John Lauritsen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Lauritsen (5 March 1939 – 5 March 2022) was a gay rights activist, journalist and author.[1][2][3][4][5]
Lauritsen was born and raised in Nebraska.[6] He received a baccalaureate degree from Harvard College in 1963, and spent most of his life as a market research analyst. Following his retirement, he became a full-time writer and publisher.[7] In 1982, he founded his own imprint, Pagan Press (paganpressbooks.com).[8][9][6]
With the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, Lauritsen became a prominent critic of then pharmaceutical treatments.[6][5]
His articles appeared in the New York Native, Gay Books Bulletin, Gay News (London), Civil Liberties Review, The Freethinker (London), Journal of Homosexuality, Christopher Street, Gay & Lesbian Humanist, and Gay & Lesbian Review.[6]
Lauritsen gained scholarly prominence by his claim, in the book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, and academic articles, that the novel Frankenstein had been underrated and misinterpreted; that its central theme was male love; and that the real author was Percy Bysshe Shelley.[7] The claim was supported by Camille Paglia.[10]
He also believed biographers had falsified the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and those of their circle (Thomas Medwin, Edward John Trelawny and Edward Ellerker Williams); that the group had been drawn together by their sexual affinities, and their homosexuality had been historically suppressed.[11][12] This theory he outlined in his book The Shelley-Byron Men: Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise.
Lauritsen died suddenly on his 83rd birthday at his home in Dorchester, Massachusetts.[9][13]
