John Lauritsen

John Lauritsen: Writer, Publisher, Survey Research Analyst. AB Harvard 1963.

Beginning in 1966, John Lauritsen established a career as a market research executive and analyst. He also has been a gay activist and scholar since the earliest days of the gay liberation movement. In the summer of 1969 he joined the Gay Liberation Front, and edited Come Out!, the first publication of the post-Stonewall gay movement. He joined the Gay Activists Alliance in 1974, and served as Delegate-At-Large. And in the same year he joined the Gay Academic Union. He was a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Homosexualities.

With the advent of the gay health crisis in the early 80s, Lauritsen became an investigative journalist and a leading "AIDS critic" (one who rejects the official AIDS model, including the HIV-Causes-AIDS hypothesis). His main outlet was the New York Native, which from 1985 to 1996 published over 50 of his articles. These articles have been described by the leading science and medical correspondent of the Sunday Times (London) as "the most trenchantly informative, irreverent, funny and tragic writing of the AIDS years" (Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, London 1996).

In addition to the Native, John Lauritsen's articles have appeared in publications as diverse as Gay Books Bulletin, Gay Times (London), Civil Liberties Review, The Freethinker (London), Journal of Homosexuality, Christopher Street, Gay & Lesbian Humanist, Gay & Lesbian Review, Bio/Technology, and The Lancet. His writings have been translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian.

Books

The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (Co-authored with David Thorstad, New York 1974; Second Revised Edition, Ojai, California 1995). This seminal work, continuously in print since 1974, uncovered the forgotten history of the gay movement of the 19th and the early 20th century.
Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings (New York 1983). (Editor) John Addington Symonds,
Death Rush: Poppers [Nitrite Inhalants] and AIDS (Co-authored with Hank Wilson, New York 1986).
Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story (New York 1990).
The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (New York 1993).
The AIDS Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis (Co-edited with Ian Young, Provincetown 1997).
A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love (Provincetown 1998).
(Editor) Plato: The Banquet translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley (Provincetown 2001).
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. (2007)