Iron Peter: A Year in the Mythopoetic Life of New York City: A Novel

by Charles Ortleb

A satirical novel about a beautiful gay man who comes to New York City to try and save the gay community from being destroyed by the lies the government is telling about AIDS. Iron Peter is spiritually the son of Iron John. His mission is comic, mythical, and tragic. It may be the only novel ever written that dares to tell the truth about the politics and science of "AIDS." From December, 1980 until 1997, Charles Ortleb was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of New York Native which Wikipedia describes as "the only gay paper in New York during the early part of the AIDS epidemic" which "pioneered reporting on the AIDS epidemic when others ignored it." On May 18, 1981, New York Native published the world's very first report on the disease that would become known as AIDS. In his book, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts described the New York Native coverage of the epidemic as being "singularly thorough" and "voluminous." In Rolling Stone, David Black said that New York Native deserved a Pulitzer prize for its AIDS coverage. In an interview in New York Press, Nicholas Regush, a producer for ABC News and a reporter for Montreal Gazette, said that New York Native did "an astounding job" in its coverage of AIDS and credited it with "educating him early on." In a profile on me titled "The Outsider" in Rolling Stone in 1988, Katie Leishman wrote that "It is undeniable that many major AIDS stories were Ortleb's months and sometimes years before mainstream journalists took them up. Behind the scenes he exercises an enormous unacknowledged influence on the coverage of the medical story of the century." The writers and journalists who appeared in New York Native from 1981-1996 often made history. Larry Kramer's famous essay, "1112 and Counting," which helped launch the AIDS activist movement, was published in New York Native in 1983. John Lauritsen's investigative articles on AZT, the toxic AIDS drug that killed thousands of gay men, are still considered by many to be some of the best journalism published during the epidemic. The New York Native was such an important journal of record on AIDS that in 1984 the director of the CDC went out of his way to inform New York Native's medical reporter about the discovery of the so-called AIDS retrovirus before any other publication in America. In addition to pioneering the coverage of AIDS, New York Native was the only publication in the world to have a reporter, Neenyah Ostrom, who provided weekly coverage of the emergence of the epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome and its scientific and political relationship to AIDS. Hillary Johnson, in her groundbreaking history of chronic fatigue syndrome, Osler's Web, wrote that "Ortleb, in fact, increasingly suspected the AIDS outbreak was merely a modest subset of the more pervasive, immune-damaging epidemic disease claiming heterosexuals--chronic fatigue syndrome." The news about chronic fatigue syndrome these days seems to suggest that much of New York Native's controversial take on the relationship between AIDS, HHV-6 and chronic fatigue syndrome is being vindicated.

150 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 25, 2012

Reviews

[EMM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Iron Peter is a novel of information vs. misinformation. It serves up a different way of looking at AIDS PR especially if you grew up exclusively with the party line on the subject. This satire takes on those fighting AIDS in whatever form. The top scientists that try to treat it and those who try to prevent its spread are cast as villains. The book is amusing, clever, and sometimes quite funny. At other times it misses the mark as any satire of some length is bound to do. Whatever its shortcomings, they don't have to be suffered for long. This is not a novel that dwells. It's a satisfying read which is occasionally very funny but ultimately fittingly sad.

[Terry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having spent the better part of a fortnight trying to get to grips with this book, I finally reached the end after skim reading the last couple of months (chapters). As you may realise I did not find it an easy read, something definitely wrong with the writing style or maybe how it is put together I am not entirely sure.
Written in 1998 as others have pointed out, it is a satire on how the outbreak was dealt with by the American government in particular and how the gay community was regarded as no big loss to society and how (maybe) unsafe drugs were used on AIDS patients as guinea pigs. For me the novel was too ambitious and few authors in the world could have tackled the subject/premise to produce a well rounded, readable and accessible book. Apologies to the author but personally I found it a heroic failure.
One Star.