"Positive Pictures" is a book about the gay movement's history of the last 30 years through images from HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns - you can read it online here.

Firstly, this book is a tribute to the "Generation Safe Sex", the people who always had to experience sex as something potentially deadly. These are the same people who also learned how to cope with the situation and were able to make safe sex something fun and enjoyable. In "Positive Pictures" you can also find an interview with Chi Chi LaRue, a gay-porn film director who first started an "aggressive" promotion of safe sex through pornography.

The authors Paul Schulz and Christian Lütjens also have a clear idea about how and why the plague is still growing nowadays: the disease and the gay movement share the same past, HIV was born as a gay issue and it still is a gay issue. The fight for gay rights and against homophobia was the key factor in the reduction of the number of new infections in Europe and the US. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the same countries that now show a worrying rise of new infections are the same where homophobia is a sadly common reality. The same is true for higher-risk community such as the African American and the Latino ones. The book also shows how gay campaigns have almost always used white-Caucasian people for testimonials, while from now on also American and European campaigns should change this aspect. "If you look at prevention as a universal thing, we have a long way to go" Schulz said. "Anytime you fight homophobia anywhere in the world, you also fight against the virus. And the book, hopefully, is a tiny step in that direction". We at DAA say bravo!