Because of its clinical and epidemiological features, the AIDS epidemic raises a troublesome tension between the communal welfare and constitutional rights and civil liberties. The closing of bathhouses, measures to ensure the safety of the blood supply, testing and reporting/notification policies, compulsory screening, and isolation of those infected with the human immunodeficiency virus can be analyzed in terms of the politics of privacy, safety, identification, exclusion, and control, respectively. Social, legal, historical and political factors are considered that render ineffective coercive Government measures such as mandatory testing, quarantine, antisodomy laws, or barring infected children from the classroom. Such authoritarian policies work only to antagonize and alienate those whose cooperation is most essential to implementing public health measures to control AIDS. It is argued that the only effective way to control AIDS is through a strategy that will modify the private behaviors of both the infected and the uninfected. This strategy, grounded in the politics of persuasion, is a truly forceful and collective public information and education campaign that fosters a culture of restraint, responsibility, and concern for the communal welfare. Chapter notes and index.