My dissertation centers an established and emerging cohort of black queer contemporary visual artists and writers who articulate how blackness is historically constructed as a signal for erotic danger through a host of aesthetic strategies in order to argue for risk-taking as a mode of erotic liberation. Drawing on archival research, interviews with contemporary artists, and close readings of visual and literary objects, my project is the first to address the persistence of the HIV/AIDS crisis as it traverses time and space in the work of black queer cultural producers. Building upon recent interventions in the fields of Black Queer Studies, Art History, Literary Studies, and Film and Media Studies, I argue that black queer visual artists disrupt and expand upon a version of sexual risk-taking in (white) queer studies that is claimed as the vanguard of radical queer practice. Over four chapters, Immoral Panics considers how black gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and trans filmmakers, painters, and poets represent blackness as a sign of erotic risk in its shifting historical proximity to debates surrounding consent, ungendering, andthe HIV/AIDS crisis. Beginning in 1976 and concluding in 2018 the project, first, reveals the coconstitution of blackness and queerness as sexually excessive contagions by the state through proceeding generations and, second, marks the HIV/AIDS crisis as always already racialized and ongoing in the lives of black queers who now bear the structural brunt of queer radicalism. In Chapter One, I argue that consent within queer pleasure is haunted by the violence of the law and the afterlife of slavery through a reading of the rarely cited archive of the 1976 police raid at the Mark IV Bathhouse during a white male BDSM slave auction and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s The Attendant (1993), produced in response to the AIDS crisis. In Chapter Two, I articulate how the initial moral panic regarding AIDS built upon the anti-black surveillance of skin color through attentive readings of the journals of late black gay writer Gary Fisher and the abstract paintings of Mark Bradford as they both pay sustained formal attention to society’s demeaning interest in AIDS-related cancer Kaposi’s Sarcoma. In Chapter Three, I argue that the disorientation experienced by black queers as they interface with queer public sex institutions, blamed for the spread of the virus, serves as a productive affective model for both inhabiting and critiquing queer risk and pleasure through close readings of the works of late black gay poet Essex Hemphill from 1992, London-based Indian gay photographer Sunil Gupta from 1999, and black lesbian filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden in 2017. In Chapter Four, I demonstrate how a cohort of black nonbinary, queer, and trans contemporary painters and poets, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Danez Smith, and jayy dodd, play with and rearrange risky images and signifiers of black masculinity, as a form of pleasurable world-making under the specter of the virus.