Name/Title
(1991) Red Hot + Blue, Steven Meisel photograph, produced for the Red Hot safe-sex campaign, 1991–1992.Description
This is a Red Hot Organization HIV/AIDS prevention poster from the early 1990s, usually identified as Steven Meisel, Safe Sex Is Hot Sex (“Use a Condom Every Time”), associated with Red Hot + Dance and dated 1991.
The poster’s message is blunt: “safe sex is hot sex” appears in large red type, while the side text reads “USE A CONDOM EVERY TIME”.
The Red Hot Organization used popular culture, music, design, and fashion photography to fundraise and circulate AIDS awareness. Its own history describes Red Hot as launching in 1990 with Red Hot + Blue, a benefit project addressing AIDS and stigma around gay communities, followed by Red Hot + Dance, which targeted club cultures affected by AIDS. Red Hot also notes that its early 1990s street-poster campaign included gay, lesbian, and straight couples photographed by Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, and Bruce Weber, alongside related PSA campaigns shown on outlets such as MTV, VH-1, PBS, Bravo, Channel 4, BBC, and Canal Plus. 
As a piece of public-health design, the poster is doing several things at once. It communicates HIV prevention; it normalizes safer sex as part of erotic life; it counters the idea that desire and protection are opposed; and it places queer sexuality in public space without apology. Its effectiveness depends on that tension: it is glamorous, sexually direct, and cautionary at the same time.
A useful way to read it is as a sex-positive AIDS-era risk communication artifact. It does not say “do not have sex.” It says that sex remains possible, desirable, and socially meaningful, but denial is dangerous. That was a politically loaded message in the early 1990s, when AIDS activism, public-health outreach, queer cultural production, and mass media were all negotiating how to speak about sex, death, pleasure, stigma, and responsibility.Create Date
May 2, 2026Update Date
October 15, 2026