Protect Yourself against AIDS, Brother!

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

There is a strong tension on the page between, on the one hand, the 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,” and, on the other, a wrenching photograph of an emaciated dying AIDS patient, a real individual suffering the agony of the disease and being comforted by an anguished loved one. This is a tension to some extent present in contemporary Western publications on which Impulse to some extent models itself. The devastation of AIDS followed very quickly on the dawn of the gay liberation momentum that started with Stonewall in 1969. By the 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic had already wrought and continued to wreak massive destruction, many Western LGBT publications walked a difficult line between, on the one hand, responsibly cautioning their readers about the grave dangers of AIDS and honoring the experience of community members who had suffered and died, and on the other, not detracting from the celebratory libertine energy of new, hard-won freedoms of sexual expression. Western arch-conservative elements in these years often 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 new feelings of shame around gay sexuality.

Another complex dimension to this page from a 1993 issue of Impulse is its multiple layers of Western referentiality. One of these layers is the generic level: with its combination of male nude photography, erotic art, health information, and personal ads, Impulse is clearly to some extent mimicking Western 1980s and 1990s genres of gay magazine. Then there is the Western origin of the two images on this page. Finally, there is the exclusively Western origin of the valuable, potentially life-saving information being shared on the page. Gay readers in North America or Western Europe could reasonably expect to find this kind of information communicated by experts and researchers in their own countries who were working to respond to the AIDS crisis. In the early 1990s in Russia AIDS was still treated very much as a Western disease that, inside Russia, at worst affected marginals and undesirables, and as such was a decided non-priority.