"Brother! Protect Yourself from AIDS!"

This page from the Russian gay magazine Impul’s (Impulse) relays information—originally published by Dutch scientists—about the sexual transmission of the HIV virus, arranging sex acts in a hierarchy from safest to most dangerous. Accompanying the text are two images, both of Western origin. One is a cartoon monster labeled “AIDS” (using the anglophone acronym), while the other is a photograph famously published in 1990 in Life Magazine, of dying AIDS patient and gay activist David Kirby.

 

There is a strong tension on the page: on the lower left, we see a cartoon depiction of AIDS and puerile phrases like “the virus jumps from the pee-pee into the tushy more often than the other way around.” The upper right, by contrast, confronts the reader with a wrenching photograph of an emaciated AIDS patient—a real individual suffering the agony of the disease, being comforted by an anguished loved one. This tension echoes the contemporary Western publications on which Impulse modeled itself. The devastation of AIDS followed very quickly on the dawn of a gay liberation that had begun with Stonewall in 1969. By the 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic had already wrought massive destruction, many Western LGBT publications had to walk a difficult line. On the one hand, they sought, responsibly, to caution their readers about the grave dangers of AIDS and honor the experience of community members who had suffered and died. On the other hand, they were wary of detracting from the celebratory, libertine energy of new, hard-won freedoms of sexual expression. In those years, Western arch-conservative elements cast the devastating epidemic as righteous retribution for immoral sexual deviance. Many gay publications were careful not to allow legitimate anxiety around the existential threat of AIDS to lead to feelings of shame around gay sexuality.

 

For the Russian magazine, further complicating this fraught emotional picture is the issue of national provenance. With its combination of male nude photography, erotic art, health information, and personal ads, Impulse is, clearly, mimicking Western gay magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. The two images on this page also derive from Western publications, as do the potentially life-saving facts conveyed alongside them. Gay readers in North America or Western Europe could reasonably expect to find this kind of information communicated by experts inside their own countries working to respond to the AIDS crisis. In the early 1990s in Russia, meanwhile, AIDS was still treated as a “Western” disease affecting “marginals” and undesirables, and as such a definite non-priority for both policy and scientific research.