Sullivan then explained that his site is maintained and managed by fantascope.com, the parent company for andrewsullivan.com, and that there is a strict wall between the editorial and financial arms of the business. But given that the primary property of andrewsullivan.com is Andrew Sullivan, that's akin to Martha Stewart disavowing herself from a business decision made by Martha Stewart Living or the line of K-Mart housewares named after her. In a later e-mail, Sullivan dismissed the characterization. "As to the Martha Stewart point, I don't think she thinks that every ad contract her magazine gets is a personal pay-off. It's a business. Does Mort Zuckerman [publisher of U.S. News and World Report and the New York Daily News] or Marty Peretz [owner of the New Republic] treat advertising in their magazines as personal remuneration? I doubt it. Loads of people own media outlets. But those media outlets are not synonymous with them.

"This is a completely new issue because this is a completely new phenomenon: me-zines. They're both a magazine and a person. In some ways, andrewsullivan.com is a broadcast company. I own it but it isn't me. Yet its brand is me. ... I wish I were Martha Stewart. But then I guess many gay men feel that way," he quipped.

Still, Sullivan goes further in distancing himself from the PhRMA deal by pointing out that his webmaster negotiates all business deals -- and that webmaster Robert Cameron disclosed the deal to the New York Times "before it was even completed." He also told Salon that the money would only have gone toward the maintenance of the site. "A salary is a long way off," he wrote in an e-mail.

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Sullivan, who is HIV positive, is undergoing treatment with the anti-retroviral cocktail drugs that have been at the core of the access-to-drugs controversy in Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. He has long praised the pharmaceutical industry in print, but had he not dropped the PhRMA sponsorship, and had he continued to rally behind the industry on his Web site, it would have been increasingly difficult for him to argue that he wasn't, in fact, a paid pharma flack.

This isn't the first time Sullivan has been criticized for his writings about AIDS and gay issues. Sullivan became the subject of the chattering classes in May after a New York gay publication accused Sullivan of soliciting unprotected gay sex on the Internet, and argued that his sexual proclivities seemed to contradict the preachiness of his widely respected writings on gay themes. To his critics, Sullivan had crossed the line and committed hypocrisy at a time when, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control reports, HIV infection rates are on the rise among young gay men in the U.S. To their critics, it was an egregious violation of Sullivan's privacy.

But it's Sullivan's writing on the global AIDS crisis and his open bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry that has been a lightning rod for criticism. The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Sullivan last October in which he wrote: "Here's an unfashionable romance: I love America's pharmaceutical companies," he wrote. "I asked my pharmacist the other day to tote up my annual bill (which my insurance mercifully pays): $15,600, easily more than I pay separately for housing, food, travel or clothes," he wrote. "Whether we like it or not, these private entities have our lives in their hands. And we can either be grown-ups and acknowledge this or be infantile and scapegoat them. They're not 'powerful forces,' penalizing America's 'working families.' They're entrepreneurs trying to make money by saving lives. By and large, they succeed in both. Every morning I wake up and feel fine, I'm thankful that they do."

The piece prompted the Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts to write, "Shilling for the drug industry in the Times is the equivalent of giving a blow job in Macy's window, and Sullivan left nothing to the imagination," and pointed out an unfortunate juxtaposition in the magazine. "Given the synergy between his viewpoint and the industry's, could it have been a coincidence that Sullivan's essay appeared in the same issue of the Times Magazine as a 17-page ad supplement from PhRMA?" Moss, however, told Cotts that Sullivan's "Pro Pharma" column, and the PhRMA ad were "totally unrelated."

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