"Let's talk about sex, baby": community-based HIV prevention work and the problem of sex.

Talking about sex and sexuality has been integral to HIV/AIDS prevention work in the United States since the beginning of the epidemic. Early prevention workers, who were primarily gay men, developed a "sex-positive" approach to prevention, involving frank discussions of sex and sexuality, with the idea of helping to end the epidemic by protecting oneself and one's sex partners from the disease. This article examines early prevention work at AIDS Action Committee (ACC) in Boston, Massachusetts, and details subsequent challenges to this approach, primarily from Bostonians outside of the gay community, but also from within AAC. The article ends with an examination of the early 2000s at AAC, which saw the more recent manifestation of a "sex-positive" approach to prevention in their work with HIV-infected individuals.