The AIDS Cult: Essays on the gay health crisis

by John Lauritsen (Editor), Ian Young (Editor)

This is the first book to deal comprehensively with the real reasons gay men are becoming sick in ways that are called AIDS. The editors, John Lauritsen and Ian Young, and the other six contributors to The AIDS Cult examine psychological and cultural issues the ways religious intolerance, group fantasies, toxic rugs, pharmaceutical propaganda, deadly counselling, and a Cult of Doom have acted together to destroy the health of gay men. In his Introduction Ian Young writes: The orthodox view of our protracted health crisis as a highly infectious contagion from without has been found wanting.... we must seek the causes of this and other medical dilemmas in our own society, our own assumptions, our group-fantasies, our regimens, our recreations, and our rituals.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Beginning in 1966, John Lauritsen 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 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, of which he later became a National Director. 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.