On Saturday 1st October, I was actually very positive for once,
as BMP had approached another photographer in the same vein as Herb Ritts but who was not quite so established, the french photographer Jean Baptiste Mondino, (who later went on to became most well known commercially for his ‘Le Male’ sailor shots for Jean Paul Gaultier, see below). He brought a more interesting and slightly more ‘subversive’ or maybe edgy feel to the work by focusing on ‘le look‘ between two guys. At the time they were quite original and we thought interesting:
The Mondino shots in on Friday -great shots, though a pretty liberal interpretation of the brief. Why did he want to do them I wonder? He also did the shots with the two women.
It was the first piece of work that I felt was visually striking enough to actually make people want to read the body copy, simply to see what exactly was going on (see final images used in the gay press in 1990, page 223). It got right back to the start of good sex, by rooting it in desire rather than just orgasm (deseo..) and capturing that ‘first look’ we could surely all relate too. ‘They don’t just have safer sex because it’s safer’ read the strap. This was later misunderstood (deliberately or otherwise) by some activists within the gay community. Even as late as September 2020, Matthew Hodson (who had worked for GMFA in the UK, and is now the Executive Director of AIDSMAP) was tweeting (about the Mondino advert):
‘So why the buggery do they have it then. This kind of coy safer sex advertising (late 1980s), airbrushing gay sexual desire, is what happens when people who aren’t gay think they can instruct gays on how to have sex?’
It does make us ponder the question ‘so what is safer sex’? I’m not entirely sure what Hodson understands as ‘desire’ but I’d argue as a group of gay men at the HEA, we understood gay men far, far, better than he suggests, in fact. For us the message was a holistic concept rooted in desire, care, respect and understanding. The advert shows the very start of that key process of desire: eye contact, which we felt was likely to be understood by everyone (and indeed pre testing with groups of gay men across the UK later backed that up). We always wanted a key part of the message to be about using your imagination in sex, whilst a lot of work in that early period was often simply about ‘the act of fucking’: the act of physical penetration, a somewhat heteronormative interpretation of the sex act. We were saying ‘experiment‘ and in my mind the HEA was being by far the more creative thinker here in these early campaigns by rooting safer sex into the concept of desire (always safe).
This was what I’d tried to do in the safer sex shorts my company ‘Cleancut’ had made of course, as well: the fantasy of the Weber image of sailors on leave in Waikiki etc). In fact it’s what GMFA finally went onto do later in their advertising campaigns like ‘Sailors’. However clearly such concepts did not sit well with aspect of ‘authority’ that the HEA was meant to have. It is quite difficult to give ‘black and white’ factual advice about ‘fantasy’. Interestingly, the BMP creative team eventually came up with a proposed solution to this, by producing an advert showing a ‘factual’ medical image of the brain and talking about using your imagination in the strap and copy. It kind of worked but was never especially popular. (see photo )
There was always tension from those in GMFA about the HEA’s work; it never really went away. In retrospect, even the names give the game away as both organisations were coming from very different places. The HEA was set up to be an authority: something you could trust on a medical level, as if from your doctor. GMFA however was more like an army – the gay men in it were ‘fighting’ AIDS and it viewed the situation in battlefield terms: campaigns needed to be up front, direct, no nonsense and punchy. The two organisations were coming from very different places- the ‘Authority’ was never going to please the ‘Army’ with its cautious, reasoned, more medical approach. Yet, if it had used the conceptual imagery and language of GMFA, it would have lost its authority.
Both had a place in the educational arena surrounding AIDS, both appealing to the very different sensibilities of gay men at the time: the more conservative and the more liberally minded. It was odd for me at first, representing the views of the more conservative ‘Authority’, having felt I was coming at things from a more radical community perspective for the last decade but it was a role I had nevertheless to play. In some respects it was ‘roleplay’, as I never felt truly comfortable in that position, until later when the programme bought into some aspects of community development. That however put it on something of a collision course with those who wanted it to keep its role to the more considered, conservative position of ‘authority’.
Having said that some great work came from GMFA (UK) as time went on, a particular favourite of mine being the one with two men sat on a large cake (one of who happens to be Matthew Hodson) about valuing respecting each other as men, as gay men. Great stuff .
The HEA’s campaigns were sometimes criticised, especially by GMFA, for ‘neutering’ gay men; ‘airbrushing away’ their sexuality, whilst in fact, looking back now retrospectively, I think we were working on and developing more complex ideas about encouraging and using the realities of cruising and fantasy in sex. Interestingly though, whilst these ideas were always accepted and seemingly understood by American gay organisations, they were very much less accepted by the more radical British ones. Whilst the body copy in our advertising talked about using condoms for anal intercourse (recognising it still had be part of the key message at that time) the Mondino advert’s concept was about encouraging desire and fantasy as a key part of ‘safer sex’; nevertheless of course recognising in the end it all comes back to the -sad- reality that anal intercourse in particular was not ‘safe’ sex- it was safer sex.
More to the point at the time, on the ground, after spending months back and forwards with the Department about the copy for a leaflet from the HEA aimed at gay men about safer sex, we had finally got it signed off and to the printers to be launched as a package, with the new advertising round (see image of front cover p224). The MESMAC project was also finally getting off the ground and we were ready to decide who should get the funding for the first four key sites around the UK. So by November 9th, I was still feeling pretty positive and writing:
A quiet end to the week but a lot of the new gay work arriving and the leaflet finally back from the printers. The new Mondino work will be out in the gapers (gay papers) next week, Pink, Cap Gay. Really wonder what people will make of it?
