Beginning in the early 80's, AIDS impacted more and more on the gay community, and popular language and imagery reflected the new myths. The figure of the AIDS activist as seething ACT UP clone, body pumped undeer the white political T-shirt, head shaved, concentration-camp style, became, for a while, a sexual icon. This 1992 ad depicts AIDS as a fashionable fight.

Taking the HIV test has now become the most significant initiatory rite of passage in the life of a gay man as this ad for a home HIV test kit confirms, describing it as "THE TRUE TEST OF YOUR MANHOOD" (in capital letters).

Gay men have always been seen by society as errant children, and the imagery and mythology of the Bad Boy and the Rebel are pervasive in gay culture. AIDS both reinforced this idea and provided an escape. Claiming to practice "safe sex," raising money for "AIDS research," obeying physicians, and dying nobly, allowed gay men to subsume their role as bad child with the new role of good child. Gay men became cross-carriers, bearing society's projected sins as sacrificial PWAs. Here, in an ad for a drug rehabilitation program, cross-carrying becomes orgasmic torment.