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Saturday 05 July 2008


Works For Me

20th February 2008

Out With The Old

Posted by: David Herkt


I’ve just moved house.

And packing was a complete revelation of what I’m inclined to think of as My Gay Life – years of it.

I couldn’t believe how many condoms with HIV/AIDS messages on them I’d managed to get given or pick up over the years – and not use. I now know what a lubricant package ten years old feels like. The oldest expiry date on a condom I discovered in a desk-drawer was 1988.

There was a whole history of gay clubbing in bits and pieces. Fliers for Melbourne and London clubs. Leaflets for Auckland’s Flesh and G.A.Y.. A Wunderbar Handleclub tag. A Surrender Dorothy key-ring.

There were a few old gay porn magazines from the early 1970s  I’d souvenired from three or four boxes of them that had been donated to an Australian Gay and Lesbian Archive once but had been rejected as ‘inappropriate’. I’d always opposed that decision because in many ways gay porn has influenced our sexual stylings in a number of ways from the erotic language we use in bed to the sexual characters we impose on ourselves and our partners. The hairstyles, though, I have to say were a turn-off.

Then there were the Hero programs going back to the early 1990s. Often large, often filled with articles, stories, images, and photographs, and designed by the best gay and lesbian designers Auckland could offer, these were a complete year-by-year chronology of our attitudes to ourselves – from A3 size proclamations of art and confrontation to today’s discreet, pocket-size schedule.

But what fascinated me were the remnants of both Australian and New Zealand HIV/AIDS campaigns that I’d kept for some reason or another.

That’s right, there had been something about these campaigns that had made me want to own them. And keep them.

At a time where the New Zealand AIDS Foundation’s HIV/AIDS campaigns seem only to aspire to some sort of HIV/AIDS ambient hum or background white noise signifying nothing except that things are ticking over, money is spent, and jobs validated, it was extraordinary to see targeted campaigns with impact, and with graphic and photographic power.

Some of them were the strong death-warnings of the early years – “Kissing Doesn’t Kill, HIV/AIDS does”. Others were focused on gay men and injecting drugs with photographs of extraordinary erotic force. There were hot posters that actually eroticized safe-sex and made you want to do it. There were posters with graphic work by artists like Keith Haring and Juan Davila that could easily have been framed works of art.

I’d actually had some of them on my walls at various stages of my life, they had been that interesting.

And they were still potent images and potent words.

Sitting there surrounded by boxes and half unrolled health promotion materials, I couldn’t help but think of the recent NZAF posters for the Posterboys campaign: ill-executed, appallingly-designed, badly-photographed with poster-wordings I challenge anyone to recall.

They were a triumph of the ‘I want to represent my community well and do something about HIV/AIDS’ scenario we get in spades in the victory speeches from the Underwear and Best Bums competitions that pre-occupy our gay and lesbian venues - and they were about as memorable. They even lacked the sense of irony that could have made the campaign work.

The Posterboys followed directly on from last year’s badly-conceived campaign aimed at Asian gay men. The poster-images in that campaign reached a new low. The print-colours were singularly off-putting. The poster tag-line was so meaningless as to be confusing. And the campaign seemed to be targeted at no-one - including gay ‘Asian’ men. Their tastes, their world and their needs certainly didn’t figure in it.

Together, the Asian Gay Men campaign and the Posterboys campaign, both served, in my mind anyway, to illustrate the tired bankruptcy of NZAF’s recent health promotion ideas about this latest stage of the pandemic.

NZAF has seemed to have made HIV/AIDS so boring that no-one is interested. It is actually an achievement in itself to have taken a life-threatening disease transmitted sexually and made it yawn material.

We are in desperate need of a wake-up call to both the community in general and to NZAF in particular. The failed ‘community consultancies’ of last year alone should have convinced NZAF that no-one is interested anymore, and what is required is a refreshed message, new ideas, and new strategies for coordinating the best skills of our community in the service of a health campaign which should concern us all.

And it is interesting that the best HIV/AIDS poster I’ve seen in recent years was made by an 18 year old student in an Auckland Tech for an assignment. It had a very simple tagline – “No condom - no butts” placed over a photograph of a butt – the sort of cheeky butt you’d want to have. The design was great. It was sexy. The message with that obvious meaning and its secondary meaning – as in, ‘no excuses’ was cool. It had wit, flair and mass-appeal. You would have even noticed that poster from a speeding car if it had been on a bus-shelter….

I really wanted that poster. It was simple but the execution of it made it really memorable. I would have stolen it if I could.

When I was packing I discovered I owned no posters from recent HIV/AIDS campaigns by NZAF. Not one. In boxes and boxes of papers and leaflets and fliers in a lifetime of picking up the things that interested me, not one NZAF poster from recent years had made the grade.

And I think that says a lot.

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