Abstract
Jeffrey Escoffier, who died in New York on May 20, 2022, age 79, was a prolific scholar, teacher, public health advocate, and community builder who published numerous books and articles about homosexuality, sexual revolution, pornography, and dance. He taught one of the nation’s first college courses on LGBT studies, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s.
Escoffier conveyed a passion for sexuality research and theorizing in his writing, teaching, political organizing, and government service. He became involved in radical gay politics when he moved from New York to Philadelphia in 1970 to study at the University of Pennsylvania. There he formed a gay Marxist study group and a gay community newspaper. In the late 1970s in San Francisco, he helped to found the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, organizing early study groups and public presentations on gay and lesbian history and theorizing at a time when such discussions had not yet made their way to American college campuses.
In the article “Sexual Revolution and the Politics of Gay Identity” and the book American Homo: Community and Perversity, Escoffier traced the emergence of gay identity in relation to economic structures and changing cultural scripts. He acknowledged the formative role of sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s empirical studies of human sexual behavior in making homosexual behavior more visible. Escoffier’s interest in the ways identity is shaped by discourse was grounded in a concern for social structure and the power of economic markets. He examined how capitalism’s “affluence and consumption ethic” encouraged sexual freedom, posing a challenge to heteronormativity.
Keenly aware of the nature of intellectual work as a collective enterprise, he was a consummate connector of people, ideas, and institutions. Escoffier was a founder of OUT/LOOK, a national gay and lesbian quarterly that ran from 1988 to 1992, an extraordinary publication which brought academics, activists, writers, and artists together in a rare (and sadly, unparalleled) public intellectual enterprise. A scholar-activist for whom intellectual and political work was always linked, he remained outside of the Academy throughout his career. While appreciative of the growing institutionalization of gay and lesbian studies, as it was then known, he worried that its growing sophistication was leading to obscurantism and sacrificing engagement with broader publics. In 1990, he published the prescient, somewhat controversial article “Inside the Ivory Tower,” which positioned literary-studies-based queer theorists, who were gaining growing academic respectability, against the community-engaged scholarship of his generation.
Yet he retained close ties to academics, especially in the social sciences. He wrote the foreword to sociologist John Gagnon’s collected essays on sexuality studies, An Interpretation of Desire (Chicago, 2004). In the essay, he situated Gagnon (and his coauthor William Simon) in the tradition of empirical sexuality studies that emerged with Kinsey, noting that Gagnon’s work, and the scripting theory he pioneered, was much more centrally concerned with understanding sexuality as an “arena of creative social initiative and symbolic action” (xvi).
Jeffrey was committed to documenting gay sexual life from the 1960s to today, as evidenced by his scholarship on gay pornography and public sex. He wrote that cruising and public sex were the “a priori” of gay social life, emphasizing their important role in the development of urban gay communities. Most scholarly writing on pornography had focused on issues of representation, consumption, and effects on viewers. Jeffrey considered it from the other side of the lens. He was interested in porn as a window to sexual scripts of the culture in which it was produced. He also documented the central role of directors and performers. For instance, he described gay porn of the 1970s as a form of cinema verité which documented the public sex venues and practices of the post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS era. His writings on the contemporary porn industry were based on countless hours of fieldwork spent interviewing producers and performers as well as observing porn movie shoots, both on the gay and straight sides of the industry.
Escoffier joined the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 1995, where he was a communications strategist who led several media campaigns on a variety of health issues, including HIV. Early in his career in public health, he disagreed with the strategy of some government leaders regarding HIV prevention, especially when it came to discouraging promiscuity. Under the pseudonym of P.J. Edwards, he published a book chapter in which he reviewed investigation documents by health inspectors, showing how regulations against bathhouses, adult theaters, and sex clubs in the name of the public health upheld narrow notions of sexual morality and heteronormativity. He devised media campaigns which facilitated sexual health rather than discouraging certain types of behaviors. While working full-time for the health department, he managed to maintain a prolific scholarly career, dedicating most of his weekends and vacation time to writing.
After retiring from his health department position in 2015, he became involved with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a non-profit organization offering critical education in the humanities and social sciences, where he led seminars on sexual revolution, sexual liberation, Marcuse, and Deleuze and Guattari. Additionally, he frequently organized roundtables at various professional meetings and led a seminar series at CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) in 2017 titled “The Age of Promiscuity.” A tireless community builder, for nearly two years beginning in 2016, he hosted a monthly study group for students, scholars, and other writers and artists interested in sexuality, history, and pornography, nicknamed the “tupperware group for perverts.” This group then evolved into a monthly “salon” for anyone interested in discussing “sexuality, politics, philosophy, contemporary culture, the economics of capitalism, pornography, urban design, New York in the 1970s, dance and leftwing politics,” which unfortunately ended shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the last in-person meeting in February 2020, Jeffrey invited attendees to toast “community and perversity!”