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To mark World AIDS Day (1 December 2025), join us at Rideau Building for a talk by Dr. Santiago Perez Patrigeon on their HIV/AIDS research.
Since Silence=Death was first pasted on the walls of New York in 1987, posters have been powerful artistic tools for HIV/AIDS advocacy. Hotline features over forty posters produced by public services, community groups and pharmaceutical companies, from the very local to the international, from the late 1980s to 2010s. These were accumulated over the years by Trellis HIV & Community Care in Kingston.
These posters leverage compelling visual strategies to communicate HIV/AIDS awareness, 2SLGBTQ+ activism, sex positivity, community support and health promotion, as well as key events, such as the Campaign to End AIDS and World AIDS Day. From pre-internet posters, which provided discrete hotline phone numbers, to the 2014 Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me! poster, which provoked extensive social media commentary, posters lie at the vital intersection of public affirmation and private consumption. Though from the past, they are important reminders—even more crucial today in the face of politicized cuts to research and aid projects—that HIV continues to impact lives and communities.
Please know that some posters contain explicit, consensual sexual content.
In response to the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Canada, Kingston AIDS Project (KAP) was founded in 1988 by a group of community-minded advocates to provide education about HIV/AIDS as well as support to people with, at risk of, or affected by HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted bloodborne infections (STBBIs) in the Kingston area. The group called for broader social change to reduce stigma and discrimination. KAP became HIV/AIDS Regional Services (HARS) in 1992 to reflect a growing scope of services to the counties of Hastings and Prince Edward; Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington; and Leeds, Grenville and Lanark. In 2022 HARS was renamed Trellis HIV & Community Care. Trellis’s collection of over 500 posters was donated to Queen’s University Archives to form an integral part of the larger Kingston and area 2SLGBTQ+ archives, initiated in 2011, by Janice McAlpine and Renée van Weringh, in recognition of a need to document and support the region’s queer histories and communities.
