![]() In the late 1970s, Jeffrey moved to San Francisco, where he joined the founding cohort of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, which also included Allan Bérubé, Amber Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin, and other important thinkers of the queer left. Toward a Materialist History of Sexuality By 1976, when he put up a poster for a gay Marxist study group, only one person attended. Escoffier cobbled together one issue of Gay People in the Labor Force in 1974, and it might have been a landmark periodical, had anyone read it. ![]() Being a gay Marxist could be lonely.Īs the feverish burst of post-Stonewall radicalism subsided in the face of a more reformist gay and lesbian politics, being a gay Marxist could be lonely. A long 1975 article on Oscar Wilde’s politics - “The Homosexual as Artist as Socialist” - passionately argued for the need to include Wilde in the history of the gay left, even as it criticized his reductive vision of politics as a matter of aesthetics. Jeffrey helped found the Gay Alternative in 1972, and in the paper’s opening editorial, he declared coming out “an essential political act.” Its rich coverage included everything from politics to sports to a 1974 cover featuring John Waters’s film star Divine, but his most sustained theme was always socialism and sexual liberation. The GAA led the city’s first gay pride march in 1972, near Rittenhouse Square, and Jeffrey later recalled claiming the public sphere as “one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done.” In the spirit of the times, they also held “zaps” against homophobes, pushed for a municipal antidiscrimination ordinance, and held dances and other social events. But Philly was different from New York or San Francisco, smaller and less anonymous. These were the heady early years of gay liberation, inspired by the militance of the Black Panther Party, the anti-imperialism of the antiwar movement, and the anti-capitalist analysis of modern social relations. Moving to Philadelphia in 1970 to study economic history, he brought with him a great deal of theoretical knowledge but little practical activist experience, which didn’t stop him from stumbling into the presidency of the local Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) chapter. He began graduate school at Columbia and, by 1967, recalled “roam the East Village holding hands with a man,” but only after the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion did he publicly adopt the word gay (“I had long known that I was queer - that is, a homosexual,” he wrote). High on Kerouac, Burroughs, and amphetamines, he hitchhiked to Mexico in the summer of 1963 and then enlisted, bodily and intellectually, in the cause of the sexual revolution after discovering the work of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. He was just in time to ride the waves of the ’60s, and he did so with gusto. Gay (Marxist) Liberationīorn in 1942 and raised on Staten Island, Escoffier’s dyslexia prevented him from reading until the age of ten, but books and sex marked his teen years. Modeling an engaged, community-based scholarship from the dawn of gay liberation to the development of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), Escoffier was a brilliant public intellectual at the center of radical queer politics and thought. ![]() With Escoffier’s passing this week, the world has lost a major thinker of the queer socialist left and a pioneering scholar of sexuality, one who took sex as seriously as politics and never lost sight of their intimate connections. He forged this connection while doing both in the mid-1960s: devouring the entire corpus of sexual sociology while pursuing the pleasures of the flesh in New York City’s Washington Square Park. Reading and cruising, Jeffrey Escoffier once wrote, “are not such dissimilar techniques.” Both require sustained and dialectical interpretive practices, and he enjoyed them both greatly.
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