[5] In 1983, Larry Kramer wrote a famous impassioned front page piece for the Native, entitled "1,112 and Counting", which was published on March 14, 1983.

From a profile on Larry Kramer in the New Yorker, published in 2002: "... it was a five-thousand-word screed that accused nearly everyone connected with health care in America—officials at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in Manhattan, and local politicians (particularly Mayor Ed Koch)—of refusing to acknowledge the implications of the nascent AIDS epidemic.

"[6][7][8] In his piece, Kramer said: "If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this Earth.

An interview with Barry Deeprose reveals his first interactions with AIDS, how he only was able to access information from newspapers, specifically the New York Native, and how Public Health Canada neglected to discuss it.

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.

[1] 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.

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 had enjoyed a large LGBT readership ever since—although it had a reputation for having an anti-gay slant in the late 1950s and early 1960s prior to the Stonewall Riots.