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Death Rush: Poppers And AIDS
Paperback
Published January 1, 1986
25 people want to read
About the author
John Lauritsen
17 books9 followersBeginning 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.
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.
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July 19, 2023Highly recommend people read Adam Zmith's Deep Sniff, where he references this text and does a very efficient analysis of it as a product of a time filled with panic and an ever-present fear of death within the gay community. A lot of these theories and the science within have been either disproven or were never proven in the first place - just by the language in the bibliography you can see there's a lot of 'maybes' being thrown around in studies being treated as abject truth, and we know now how wrong a lot of these theories were.
Again, recommend Zmith's work, and I'm glad I read this to get a greater understanding of what this period of time was like in parts of the community, and identifying how this kind of rhetoric continues to repeat itself now. It's not a piece of work intended to be malicious, but was spread as a way of protecting the community, and reading more on the topic is very helpful as it helps you parse misinformation-with-good-intentions from things that are spread to cause harm and stoke a moral panic against vulnerable communities.
Again, recommend Zmith's work, and I'm glad I read this to get a greater understanding of what this period of time was like in parts of the community, and identifying how this kind of rhetoric continues to repeat itself now. It's not a piece of work intended to be malicious, but was spread as a way of protecting the community, and reading more on the topic is very helpful as it helps you parse misinformation-with-good-intentions from things that are spread to cause harm and stoke a moral panic against vulnerable communities.
Displaying 1 of 1 review