Jones, R. (2002) A walk in the park: Frames and positions in AIDS prevention outreach among gay men in China. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (3):575-588. A Walk in the Park: Frames and Positions in AIDS Prevention Outreach among Gay Men in China 1 Rodney H. Jones Department of English and Communication City University of Hong Kong The effectiveness of AIDS prevention messages depends not just on the content of the messages, but also on how they are delivered and the identities that those who deliver them claim for themselves and impute onto their targets. Because of the stigma associated with HIV infection, claims and imputations of identity in HIV/AIDS education and counseling always involve the risk of invoking what Goffman (1963) calls ‘spoiled identities’. Leap (1990, 1995) has noted, for example, how in HIV counseling sessions participants choose features of grammar and discourse to create as much discursive distance as possible between themselves and the virus, and Silverman and Perakyla (Silverman 1994, 1997; Silverman and Perakyla 1990), studying similar counseling situations, have shown how even subtle interactional features like pauses, hedges, and the structure of turn taking act as tools with which participants control the imputation and assumption of identities or ‘risk’ and ‘safety’. This research note considers the interactional demands of an act of AIDS education which, although seemingly simple, is in many ways even more complex than the HIV counseling sessions discussed above: the act of handing an AIDS prevention pamphlet to people in a public place. Whereas in more formal HIV counseling sessions participants generally have a longer time to do their interactional business, targets of the