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Short abstract

By tracing the print assemblages of European gay porn magazines published between 1970 and 2000, the paper demonstrates how making and doing across time could benefit from attending to the erotic as sites where HIV epidemic, public health, and queer politics are co-produced.

Long abstract

This paper engages with the panel's provocation to explore how transdisciplinary STS can "make and do" across time by attending to the past through a curated selection of gay erotic and pornographic magazines published in Poland and the United Kingdom between 1970 and 2000. I argue that these publications functioned not merely as sites of sexual fantasy but as active public health artifacts, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis and sexual health. In doing so, I respond to the call for 'Queering STS' (Ledin, 2024), deploying queer studies and STS traditions to offer perspective to how we might attend to the past as negotiated through porn and erotic press.

Specifically, I engage with the 'Queering STS' proposition that brings forward desire, passion, pleasure, and affection as analytical categories, situating them within the contexts of the HIV epidemic, risk, public health, and state response. I approach the data generated by these publications not solely as textual but also as material—attending to how paper, ink, photographs, and circulation networks participated in the making of queer worlds across time. I am therefore particularly interested in the material dimensions that these texts enact: how they translate transnational biomedical knowledge into local contexts, and how they enact forms of sexual citizenship that operate across and against the East/West divide.