Sacrifice, originally Elton John (1989)
As Cleancut got on with the business of producing films: a video for a London Health Authority..
called ‘So you think you know about AIDS and safer sex’, a couple of pop videos for bands and a promotional video for Philips in car radios for the Birmingham Motor show, were some of the things that got made in the next year, we had noticed that the number of reasoned clear minded mainstream programmes about HIV and AIDS was sklowly increasing.
In 1987, the BBC in particular, showed a number of programmes about the HIV and AIDS crisis affecting the UK. As part of its commitment to offering related support and information post programme, it usually provided a telephone help advice line at the end of the programme, where people affected by the issues discussed in it, could ring for further advice, help and information.
It turned to several organisations at the time to ask if they could provide experienced people to staff the phones after the programmes, including Lesbian & Gay switchboard. As a result a number of switchboard volunteers, including myself, took calls from offices initially in BBC premises after such programmes with a number trail at the end of them. The first few were generally perceived as having been quite successful with a large number of calls taken after the programmes. Unlike the calls Switchboard received, they were often, usually in fact, from members of the general public, including a large group of what we termed the ‘worried well’, anxious about contracting HIV/AIDS, often under the assumption that it could be contracted from airborne germs, toilet seats, by sitting on bus seats and so on.
After a while, the service was thought to be so useful that it began to be operated regularly throughout the day, with funding secured from the government for its development and expansion. The rota usually consisted of about a dozen people on shift at any one time and the service was pretty busy usually, especially in the evenings. A large part of peoples worry about contracting the virus was still being fuelled by the irresponsibility of various red top newspapers at the time but also to some extent the governments own campaign, ‘Dont Die of ignorance’, the information leaflets it sent to every home and the television adverts ‘Iceberg’ and ‘Volcano’, (video below) which was predicated on working, by installing a sense of fear in people.
The distinctive forty second television advertisement, was voiced by John Hurt and directed by Nicolas Roeg. Both should have known better. A volcano features in the most notable advertisement and an iceberg in the second. Roeg was chosen for his signature “doom and gloom sci-fi aesthetic” with the volcano reinforcing the apocalyptic tone. Evidently it was originally intended that a civil defense siren would sound at the start of the advert, (rather like the ‘Frankie Goes to Hollywood’ video) but (thank god) this was actually rejected by the PM, Margaret Thatcher as being overdramatic. The adverts went down like a lead balloon with most of us on Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and this was a feeling that generally also transferred across to the fledgling ‘National AIDS Helpline’ (NAH) staff as well.
However, the health secretary at the time in Thatcher’s cabinet, from 1981-87, Norman Fowler claimed that “90% of the public recognised the advert and a vast number changed their behaviour because of it” and as it was a “life and death situation. What he didn’t say was that this was primarily because a large number of people were scared shitless about ever having sex again. So the purpose of the National Aids Helpline as well as providing advice on safer sexual practices, was also to calm the most worried and anxious people down, and try to reassure them that there was little risk attached to their activities, on a day to day basis. Norman Fowler was so sure of the usefulness of the campaign and of his role in it, that he even wrote a book in 2014 called ‘AIDS, Don’t die of prejudice’ (link with book previews). To be fair, I think his heart was -more or less- in the right place and in fact he has kept involved in the subject ever since, by being on the board of the International AIDS vaccine initiatives and vice chair of the ‘All party Parliamentary group on HIV and AIDS’.
He talks in the book of how he proposed that the government ran a Sexual Health campaign about the dangers of HIV/AIDS in national newspapers, with information about risky sex practices and protective condom use. However Mrs T was back to her usual response when backed up against a corner: ‘No, no, no’. She felt that information about such practices as anal sex, would actually encourage people to try it. We are back to some extent here of her later concern, voiced in relation to Section 28, that teaching people about the possibility of gay sex, would encourage the take up of such practices, that people would assume ‘a god given right to try it’.
Nevertheless a committee (the H committee) convened by Fowler, recommended it go ahead anyway, despite her reservations. He talks about how it ‘brought us up against some basic questions about any AIDS educational awareness campaign. Were we to muffle our message so that the chance of causing offence was minimised’? It was agreed to proceed anyway, along with extending the advertising to produce a TV campaign as well but Thatchers’ view was always that such a campaign actually exacerbated concern and worry from those who did not need to feel worried about it. In retrospect, I have to say that I’m afraid I’m with Mrs T on this one. That is what many of our phone calls bore out. She felt that more targeted advertising was a better idea (such as poster ads in sexual health clinics and toilets), though her prime concern does seem more about the discussion of anal sex in mass media, encouraging experimentation.
