Images of sexually transmitted infections in public health campaigns have long drawn on tropes related to pollution, contamination, and a decaying society in order to dissuade the public from engaging in “irresponsible” sexual behavior (Brandt 5). From early twentieth-century government posters, such as the one pictured above, that linked disease to gendered and racialized tropes about contagion to the lurid HIV/AIDS campaigns of the 1980s that portrayed HIV/AIDS as a murderous Grim Reaper, the threat of disease has often been used to police sexuality, morality, and the boundaries of national belonging and citizenship. In the case of HIV/AIDS, the visual vocabulary of disease prevention made infection inseparable from the people considered contagious, such as gay men, injection drug users, and sex workers, and transformed these groups into “deserving victims” supposedly complicit in their infections.
If mainstream visual cultures of public health relied on fear and disgust to discipline viewers, queer and HIV/AIDS activists turned to humor and irony to resist these sex-negative cultural mandates. The HIV zine Diseased Pariah News (1990-1999), or DPN for short, offers a striking example of how queer and HIV/AIDS activists contested homophobic and anti-erotic public health imagery. Created by Beowulf Thorne and Tom Shearer, two HIV-positive, white gay men in San Francisco, the publication turned the stigma associated with HIV serostatus into a point of collective identification and defiance. Just as activists of the era recuperated the epithet “queer” as a political slogan, Thorne and Shearer encouraged gay men to embrace their identities as “diseased pariahs.” The zine’s campy humor, provocative tone, and irreverent imagery challenged dominant narratives that portrayed people living with HIV/AIDS in liberal sentimental terms as objects of sympathy and pity.
One visual strategy that DPN creators used to challenge dominant depictions of HIV/AIDS was through the deployment of cute animals. Literary critic Sianne Ngai describes cuteness as an aesthetic category that juxtaposes tenderness and vulnerability with power and control. Cute things, like baby animals and humans, invite us to care but also imply weakness and power imbalances. Ngai argues that cuteness connotes ideas like “helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency,” qualities often attributed to individuals or groups with limited or obstructed agency, such as children, the sick, or disabled (816). By parodying icons of cuteness, such as teddy bears and furry critters, Thorne and Shearer critiqued liberal discourses that robbed people living with HIV/AIDS of their individual and collective agency and depoliticized the epidemic.
The zine’s mascot, the “oncomouse,” exemplifies the zine’s visual activism. The oncomouse was a genetically engineered rodent designed to be more susceptible to cancer was a real byproduct of biomedical research and the first animal to be patented in the United States in 1988. DPN’s version of the oncomouse appears on the cover of the first issue and resembles a knock-off Mickey Mouse. Described by Thorne as a “cute mousey,” the oncomouse represented the experience of HIV/AIDS patients who found themselves poked, prodded, and subjected to experimental and usually ineffective medical treatments. For DPN creators and readers, the cute oncomouse was not meant to evoke pity. Instead, the rodent was described as the “perfect pet for people who like to feel sorry for something,” mocking the moral satisfaction that often accompanied liberal sympathy for people living with HIV/AIDS.
A similar critique appears again on the cover of the third issue, which features a black-and-white photograph of a teddy bear doused in lighter fluid and set ablaze. The bear holds a sign that reads like a glib get-well-soon card: “All better.” The teddy bear, a staple of hospital gift shops, is associated with childhood innocence. The toy is further intended to be a surrogate for human touch of which patients are often deprived of in clinical settings. By setting the bear violently aflame, the DPN creators reject the idea that people living with HIV/AIDS must appear soft, harmless, innocent, and grateful to be treated with care and compassion.
Cute animals return in a set of colorful “merit badge” stickers that the editors began to sell to readers in 1995. These badges were meant to be handed out once someone with HIV/AIDS contracted a particular opportunistic infection. The badge for toxoplasmosis, for instance, features a mischievous street cat mid-defecation, an off-color reference to the parasite’s mode of transmission. For most patients, these infections were painful and frightening. By turning them into collectible symbols of survival, however, DPN transformed illness and suffering into a kind of perverse honor and darkly comic recognition of bodily and psychic resistance.
In contrast to DPN’s biting humor and visual critique, by the late 1990s, many aspects of the grassroots HIV/AIDS movement had been absorbed into what writer and activist Sarah Schulman calls “AIDS Inc.,” a depoliticized network of professionalized nonprofits and quasi-governmental agencies that sought to manage, rather than mobilize around, the epidemic (XV). Around this time, the company Giant Microbes began producing plush versions of sexually transmitted infections for use in sexual health education. HIV appears as a soft, black amoebic-like toy with oversized eyes and a red ribbon. The HIV/AIDS magazine POZ praised the toys as “fuzzy icebreakers” that could help children and adults talk more comfortably about sexual health. While they serve an important educational purpose, they nonetheless show how easily queer activist strategies and aesthetics can become domesticated and sold. The plush virus becomes something to buy, hold, and play with. The toy offers a sanitized representation of contagion, emptied of its political charge and stripped of the political realities that continue to shape the epidemic. The aesthetic contrast between DPN and Giant Microbes reveals a broader shift in the visual politics of HIV/AIDS in which dissidence gave way to a neoliberal ethos grounded in lifestyle choices and consumption.
DPN’s visual language of queer cuteness resisted the moralized tropes of pity and punishment that shaped early HIV/AIDS visual cultures. Thorne and Shearer’s images of mutant mice and charred teddy bears embodied a queer aesthetics that relied on irony, parody, and irreverence. In contrast, today’s zoomorphic images make STIs into huggable, consumer products devoid of the depth and irony that gave them political bite.
By returning to DPN’s visual activism and experimentation, we might better understand the role that aesthetics play in shaping public understanding of sexually transmitted infections. The history of HIV/AIDS cultural activism and DPN suggests that confronting health disparities requires more than awareness or inoffensive attempts to humanize vulnerable communities. Instead, the zine shows us how responding to disease and epidemics requires us to reimagine the visual and affective languages through which disease is made visible in the first place.
Works Cited
Brandt, Allan M. No Magic Bullet : A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 4, 2005, pp. 811–47.
Schulman, Sarah. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Image Credit
Welsh, Paul. “We’ve Fought in the Open—Bubonic Plague, Yellow Fever, Tuberculosis—Now Venereal Diseases.” 1918. Committee on Public Information. Division of Pictorial Publicity, U.S. Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons. Source: Wiki Media Commons.