Gran Fury emerged from ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the now-influential activist group who sought to combat governmental negligence of the blooming AIDS catastrophe at both policy and societal level. 2 The adoption of this narrative during the emergence of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome as a global health crisis in the early 1980s tore gashes into the hard-won, tentatively liberalising US attitudes towards homosexuality at the time. The posters and billboards were routinely defaced: a growing and pervasive narrative positioning HIV as a threatening epidemic ‘fuelled by gay promiscuity’ 1 led city inhabitants in anger to cross out all the kissing figures within two days. When Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do first appeared plastered prominently over Chicago’s public spaces in 1990, its purpose was to combat the panic-circulated myth that the human immunodeficiency virus could be transmitted through saliva. Installation view at Auto Italia, London (2018).
Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989).