The First “Safe Sex Guidelines”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the USA and Europe saw a “sexual revolution”: A new women’s movement and various “sexual minorities” began to organize and fight for their rights. In San Francisco, a growing gay and lesbian population enjoyed great sexual freedom. However, this freedom soon revealed a negative side – an increase of sexually transmitted diseases. For this reason, a new gay medical association, Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights (BAPHR), very early on recommended the use of condoms. When, several years later, AIDS made its appearance, this recommendation was expanded to cover a variety of sexual contacts in detail. These first “AIDS Safe Sex Guidelines” were widely disseminated all over the city, for example in the form of small cards that could be carried in a wallet or shirt pocket. The guidelines differentiated between “safe”, “possibly safe”, and “unsafe” sexual practices and thus pursued two main goals: 1. To counteract a growing panic by creating an awareness of the different degrees of risk. 2. To provide some reassurance that these risks did not have to mean the end of all sexual contact. The strategy worked in San Francisco, because its gay community was sophisticated enough to accept the differentiations. It did not always work elsewhere. In communities that considered the guidelines too complicated, they were replaced by the earlier simple advice to use condoms.

1984: Wallet-size cards, distributed by the SF AIDS Foundation, front and back.
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