And then, by Sunday 18th November
To the ICA tonight to see an evening of safer sex films. All crap I thought, except mine. (What am I like?!) It’s been hard work but generally positive over the last few days with much activity on the MESMAC front, as the possible project sites scramble to get their proposals in before the Friday deadline. Also had a Press briefing for the gay work at the HEA today, not exactly well attended but it went pretty well. Not too many awkward questions, they are softening up on us- just a bit.
Mondinos ´1997 shot for ´Le Male´ perfum ad: I would have liked to have seen something like this from Mondino in 1990 but realistically the brief was coming from a different place and a different client! It was also aimed at a much wider target audience of gay men, than this advert. There would 3 different men and a pack of condoms with the other items. The strap would be ´Always be prepared for every eventuality´.. you could even have the shelf covering their dicks, as here, if it was imposible to go nude. But dream on! It does harp back to the Cleancut ´Taste video´ though a little. If we had continued to make videos (and I sometime wish we had) they would probably have taken on something of this resonance.
Things could change in a few days then though. On Monday 23rd October I am writing:
Susan Perl is a wally and she really riles me sometimes. Joe is a bit low, poor angel (as he says to me). I call him ‘my Poor devil.’
But by the following day I am sweetness and light: Tuesday 24th October:
A flash of warmth for Sue Perl today and suddenly a lot is forgiven. It’s so easy to be ‘pissed off ‘ with people, when communication is lost. A little love and affection goes a long way. In fact Susan went on to write an interesting critique on mass media in a 1991 book, Reflections on using mass media for AIDS public education but I´ll cover this in the next book.
This was very true and often I think working there on a difficult area, with so much bad news about the progress of a disease that there was no cure for, remember: no vaccine, no drug treatment at that time; we all had friends who were being affected by it, it was easy to become quite riled by others, who were also dealing with a range of complications in the work they were developing. As time went by this was recognised by the directors there, who gave us time to go to away days as a team, where we could better get to know each other, share problems and potential solutions and work together. Little by little the team became more supportive of each other and we understood that some things would fail, through no fault of our own. That sometimes failure was ok. This helped to create a less stressful environment and a happier workspace. However, this wasn’t to happen overnight! By November 1st I was writing:
Pissed off at work again. The bisexual work is off yet again. Or rather delayed. It’s absurd. I’ve realised I wrote on the 30th July how late it was. Little did I know. Do people actually realise that there are people are dying out there? And in an off the cuff remark: I hate getting old, I resolve never to grow old gracefully. It’s going to be spit, spite & sweat all the way. Time just rushes on so fast.
In fact, for a while, it seemed like things were racing downhill again fast. By Sunday, November 12th:
Not very good articles in the gapers this week, Capital Gay headline ‘was knives are out for the HEA‘. Jesus. I‘m going to need police protection at this rate. Our press office trying to play it down but.. depressing to have to work in the middle of it all really.
and on the following day, 13th November:
Feeling low tonight, a hard day at work feeling hassled, I feel and look like something the cats dragged in.The stress and strain of the job is showing. I’m seriously thinking of resigning from the job. It’s too much to handle.
And yet again on the 22nd November:
Bad days at work as we learnt that the AIDS division is to be virtually abolished, so we are all wondering what‘s going to replace it. It‘s in all the papers too. Sigh.
Part of it was to do with a shake-up of the HEA generally, which was felt to be far too radical and left leaning for its own good by the Conservative government at the time. Some of this change was occurring because there was a new Minister for Health, Virginia Bottomley, David Mellor having been moved on and replaced by Mrs T. On the 24th November:
Much coverage in the media of the HEA story. Virginia Bottomley, the new Health Minister is seemingly a ‘rightish wing right winger‘. That‘s all we need. I‘m very concerned about the future of the AIDS programme.
Yet, you did come to realise after a while, that there were people ‘above you’ also working hard to try and smooth things over, friends in high places working also to see how changes might be affected, whilst still keeping the general liberal approach that the Authority had intact.
And so, with Christmas coming up fast again by the 12th December, I was writing:
Things are settling down, feeling a lot better about work, with Derek even talking about a permanent post at long last. So suddenly I seem to want it now after everything negative that’s happened over the last few months. I think I better put a ad in cap gay ‘masochist seeks sensual satisfaction “!
This was so often the way at the HEA: things would seem to go very black for a while, there would be a thunderstorm (when we hoped noone would be zapped by lightning) and then (sometimes almost magically) the skies would clear and the sun would come back out again with everything fresh and sparklingly cleaned by the rain. As I came to understand it better, it actually started to grow on me. I felt this sense of camaraderie develop, where we had all been through so much together, and come out the other end, that we better understood each other. You also started to understand how the different departments there worked together to gel as a cohesive entity.. research, advertising and all the health areas we covered, as HIV/AIDS was just one of many.
Going forward we knew there would always be changes, always be periods when things were difficult but slowly we were better able to support each other through them. As we entered 1990, and a brand new decade, suddenly I was no longer talking of leaving but of new projects and how best to get them off the ground. We knew so much more in just a year or so of how to best use the networks that we had, more effectively. HIV/AIDS had not by any means gone away, some of our friends were still very ill or dying but there seemed to be just the hint of a way through things, that we could get through things, a resolve, that we would get through things.
Sex, love and life (The Sacrifice) 3.12 The end of a long decade
