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Having seen so many of my personal friends succumb to this deadly virus, I felt it was something I needed to do to help stop the spread of this horrific disease. “The gentleman advised me that a young photographer named Mick Hicks was looking for two subjects, one Black male and one white male, for the poster. One day, as 24-year-old Robert wandered down Castro Street, a man approached him and asked if he would pose for a photo for a safe-sex poster for San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
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I would find my way up through the bar scene during that time, sneaking into gay bars and discos.” Of course, he realized that AIDS was rampant through the city. “I went to high school four or five blocks from the Castro. “I had started meeting and dating guys in my junior year in high school,” he told me. He quickly accepted the commission.Īt the same time, a young Black man named Robert Gray, a native San Franciscan raised in the Bayview Hunter’s Point area of the city, and a proud sixth-generation descendant of the Georgetown 272 (a group of 272 African slaves who were sold, in 1838 by the Jesuit priests who ran George University to keep the school afloat), was rather well known in the Castro and Tenderloin areas. Hicks worked for virtually all the LGBTQ newspapers in the Bay Area and had spent a year and a half photographing people with AIDS, chronicling their struggle with the disease. In 1984, Rick Crane, director of the Foundation at the time, hired famed local photographer Mick Hicks to photograph two men for a safe-sex poster to be put in the city’s gay bars, baths, and other locations. As the virus spread through the gay community, the Foundation became a fervent advocate for safe-sex practices. From the beginning, they have known that neither being HIV-positive, nor the fear of contracting the virus, should prevent one from having a rich, satisfying sexual life. This article was produced in honor of San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s 40th anniversary, which we are commemorating in 2022.įrom its inception, San Francisco AIDS Foundation has approached the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in a very sex-positive manner.