This does rather corroborate the view that Thatcher felt that people could be led in or lured into homosexuality, as a way of life: this was still quite a mainstream view then, that of the deviant (in the form of a person or in literature) luring others into a web of vice and sin. The prime minister’s requests for amended copy were ignored however and the adverts went ahead. There were very few complaints Fowler notes from the public at the time, by the sexual language used in them. However, many in the party sided with Thatcher, Norman Tebbit being one. There was also protestation from other grandees in the national Press. Woodrow Wyatt in the ‘News of the World’ was particularly obnoxious, both to Fowler at the time and just about everyone else I knew. He wrote:
‘The start of AIDS was homosexual love making. Promiscuous women are vulnerable making love to promiscuous bisexuals. They then pass it on to normal men’. He went on to add : Labour councils give grants to homosexual centres who encourage children to experiment with sex. This is Murder!’
Further negative comments came from close supporters of Thatcher, Lord Sherman and Christopher (now Lord) Moncton. In an article in the American Spectator, he proposed everyone be screened regularly and that HIV ‘carriers’ be quarantined for life. The Conservative Family Group supported this view at the time.
Fowler goes on to say that ‘research showed that the people they needed to convince most were gay men who took an almost cavalier attitude to sex and drug users (transmission can occur through shared needles) who were apathetic to their fate’. I suppose this to some extent goes back to the view I wrote about earlier that was expressed by the Guardian journalist and what was said about places like the ‘LA’. It refuses to recognise that there was a lifestyle that was adopted by some gay (and bisexual) men that was about living life to the full, of which having sex was a part of it. This argument went ‘stop it now, change your behaviour, and conform to societies expectations’. It was never going to be an especially popular message within the gay community. Fowler goes on to say that the view from the public was often that ‘the victims of AIDS should be left to their own fates’ and ‘they didn’t know why the government should put out adverts addressed to the public at large when everyone knew it was just a gay disease’.
So here we can see the crucial and critical dilemma faced by those who were developing these general ‘broad brush’ campaigns in 1986 and 1987. They were, essentially, damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. In reality, there was only one obvious way forward. To develop targeted, more specific campaigns aimed at gay and bisexual men, (and others at particular risk) utilising the media that they were used to reading and in places where they congregated for socialising, play, and sometimes sex. However, it took some time for this view to ‘coalesce’ or, shall we say, ‘solidify’ in government. To his credit Fowler expresses irritation, anger even, at people who expressed such views, anger at ‘the rank injustice of it all’, ‘why should gay men be seen as ‘second class citizens” he asks?
Interestingly, whilst they got the information leaflets out to every household in January 1987, and ran a national billboard campaign too, without any great criticism, the committee’s planning started to come unstuck when they asked the advertising agency who worked with the Department of Health, Tragos Bonnange Wiesendanger Ajroldi (only ever known as TBWA for obvious reasons and now known as ‘the disruption agency‘) at that time to develop a series of adverts. When they showed the Department what they had come up with, as Norman wrote in his diary, it wasn’t just disruption ‘it was Apocalypse Three’ so they were watered down somewhat. Norman Fowler still stands by these ads as doing their job. I still disagree with that. We are clearly not going to change our positions on that, thirty years later. Also, to his credit, Fowler travelled to meet other organisations working on the issue all over the world, to New York, to Berlin, to Amsterdam, picking up advice from those working directly in the field. He was complimented by health workers in San Francisco on taking such a lead, where nobody could remember Reagan as ever saying anything on the issue, despite the serious situation there by then, with young gay men dying on a daily basis.
He came back determined to take more action to support those particularly affected by the disease. He notes in his diary that ‘Tebbit and Thatcher are exasperated by the education campaign’ but writes ‘that if they don’t like it they can lump it’. By July 1987, after the General Election which Thatcher again won, however, he was out of the Department of Health and into Education. He notes how ‘although Thatcher didn’t support his work, nevertheless she allowed him to get on with it’. In the event though, on reflection she may have felt that it was all a little too close to home. There had to be some way that sensitive campaign work could be carried out, that didn’t leave her government quite so open to the hostility that the messages so far had received, particularly from right wing of the party and public. His replacement at the Department of Health in June 1987 was to be John Moore. He had other plans for how to get more targeted specific messages across to the relevant communities.
