Health

Jeffrey Escoffier, Health Official and Scholar of Gay Theory, Dies at 79

And he wrote a lot. Many of his essays, as noted in the preface to his 1998 book “American Homo: Community and Political City,” “the social importance of post-WWII homosexual liberation and its cause. American public life exploring political reactions. “

It involved excavating the history of gay life before Stonewall, along with economic and other aspects. It also included investigating gay porn, how it changed over the decades, and how it was reflected and helped shape the gay identity. His latest collection of essays, published last year, was “Sex, Society, and Pornography: The Subject of Porn Knowledge.”

“Jeffrey Escofier embodies a radical queer intellectual,” said Whitney Strab, an associate professor at Rutgers University in Newark. “Overthrow for profit: the politics of pornography and the rise of new rights.” “(2010) was stated in an email. “Especially, essays such as The Political Economy of the Closet showed how to think and write gay economic history, even if the archives were frequently erased or destroyed. Pioneering research has asked scholars to go beyond text analysis and think about the labor behind the body on the screen. “

Jeffrey Paul Escofier was born October 9, 1942 in Baltimore and grew up in Manhattan and Staten Island. His father, George, was a colonel in the Army, and his mother, Iris (Miller) Wendell, owned an antique store.

“I first experienced homosexuality at the age of 16 in the summer of 1959,” Escofier wrote in “American Homo.” “Then I was hungry for wild adventures. Growing up on Staten Island and noticing my queenness in that sleepy working-class community, I considered Greenwich Village as Shangri-La.”

Escoffier holds a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. He moved to Philadelphia in 1970 and received his PhD in Economic History from the University of Pennsylvania.

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