This poster was part of Talk About AIDS, a campaign launched under the Center for Disease Control’s national initiative America Responds to AIDS (ARTA). Introduced in 1987, ARTA marked the federal government’s first coordinated attempt to educate the general public about HIV/AIDS. Framed around family and emotional intimacy, Talk About AIDS targeted heterosexual, middle-class Americans—especially white men—with indirect appeals to responsibility, echoing the messaging common in the drug education campaigns of organizations like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) in the 1980s and ’90s. Such materials were widely distributed in schools and community centers, contributing to the fact that a generation of children—particularly in suburban and rural areas—grew up with a distorted understanding of the risk that HIV actually posed to them. Critics, especially from activist groups like ACT UP and People With Aids Coalition (PWAC), condemned the campaign’s euphemistic tone and its focus on mainstream audiences at the expense of those at highest risk, most especially gay men, sex workers, and people who used drugs. While it expanded the public conversation about AIDS, campaigns like this one simultaneously diluted the urgency of the situation and misdirected the public’s understanding of HIV/AIDS risks. This poster embodies a national strategy that chose political palatability over truth-telling.