Activists were spreading safe sex advice before HIV even had a name
A year before HIV was isolated, San Francisco's branch of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence handed out a pamphlet called Play Fair! urging condoms, testing and personal responsibility. In May 1983, the month the virus was named in France, two New York activists published similar guidance. Much of it is still standard advice today.
Ways to dodge syphilis and gonorrhoea are centuries old, and the phrase safe sex existed in English by the 1930s, but its meaning of cutting infection risk dates from the mid-1980s AIDS crisis in the United States. The New York booklet, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, came out in 1983; the term reached professional literature in 1984 and The New York Times a year later, when specialists were telling patients to limit partners and use prophylactics. In 1986 campaigns widened from gay men to the general public, including college students, and the first book on the subject, Safe Sex in the Age of AIDS, ran to 88 pages.
Many health workers in Canada and the United States now prefer safer sex, stressing that risk runs along a continuum and never quite reaches zero, while usage in Britain, Australia and New Zealand keeps the older wording. Most contraceptives offer no protection against infections, and some infection-reducing habits do nothing to prevent pregnancy. A 2006 survey found 68% of respondents defined safe sex as condom use, with smaller shares naming abstinence or monogamy.
Condoms are effective but imperfect. One study put their reduction of HIV transmission at 85% to 95%, with slippage, breakage and misuse making anything higher unlikely, and warned that patchy use could drag real-world protection down to 60–70%. Oil-based lubricants can weaken latex. In 1997 the US Catholic bishops issued guidelines that listed condoms, and two years later the Vatican rebuked them in favour of chastity and heterosexual marriage.
Drugs have changed the picture. Pre-exposure prophylaxis, most often a single pill combining tenofovir and emtricitabine sold as Truvada, has proved over 90% effective at stopping HIV passing between partners in numerous studies, though it does nothing against other infections or pregnancy; in 2025 an injection lasting six months was approved. People with HIV whose treatment keeps the virus undetectable cannot pass it on sexually, the idea behind the slogan Undetectable equals Untransmittable. Vaccines against hepatitis B and HPV add further protection.
Source: Safe sex
