The magazine’s earliest reporting on AIDS asked for calm amidst hysteria.
When Playboy editor David Nimmons wrote in the October 1983 issue that “nobody knows” the cause of AIDS, be they doctors, patients or the media, he wasn’t being facetious. It might be hard to remember, but there was a span of three years when AIDS had been identified by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but scientists had yet to suss out its root cause, the virus now known as HIV. (That wouldn’t happen until 1984.) It was in this pocket of time that Nimmons wrote “AIDS: Journalism in a Plague Year,” an early indictment of media-produced hysteria surrounding the still-burgeoning epidemic.
And hysteria is the right word. Since AIDS first came to public consciousness in 1981, the illness and panic (moral or otherwise) — fueled by rampant misinformation and homophobia — seemed to go hand in hand. Parents didn’t want their kids going to school with kids who might have an AIDS diagnosis and 1 in 5 Americans, when polled in the 1980s, said that they had become less comfortable around a gay person they knew because of the epidemic.
Within a month of that same issue in which Nimmons called for calm hitting newsstands, a group of New York City tenants sought to run Dr. Joseph Sonnabend — one of the world’s most famous AIDS physicians who was frequently quoted in Playboy’s AIDS coverage — out of his first-floor office in their West Village building. The New York Times noted that residents were “frightened of the AIDS patients” and feared that Sonnabend’s practice would lower apartment values.
Such was the panic of AIDS in 1983, that simply sharing a building with people with AIDS caused surely-rational New Yorkers to an attempted ousting of one of the most revered members of the scientific community. There was a lack of information, and a corresponding thirst for certainty: earlier that year, the government was forced to expand the number of lines dedicated to its National AIDS Hotline from 3 to 8 to field its nearly 10,000 daily calls. Reliable information about AIDS was scarce, and certainly wasn’t coming from the top down: famously, president Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even say the acronym aloud until 1985, four years after it first made national news and after 8,000 Americans had already died from complications related to the diagnosis. Even the National Institutes of Health was guilty of stoking the AIDS flame. Just a few months earlier, it had published a study suggesting that “routine close contact” with people with AIDS could lead to a possible transmission.
So, Nimmons’ take was a rare, sober call for not just calm, but compassion. Setting the tone for years of Playboy’s coverage going forward, Nimmons looked around at the (perhaps understandably) panicked milieu and urged calm as an antidote to the “media’s feeding frenzy” around AIDS anxiety. “We’re being presented with everybody’s conjecture as fact, and conjecture does a lot of damage when people’s lives are at stake,” he wrote in 1983. He also specifically called out “careless” and “embarrassing” coverage that linked AIDS to queerness in exploitative and homophobic ways, including several headlines announcing a “Gay Plague.”
“About AIDS being a ‘gay’ disease: It’s not,” he wrote. “There’s no such thing. Germs swing both ways, and they don’t care whom their hosts sleep with.”
This was the same year that people with AIDS came together to write the Denver Principles, a series of statements affirming the dignity of people with AIDS and railing against the treatment of them in the media and society writ large. The principles included not scapegoating people with AIDS and asserting their rights to fully and satisfying sexual and emotional lives; the manifesto was also the beginning of AIDS empowerment. In it, the people gathered said outright that they are not “victims” and “only occasionally patients” and instead demanded they be called People with AIDS.
Nimmons wasn’t alone in his tone on AIDS at Playboy, one notably lacking the homophobia that permeated the media landscape at the time. In 1986, Playboy ran an editorial called “Can Sex Survive AIDS?”, which approached AIDS through a scientific lens, rather than a stigmatizing one. Before walking through the facts around AIDS and offering harm reduction tips, editorial director Arthur Kretchmer wrote that the “biggest health problem in the country right now is fear of AIDS. The second-biggest problem … is ignorance about AIDS.”
Most impressive is a run of articles that ran from 1987 through 1988, at a time when the AIDS crisis was coming even more into public view. That July, just three months after activist Larry Kramer founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and just following Reagan’s first speech about AIDS, Playboy published “A Calm Look at AIDS,” written by journalist David Black. (Kramer would later sit down with Playboy for an interview in 1993.) Citing recent media reports about the dangers of AIDS, Black asserts that some experts fear the American public is “succumbing to an unnecessary panic that could have political and sociological repercussions for everyone: gays, straight and women.”
Some of Black’s assertions are incorrect— like his division of gay and straight sexual networks, which makes little room for overlap between the two and disregards the existence of bisexuality—but the spirit is still there. Ultimately, Black’s focus is on the debilitating effects of paranoia and fear, which can have “psychological implications” on people who are taught that sex should be equated with fear and death.
