John Lauritsen

John Lauritsen (5 March 1939 – 5 March 2022) was a gay rights activist, journalist and author.

Lauritsen was born and raised in Nebraska. 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. In 1982, he founded his own imprint, Pagan Press (paganpressbooks.com).

With the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, Lauritsen became a prominent critic of then pharmaceutical treatments.

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.

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. The claim was supported by Camille Paglia.

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. 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. Provided by Wikipedia