The Last Lovers on Earth is the first collection of short stories by Charles Ortleb. The stories capture the precarious position of gay people in America today. With unprecedented insight, Ortleb uses humor to tell painful truths about where the gay community has been and where it is headed. Three stories from the collection were the basis of the hilarious and disturbing independent film, The Last Lovers on Earth.
About the Author: From 1981 until 1997, Charles Ortleb was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of New York Native, described by Wikipedia as "the only gay paper in New York during the early part of the AIDS epidemic" which "pioneered reporting on the AIDS epidemic when others ignored it." On May 18, 1981, New York Native published the world's very first report on the disease that would become known as AIDS. In his bestseller, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts described the New York Native coverage of the epidemic as being "singularly thorough" and "voluminous." In Rolling Stone, David Black said that New York Native deserved a Pulitzer prize for its AIDS coverage. In an interview in New York Press, Nicholas Regush, a producer for ABC News and a reporter for Montreal Gazette, said that New York Native did "an astounding job" in its coverage of AIDS and credited it with "educating him early on." In a profile titled "The Outsider" in Rolling Stone in 1988, Katie Leishman wrote that "It is undeniable that many major AIDS stories were Ortleb's months and sometimes years before mainstream journalists took them up. Behind the scenes he exercises an enormous unacknowledged influence on the coverage of the medical story of the century." The writers and journalists who appeared in New York Native from 1981-1996 often made history. Larry Kramer's famous essay, "1112 and Counting," which helped launch the AIDS activist movement, was published in New York Native in 1983. John Lauritsen's investigative articles on AZT, the toxic AIDS drug that killed thousands of gay men, are still considered by many to be some of the best journalism published during the epidemic. The New York Native was such an important journal of record on AIDS that in 1984 the director of the CDC went out of his way to inform New York Native about the discovery of the so-called AIDS retrovirus before any other publication in America. In addition to pioneering the coverage of AIDS, New York Native was the only publication in the world to have a reporter, Neenyah Ostrom, who provided weekly coverage of the emergence of the epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome and its scientific and political relationship to AIDS. Hillary Johnson, in her groundbreaking history of chronic fatigue syndrome, Osler's Web, wrote that "Ortleb, in fact, increasingly suspected the AIDS outbreak was merely a modest subset of the more pervasive, immune-damaging epidemic disease claiming heterosexuals--chronic fatigue syndrome."