In the USA meanwhile, things had been going downhill for the Gay Mens Health Crisis (GMHC’s) safer sex programme. In October 1987, Senator Jesse Helms circulated a copy of their Safer Sex Comix on the floor of the Senate, using it to launch an all out attack on their innovative, gay positive AIDS prevention materials. ‘The Comix’ (example of Comix 8, 1987) was designed to be distributed in gay bars and bathhouses as part of their outreach and prevention programs, featuring a range of illustrated safer sex scenes with lines such as “I’d like to get fucked with a tight rubber,” and “Please sir, would you shoot your man-cum on my chest?” Personally I really liked this idea of using visually more interesting styles to get messages across; you might also assume it was possible to be more explicit in these comic strips than when using actual people. Research they did showed they had proved popular with the target audiences. However, despite the fact that no federal monies had been used to print the Comix, Helms sponsored an amendment to the ‘1988 omnibus appropriations bill’ that passed in a vote of 94-2, preventing federal funding for any AIDS education materials that “promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual activities. So unlike the UK government, which was at least starting to think about producing something targeted for gay & bisexual men, those holding the purse strings in the States basically said anything remotely positive would need to be self funded by the gay community or its supporters.
This was interesting though in some ways, as it did allow for some very ‘creative thinking’ to come out of organisations like GMHC but this was not without its inherent problems. GMHC decided to turn to a similar medium as that which we at Cleancut were using, video shorts to get across short punchy messages about different safer sex practices. As the producers of the short films Carlomusto and Bordowitz explained at the time:
“In the face of increasing censorship amidst a morally conservative climate, we militantly advocate sex – in beds, kitchens, bars, restrooms, taxis, anywhere you want. If it’s safer sex, do it!
They needed to be careful though, as yet again radical activism and ACT UP didn’t hit the sweet spot for all gay men.
‘The Shorts’ though was a fascinating venture, that drew on a rich American history of countercultural and ‘postcolonial’ media production that saw video as ‘potentially revolutionary’. Of the seven pieces produced in all, its first two shorts, Something Fierce and Midnight Snack, were created by Bordowitz and Carlomusto to appeal to a general (gay) audience, but the remaining five shorts were designed to target specific groups. For example Car Service was geared toward black men, Steam Clean was aimed at Asian Americans, and Gotstabeadrag was aimed at youth of color who were involved in the then- very current -house ball scene (which was to be shortly piggy backed on by Ms Madonna). One, Current Flow was targeted at lesbians (and directed by Carlomusto, who wrote the script in conversation with members of ACT UP’s women’s caucus) and finally, Law and Order was conceived as an S/M video, which, like both Midnight Snack and Current Flow, featured a black/white interracial couple.
Despite its effort to ‘invert’ the racial and sexual hierarchies within gay commercial sexual culture at that time, ultimately post testing revealed that the political messages enclosed may in fact have ‘eclipsed’ the video´s erotic appeal. After interviewing several men who had seen the videos, Fung found that in fact, his target audience did not tend to respond positively. Some of his interviewees just fast-forwarded to the sex scene (thereby missing much of a scene exploring the social critique of racism in bathhouses) while others even fast-forwarded through the sex scene itself. One viewer felt that the video ‘didn’t have enough sex‘, commenting that “it doesn’t disguise itself very well as porn,” while another found the Shorts in general to “carry more of a medical or a social message than a pure porn film, so it was immediately felt to be boring (as erotic expectations were not met). So herein lies the problem of producing information enclosed in a shiny porn wrapper. By doing so we become trapped in stimulating the very cultural notions, perpetuating the tropes that we as ‘creative activists’ are trying to avoid. Porn is inherently ‘disposable’: we fast forward through the bits we don’t like, we soon get tired and look for something new. It satiates us, then we move quickly on. Wrapping your safer sex message up in the same terms, risks people being becoming quickly dismissive and bored. We felt that you needed to try to create witty, aesthetically pleasing and interesting homo-erotic images, that you could watch again & again, without fear of ‘fast forwarding’.
Whilst this was the kind of debate that was clearly needed at a level of community intervention in 1989, it was fairly clear that such notions would just go right over the heads of those in the Department of Health here in England and Wales, (who, lets face it, had clearly thought that it was much ‘safer’ just to scare the shit out of people). And, of course, to make sure that nothing could be construed as too positively ‘promoting homosexuality’.
Sex, love and Life (The Sacrifice) 3.02 The Creation of a ‘Department of Health’ versus the ‘HEA’