Love & Fury: AIDS Activist Posters Exhibition
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Poster House exhibition "Love & Fury" showcases AIDS-era activist poster art spanning from pre-crisis 1979 bathhouse culture through 1988, featuring works by Keith Haring, Howard Cruse, Boris Vallejo, Gran Fury, and the Silence=Death Project
- Gay Men's Health Crisis organized the first major US AIDS fundraiser in spring 1983, staging a Ringling Bros circus production at Madison Square Garden that drew more than 18,000 people and featured Patti LuPone, Leonard Bernstein, and Shirley Verrett
- Keith Haring's 1987 "Safe Sex!" poster helped popularize the term "safe sex," which had been coined in 1983 by activists Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, the same duo behind the landmark pamphlet "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic"
- The Silence=Death Project, a collective of six gay men formed in 1986, reclaimed the pink triangle — a Nazi symbol used to identify LGBTQ+ prisoners — turning it into the era's most enduring image of resistance
- The Silence=Death Project also created "AIDSGATE" in 1987, borrowing Watergate-era language to publicly shame Ronald Reagan's inaction on the epidemic and demand lawmakers be held accountable
- Gran Fury targeted New York City health commissioner Dr. Stephen Joseph in a 1988 poster accusing him of having "blood on your hands" after he lowered estimated HIV/AIDS figures from 200,000 to roughly 50,000 — a cut activists said was designed to slash public funding
- Howard Cruse's 1984 poster "Great Sex! Don't Let AIDS Stop It," adapted from Callen and Berkowitz's pamphlet, was displayed at communal gay spaces including the New St Marks Baths and signaled a new attitude that safe hook-ups could still be pleasurable
Why it matters: The exhibition reframes AIDS-era posters not as relics but as direct political instruments that coined language ("safe sex"), reclaimed Nazi persecution symbols into resistance icons, and publicly named officials whose inaction or data manipulation cost lives — a reminder that graphic art functioned as the movement's primary public voice when mainstream institutions were silent.
