In June 1983 – two years after the first case of AIDS was reported in the USA – I found myself on holiday in San Francisco.

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit a friend over there. (Indeed, so spur-of-the-moment that I managed to get there just two days after the massive ‘Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade’!)

That epic case of mistiming notwithstanding, it was a visit that was to have a profound influence on my subsequent work on AIDS, both in the UK and Australia.

Unlike the UK, where AIDS cases had barely reached double figures, US cases were already in their thousands. For example, the Centers for Disease Control reported 3,064 cases at December 22nd, 1983 (up from 452 at 8th July, 1982 – a frightening level of escalation.) And San Francisco was one of the places that was being hardest hit.

I have written elsewhere about my visit to San Francisco but there is one particular element that I want to expand on. After some years of searching I’ve finally been able to find images of the AIDS education brochure Can We Talk?

Produced by what was then the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, this little booklet came as a tiny glimmer of hope in an otherwise gloomy landscape. It was written at a time when we still didn’t know what caused AIDS, when our conversations about AIDS invariably alluded to death and when there was an increasing anxiety about sex. Certainly there was nothing to joke about there.