Charles Ortleb

From AIDS Wiki

Charles Ortleb is an American journalist, novelist, and filmmaker.

Contents 1 Publishing 1.1 New York Native 2 Literature and films 3 Quotes 4 References

Publishing

Ortleb was the publisher of Christopher Street, TheaterWeek, and The New York Native. He was forced out of business around 1997, at the time when the "cocktails" emerged and gained immediate acceptance.

New York Native

Between the years of 1980 and 1996, Ortleb was publisher of the New York Native, which was one of the first publications to question the HIV hypothesis. The Native featured ground-breaking interviews with Peter Duesberg and articles on AZT, nitrite inhalants ("poppers") and AIDS politics by John Lauritsen. It was the Native that first featured Duesberg in 1987 just after his Cancer Research article, and it was also the Native that published Lauritsen's articles on the fraudulent trials that formed the basis for FDA approval of AZT.

During this time, Ortleb also promoted his hypothesis, with Neenyah Ostrom, that AIDS is related to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and both are caused by HHV-6.

Literature and films

Ortleb's first novel was Iron Peter, a work Celia Farber described as the "Animal Farm of the AIDS era". In 1999, he published The Last Lovers on Earth, a collection of short stories. In 2004, he produced and co-directed the film The Last Lovers on Earth, based on three of those stories. In 2000, he published The Closing Argument, a fictional courtroom drama focusing on medical racial profiling.

Quotes

• "Everyone must do their homework on this issue. If you haven’t read books by Duesberg, John Lauritsen, Root-Bernstein, Bialy, Ostrom and Hillary Johnson on issues related to this debate, you are not an informed citizen." (Oxman 2005)
• "Gays assume that scientists and doctors only have their best interests at heart. Hand-in-hand the gays and the government AIDS scientists have been working for a better future for the gay community – all because of the overwhelming love and concern our society has for gay people. Right. And people wonder why I’ve turned to writing satire about the epidemic." (Oxman 2005)
• "We are now living in a time of psychotic science, or abnormal science as I call it. That's why there are no controls in AIDS science, no dissent, why it's all science by press release. These self-appointed AIDS czars pretending to speak for the gay community, pretending to be revolutionaries, pretending to be anti-government when in fact they've always worked hand in hand with the government." (Farber 2004)
• "Being told you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome makes it sound like you should just take a vacation even though your immune system looks like swiss cheese. Being told you have CFS is better than being imprisoned in the AIDS paradigm." (Oxman 2005)

References