preston's (1985b) print collection, Hot Living: Erotic Stories About Safer Sex. It considers this collection as a use of the erotic genre to produce a popular memory within its reading community to support safer sex practices in the "Age of AIDS." It examines this collection as a communitarian project that articulates a new erotic rhetoric in response to HIV and considers its individual epistemological and epidemiological implications.

The history of gay bathhouses. 1984.

Public policy regarding bathhouses has been criticized as being based on political expediency rather than on medical or social science. To affect that shortcoming, we include here a brief history of gay bathhouses. The history of the baths is rarely told, but whenever it is told it necessarily reflects the times in which it was written. For that reason, we include a history written in 1984, at the time that much of what was known about AIDS, routes of transmission and the role of the bathhouses was very much in flux. This history not only gives a context for the current discussion, but also allows the reader to see the history from that distant point in time. This paper was first published in December 1984 as an article in Coming Up!, a lesbian and gay community newspaper published monthly in San Francisco (California). It was later edited and reprinted in a book titled Policing Public Sex (1996). The version of the paper presented here is from the original 1984 article (pp. 15-19); several images appeared with the article that are not reproduced here. As with all the reprinted papers in this volume, no editorial changes were made to the paper and only minor typographical errors were corrected.

The San Francisco bathhouse battles of 1984: civil liberties, AIDS risk, and shifts in health policy.

In the mid-1980s, controversy emerged in a number of American cities over the roles gay bathhouses and sex clubs might play in the spread of AIDS, and in raising safe-sex awareness. In 1984, San Francisco became the first city where political debates broke out over AIDS-related policies for bathhouses and sex clubs. These debates were dominated by questions of public health and gay civil liberties. A variety of proposals were put forward during 1984 to try to reconcile these two concerns, or to give one a higher priority than the other. Certain officials in San Francisco's government, and members of its gay/lesbian/bisexual community, strongly disagreed over whether the businesses should be closed, should make their own AIDS-prevention efforts, or should continue operating under new regulations. Policies implemented for the city's baths were disconnected from the known AIDS risk of different sexual behaviors, and from research findings on AIDS and the local baths. Political and judicial decisions concerning San Francisco's bathhouses and sex clubs that were made in 1984 had continuing influences on these businesses through the later 1980s and the 1990s.

Legal aspects of regulating bathhouses: cases from 1984 to 1995.

Public health measures regulating or closing bathhouses and other businesses facilitating consensual sexual activity among strangers have generally been upheld by courts. Using standard legal research methods, this study sought (1) suits brought by government authorities to close a sex-facilitating business (SFB) based at least in part on health concerns, and (2) suits filed by SFBs to invalidate state laws or local ordinances banning closed booths or other architectural features that facilitate sexual activity. The research yielded eight published and unpublished trial or appellate opinions between 1984 and 1995 in which local health or other officials filed a law suit to close or otherwise interfere with sex at a bathhouse or other SFB. In seven of the eight cases, the state prevailed entirely or in large part in securing the relief it sued for. Factors influencing these results include the traditional deference of courts to public health officials, stigma, and limited legal recognition of a right to public sexual activity. Major questions include the extent to which coercive health measures increase stigma or social hostility towards gay men, whether closure actions "educate" at risk-individuals about the danger of anonymous unprotected sex, and what effect legal action has on the frequency of unsafe behavior.

Beyond the baths: the other sex businesses. 1984.

After their successful review of the local bathhouses, Helquist and Osmon conducted another investigation, this time of other sex businesses in San Francisco, including sex clubs. Once again, these investigators approached their work systematically. Their article provides a thorough description of what was happening in the sex clubs and other sex businesses at that point in the AIDS epidemic. The original paper was published in the September 1984 edition of Coming Up! (pp. 19-24). As with all the reprinted papers in this volume, no editorial changes were made to the paper and only minor typographical errors were corrected.