AIDS advertising campaign hampered

AIDS advertising campaign hampered

By Leon Harrison

PERTH — The West Australian AIDS Council has begun a newspaper advertising campaign to alert homosexual men who do not identify with the gay community of the dangers of AIDS.

The campaign was launched because recent cases of HIV— infection showed that some high risk men were not coming forward to be tested until it was too late. The council is concerned that many of the men believed to frequent gay beats are a risk to their wives as well as to other men and need to be educated about safe sex and testing.

There has already been disruption to the campaign through the work of the West Australian newspapers chief executive David Aspinall and the Australian Family Association.

Aspinall withdrew the council's advertisement from the West Australian's October 3 edition because it used a photo of two naked men embracing. Aspinall claimed the photo was "disgusting" and argued that "you have to bear in mind that we are a family newspaper."

The advertisement was finally run in the paper's October 5 edition, with the photo darkened to obscure its content.

From GLW issue 31