This article offers a selective review of the history of gay men’s HIV/AIDS prevention in Australia. It argues that from the outset of the epidemic, those working in gay men’s HIV prevention in Australia developed a new health education aesthetic, a safe-sex aesthetic, which 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. This aesthetic has proven immensely flexible in responding to and accommodating changes in the epidemic and gay male community over the past 25 years. However, it has led to attacks by conservative groups that gay men’s HIV prevention has been less about prevention and more about promoting homosexuality. This article concludes that a safe-sex aesthetic was ahead of its time, modelling best-practice health promotion nearly a decade before it became official public health policy in Australia.
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