“Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” was a political art action that manipulated advertising and media strategies in order to reach a broad audience with information about AIDS. The image was intentionally designed to resemble a well known clothing industry ad campaign. 

Emerging from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1988, Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members. When Gran Fury’s work first appeared plastered prominently over Chicago’s public spaces in 1990, its purpose was to combat the panic-circulated myth that the human immunodeficiency virus could be transmitted through saliva. The posters and billboards were routinely defaced: a growing and pervasive narrative positioning HIV as a threatening epidemic ‘fuelled by gay promiscuity’ led city inhabitants in anger to cross out all the kissing figures within two days. 

The overt messaging of Kissing Doesn’t Kill overlays a more subtle, embedded communication: that queerness is and was also joy, even amid the chaotic emergence of AIDS.
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https://www.afterall.org/articles/gran-fury-read-my-lips/