New York Native - Controversy and Demise

Controversy and Demise

In a New York Times article on the demise of the New York Native, Charles Ortleb, the magazine's publisher and editor, said that he was shutting down due to financial problems, but he conceded that the paper failed largely due its controversial AIDS coverage. After its initial and pioneering success in making the gay community aware of the AIDS crisis, the paper later became unpopular for promoting conspiracy theories about AIDS and its causes, including the claim that HIV did not cause AIDS. The gay activist group ACT UP boycotted the publication in the mid 1980s. While there was initially some support for the Native's criticism of the governmental and scientific response to the AIDS epidemic, it eroded as Ortleb and the paper endorsed increasingly unlikely alternatives to HIV as the cause of AIDS. The cultural critic and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp wrote in 1987 that "...rather than performing a political analysis of the ideology of science, Ortleb merely touts the crackpot theory of the week, championing whoever is the latest outcast from the world of academic and government research.", p. 101 The paper's circulation consequently fell from 20,000 in 1985 to 8,000 in 1996.

Another contributing factor is that New York City, with an LGBT community that was often fractious and bitterly divided along gender, age and racial lines, has a long history of being a graveyard for gay publications. Among those that have come and gone include Gaysweek (which was sued out of existence in 1979 by Newsweek magazine for trademark infringement), the New York City News (1980–83) QW (1991–1992), OutWeek (1989–1991), the New York Blade (which was actually the New York edition of the Washington Blade) (1997–2009), and LGNY (now Gay City News, the city's only surviving LGBT newspaper, 1995–present).

All of these publications also had to compete with the Village Voice, a citywide weekly alternative newspaper that extensively covered the 1969 Stonewall Riots that are credited as the birth of the modern gay liberation movement, and has enjoyed a large LGBT readership ever since – although it ironically had a reputation for having an anti-gay slant in the late 1950s and early 1960s prior to the Stonewall Riots. The Voice still publishes an annual Gay Pride issue in June.