In an analysis of gender and AIDS, the author assesses safer sex health promotion and health education discourse and considers their unintended consequences for the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Taking a queer/feminist constructionist position, she links issues of power, gender and sexuality and nationalism in an attempt to offer a theoretical foundation for an effective and radical HIV/AIDS health promotion strategy. This text draws on safer sex materials from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Scandinavia and sets current practice against the historical context of VD/STD education, dissecting the role played by STDs in the cultural construction of gender. Wilton debates the meanings that erotic minorities read into bodies and desires, and how these have been transformed by AIDS, and suggests a model of pornography that disengages the sexually explicit and/or erotically arousing from gendered power relations. The study suggests an approach to the development of effective safer sex promotional strategies based on thinking in health promotion and on the insights of both radical feminism and Queer Theory.