“The real AIDS crisis is as much psychological as medical,” he wrote. “The plague is one of fear and ignorance that has the potential to wreak as much havoc as any disease.”
In its sum, Playboy’s AIDS coverage was consistently fact-based, devoting inches and inches of column space to medical experts who hoped to spread information rather than hysteria in a landscape where hysteria reigned. Perhaps it seems surprising that a magazine primarily for straight men—who were presumably at less risk of contracting HIV — would be a rare calm in the storm. But the magazine’s ethos, as set out in the Playboy Philosophy — a series of 1960s essays laying out the magazine’s credo — is sexual liberation for all. In that spirit, Playboy’s AIDS coverage seemed to understand something that most wouldn’t understand for years, even decades — and that some don’t seem to understand yet.
In May 1984, the magazine ran the frank “AIDS: a Breakthrough,” in which writer Kate Nolan walked readers through the latest science around HIV transmission, including the heightened risks associated with unprotected anal sex. Notably, Nolan doesn’t single out anal sex as something that is linked specifically to queer people and instead understands that anyone can have anal sex, putting almost anyone at risk.
“There is reason to believe that American heterosexual women participate in anal sex in fairly impressive numbers,” Nolan wrote. “Well, then, where’s their protection?”
She concludes with a bit of harm reduction and prevention education, rather than stigmatization.
“Until we know more about this, it is wise to follow the Playboy Advisor’s dictum: Use a condom during anal sex,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, you may want to find another place to ejaculate. Capistrano is lovely in the spring.”
Nimmons made a similar point in 1983, when he argued to the Playboy reader that he and the gay community were much more aligned, especially when it came to sex, than most people realized. Nimmons made a case for the LGBTQ+ community and the sex-positive straight man as bedfellows against the religious right.
“It’s no accident that some of the people most at risk for AIDS — gays, I.V.-drug users—are those on the New Right’s political hit list,” Nimmons wrote. “And, lest we forget, that list potentially includes anyone who is at all sexually active. The New Right, after all, is hardly bullish on folks who make their own sexual decisions.”
Kretchmer, too, stressed that Playboy’s readers should be wary of the religious right and its anti-sex ethos.
“It’s not surprising that Jerry Falwell is working this street,” Kretchmer wrote. “AIDS almost lives up to Falwell’s idea of a dream disease — one that would instantly strike dead anyone having sex not sanctioned by his church.” Kretchmer warns about the sequelae of such a moral panic, including the fact that after parents go after children with AIDS in their kids’ classrooms, they could easily start going after gay teachers, regardless of their HIV status.
It’s in this early understanding that sexuality is not the differentiating barrier that political and social forces would have us believe that Playboy’s work really shines. Now, when medical misinformation is rampant online in a post-pandemic world; when division based on identity often feels encouraged; and when the kind of nuance Playboy brought to its AIDS reporting feels lost, it would behoove us to approach moral panics with calm, logic, and the idea that we’re all much more alike than we are different.
No one did that better than Playboy editor James R. Petersen in his review of the book Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS, taking the book’s authors to task for their sanctioning of “realistic fear,” which they posit can be a positive motivator towards changing sexual behavior. The review emphasizes the need for sound science in the face of stigma, warning against all the horrors that the Crisis authors emphasize and unfounded fears they propagate.
After quoting at length a passage in which the book’s authors call for mandatory testing of all sex workers and a government crackdown, Petersen wonders: “So step in and eliminate any other civil rights she may have? The authors hope that ‘we can keep disruptions of civil liberties to a minimum while significantly increasing our vigilance against a lethal disease.’” Petersen continues, mocking the authors’ modest proposal: “Round ‘em up and brand ‘em. But why stop at prostitutes? Why not all active heterosexuals? Why not raid singles clubs? And black neighborhoods, where poverty and IV drug use combine to produce frightening statistics? If your spouse confesses to having an affair, give him or her a six-month sentence: No sex until blood tests prove no contamination.”
With the advent of highly-active antiretroviral therapy in 1996, AIDS transformed into a treatable, chronic condition for many people after devastating the LGBTQ+ community and communities of color for decades. That devastation was capitalized on by powerful people looking to push a moral agenda. We’re seeing that same kind of push now, as trans people face rapid attacks on their freedom tied to unfounded moral panics, and as LGBTQ people are erased from public institutions. Playboy’s AIDS coverage understood that our collective sexual and civil liberation is all tied together—and that’s a message we could stand to remember today.
