about HIV and the kind of public health there could have been:
ATL: in a press conference, Dr. Koop says, And we have to get past the idea that anal sex is only for gay men and straight women and only means penetration. Plenty of people, both gay and straight, both men and women, enjoy anal eroticism of various types. For example, I heard a sex educator recently say he and his partner enjoy teasing and pre-entering. I say, more power to them. And plenty of people don't particularly care for anal eroticism and that's perfectly normal, too. Both are normal.
That would have been something! A big bear of a Dutch Calvinist talking this way. I'm not sure Dr. C. Everett Koop even said the words "anal sex" out loud. If he did, it was just a mention and not any kind of preaching like the above.
I do remember a phrase in a commercial: barring abstinence, the best defense is the use of a condom.
This was either a condom company commercial or a public health commercial which seemed to run for a couple of months.
In the late Reagan years [1988], there was a pamphlet on HIV and AIDS mailed to every single household in America. It was really kind of remarkable.
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/QQ/p-nid/87
In 1988, he mailed a congressionally-mandated information brochure on AIDS to every American household. As he recollected, during this period "AIDS took over my life." Through his report and his many speeches and interviews on AIDS Koop did more than any other public official to shift the terms of the public debate over AIDS from the moral politics of homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use, practices through which AIDS was spread, to concern with the medical care, economic position, and civil rights of AIDS sufferers. Similarly, Koop promoted redefining the prevalent scientific model of the disease, from a contagion akin to bubonic plague, yellow fever, and other deadly historic epidemics that required the strongest public health measures--mandatory testing and quarantine of carriers--to a chronic disease that was amenable to long-term management with drugs and behavioral changes.
And here is actual 8-page brochure:
PDF -->
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/QQBDRL.pdf
Este folleto sobre el SIDA se publica en Español.
Para solicitor una copia, llame al 1-800 . . .