Cliff Raven outside Sunset Strip Tattoo in California shortly after buying it from Lyle Tuttle
A screenshot from https://www.luckyfish.com/cliff-raven-in-chicago-2020 reads:
When HIV emerged, studios began refusing homosexual customers, and many gay tattooers left the field. In a letter to Raven, one artist explains feeling relief that police raids closed him down. "I do not fancy working continually with people's BLOOD on my hands in these plague days of anguish and horrible viruses which they... don't know shit about," he says.
His community's palpable anxiety bolstered Raven's commitment to providing a medical-grade sterile environment, and it secured him as a beacon to gay men who wanted ink.
Pat Fish, the last tattooer trained by Raven, recalls him saying three things are necessary to be a good tattoo artist: art, craft, and morals. Part of having morals meant prioritizing clients' health.
"He made me buy an autoclave before he let me buy a tattoo machine," she laughs. This was in 1985. According to her, gloves weren't even industry standard until a doctor led a workshop on it at a tattoo convention in 1986—though Greg James, another tattooer who worked with Raven, says they were slowly becoming common in the early 80s. Raven began wearing them in the late 70s, and he was using an autoclave, the machine hospitals use to sterilize reusable equipment, as early as 1970.
It’s #WorldAIDSDay - Did you know sanitation and barriers are industry standard in tattooing because Cliff Raven, a gay tattooer from Chicago, made sure he could still provide service to his own community as most shops refused to tattoo homosexuals when the AIDS crisis emerged?
