‘The Humble Condom’: The Rise of Condom Culture and HIV/AIDS in Queensland

Abstract

Summary This article traces the rise in popularity of condom usage during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia’s most conservative state, Queensland. This research demonstrates the efficacy of grassroots activism and organisation in promoting condom use as a life-saving measure, despite government inaction. Centring the role of the condom, this article is the first history of policy surrounding condoms in 1980s Queensland, illustrating the moral and social anxieties that coalesced at state level around the condom, which came into conflict with federal, medical, community and (particularly notably) religious perspectives. With AIDS, the condom itself became a site of acute anxiety in that it simultaneously represented a medical act of prevention and a socially fraught sexual risk. Acceptance of the condom was fostered through educational campaigns by and for targeted communities and in direct opposition to abstinence advocacy espoused by the state government.