John Lauritsen: Writer, Publisher, Survey Research Analyst.
AB Harvard 1963. Residence: Dorchester (part of Boston), Massachusetts. Website: http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl
John Lauritsen was born and raised in Nebraska. He attended Harvard College, majoring in Social Relations (an interdisciplinary major comprising Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology). Beginning in 1966, he established a career as a market research executive and analyst. But he also has been a gay activist and scholar since the earliest days of the gay liberation movement.
In July 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, of which he later became a National Director. He was a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Homosexualities.
In 1982 he founded Pagan Press, a small book press, with the mandate of publishing “books of interest to the intelligent gay man.” “Pagan” here denotes “the culture of Classical Antiquity”.
With the advent of the gay health crisis in the early 1980s, Lauritsen became an investigative journalist and a leading AIDS critic. His first major AIDS article, “CDC's Tables Obscure AIDS-Drugs Connection”, was published in Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985. His main outlet was then the New York Native, which from 1985 to 1996 published over 50 of his articles. These 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 News (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, Norwegian, and numerous Asian and Slavic languages.
BOOKS
(Co-authored with David Thorstad) The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (1974, Second Revised Edition 1995). This seminal work — a best seller by the standard of a serious, nonfiction, small press book — uncovered the forgotten history of the gay movement of the 19th and the early 20th century. A digital edition is in preparation.
(Editor) Edward Carpenter, Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1982).
(Editor) John Addington Symonds, Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and other writings (1983).
(Co-authored with Hank Wilson) Death Rush: Poppers [Nitrite Inhalants] and AIDS (1986). Out-of-print but available online as a free pdf book. Mostly annotated medical journal articles, which describe the serious toxicities of the premier drug among gay men.
Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story (1990). Four printings sold out. Available online as a free pdf book.
The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (1993). The AIDS War and Poison By Prescription were both best sellers by small press standards (above).
(Co-edited with Ian Young) The AIDS Cult: Essays on the gay health crisis (1997). Essays on how psychological as well as toxic causes were making gay men sick in ways that would be diagnosed as “AIDS”.
A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love (1998). Lauritsen has stated that it took him over a decade to write a book this short (96 pages). Written in an almost aphoristic style, A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love is “a celebration and defence of male love from a secular humanist perspective”. Its opening paragraph lays out his leading thesis:
This
is the story of how a form of love, highly esteemed in Classical
Antiquity, fell under a religious taboo — how as a result its
practitioners suffered dishonor, imprisonment, torture, and
death. It is about a crippling of the male psyche through the
twin forces of superstition and tyranny.
(Editor) Plato: The Banquet translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley (2001). Although Shelley's translation of Plato's Dialogue on Love, The Banquet (or Symposium) is a masterpiece of English as well as world literature, it was suppressed and then bowdlerized for well over a century. This edition represents the first time Shelley's translation has been available as a work in its own right, complete and unbowdlerized, along with his introductory essay, “A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks”.
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (2007). Three main theses: 1) Frankenstein is a great work, which has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted; 2) The real author is Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his second wife, the former Mary Godwin; and 3) male love is a central theme.
(Editor) (Aeschylus) Oresteia: The Medwin-Shelley Translation (2011). A masterful translation of the greatest play in world literature.
(Editor) (Aeschylus) Prometheus Bound (tr. Thomas Medwin & Percy Bysshe Shelley) + Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) (2011).
The Shelley-Byron Men: Lost Angels of a ruined paradise (2017). Male love in the lives and works of Shelley, Byron, and the circle of men around them.
(Editor) Lord Byron (allonym): Don Leon & Leon to Annabella (2017). The first and only scholarly edition of a great epic poem, which is also a powerful outcry against Britain's “buggery” statute, under which men and even boys were being hanged for having sex with each other.