JEFFREY ESCOFFIER, born on this date, (d: 2022); Escoffier was an American author, activist, and media strategist. He was a research associate at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He has taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Davis), Barnard College, The New School, and Rutgers University, Newark. He lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. 

Escoffier earned his undergraduate degree at St. John’s College, Annapolis, before doing his graduate work at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He was the director of health media and marketing for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 1999 to 2015. Escoffier was an active participant in the LGBT community in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York City. 

In 1970 he moved to Philadelphia where he pursued his doctoral studies in economic history at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1972 he co-founded and served on the editorial board of The Gay Alternative, a gay and lesbian cultural magazine. In 1977 he moved to San Francisco, where he co-founded the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. In 1978 he joined the editorial board of Socialist Review, a democratic socialistic journal, and served as its executive editor from 1980 to 1988.

In 1988 Escoffier co-founded OUT/LOOK: A National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, one of the first joint lesbian and gay cultural ventures. Starting in 1990, OUT/LOOK sponsored, under Escoffier’s leadership, a series of conferences called OutWrite that brought together over 1,200 LGBT writers from across the U.S. These conferences brought together several notable writers such as Judy Grahn, Allen Ginsberg, Cherrie Moraga, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and Essex Hemphill. In the wake of the OutWrite conferences, he worked as a literary agent for lesbian and gay authors across the Bay Area.

Escoffier served on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York from 1992 to 1995 and then from 2010 to 2013. He was the director of the CLAGS Project on Families, Values, and Public School Curriculum.

In 1995 he joined the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as the deputy director of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health. In 2000 he became the director of Health Media and Marketing and held that position until his retirement in August 2015. There he supervised the department’s media and public education campaigns on several topics, including smoking cessation, HIV prevention and testing, anti-obesity, ebola, influenza, and immunization.

Escoffier wrote voluminously. Many of his essays, as he put it in the introduction to “American Homo: Community and Perversity,” his 1998 book, “explore the social significance of homosexual emancipation since the end of World War II and the political reaction that it has precipitated in American public life.”

That included excavating the pre-Stonewall history of gay life, along with economic and other aspects of it. It also included examining gay pornography, how it had changed over the decades and how it had both reflected and helped to shape gay identity. His most recent essay collection, published last year, was “Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge.” Escoffier was also co-editor of a book about dance and wrote a biography of John Maynard Keynes. 

Escoffier died in Brooklyn in May 2022, aged 79, from complications of a fall.