User:Jeffrey Escoffier/sandbox/Jeffrey Escoffier

[[File:Jeffrey Escoffier.jpg|thumbnail|Date of Birth: October 9th, 1942 Hometown: Baltimore, MD

Current City: Brooklyn, NY]]

BIOGRAPHY
Jeffrey Escoffier (born October 9th, 1942) is an American media strategist, writer, editor, historian and activist. He was the director of health media and marketing for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Health (one of the world’s most prestigious public health agencies) from 1999 to 2015.[1]

Escoffier graduated from the “Great Books” program at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD, in 1964.[2] He received a Masters degree from the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 1966, and did graduate work in economics (1966-1968) at Columbia University, where Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and William Vickrey were among his professors. He went on to do graduate work in economic history at the University of Pennsylvania from 1969 to 1977.

CAREER
Escoffier has long been an active participant in the LGBT community in Philadelphia (1970-1977), San Francisco (1977-2002) and New York (1992-present).[3] He was president of the Gay Activists Alliance in Philadelphia from 1971-1972.[4] In 1972 he co-founded and served on the editorial board of The Gay Alternative (1972-1976), a gay and lesbian cultural magazine.[5] He moved to San Francisco in 1977 where he co-founded the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project that included Allan Berube, Amber Hollibaugh, Estelle Freedman, and Gayle Rubin among others.[6] In 1988 Escoffier co-founded OUT/LOOK: A National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly (1988-1992), one of the first joint lesbian and gay cultural ventures after the long political and cultural split between the lesbian and gay male movements that emerged in the late 1970s. Academy-award winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff, artist E.G. Crichton and graphic designer Peter Babcock were among the founding group. Starting in 1990, OUT/LOOK sponsored, under Escoffier’s leadership, a series of conferences called OutWrite that brought together more than 1200 LGBT writers from across the U.S.[7] Billed as the “largest gathering of lesbian and gay writers in history” and the conferences brought together well-known writers such Judy Grahn, Allen Ginsberg, Cherrie Moraga, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, Essex Hemphill as well as writers at the beginning of their careers. In the wake of the OutWrite conferences he worked as a literary agent and represented lesbian and gay authors from the Bay Area. In that capacity he represented Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.[8]

In 1978 he joined the editorial board of Socialist Review, a highly respected independent democratic socialistic journal published in Berkeley and served as Executive Editor from 1980 to 1988.[9]

In 1992, Escoffier moved back to New York City where he had grown up. He served on the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York from 1992-1995 and then from 2010-2013. He was the Director of the CLAGS Project on Families, Values and Public School Curriculum (1993-1994).[10]

In 1995, he joined the NYC Department of Health as the Deputy Director of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health. In 2000 he became the Director of Health Media and Marketing and was in that position until he retired in August 2015. In that position he supervised the production of the Department’s media and public education campaigns on such topics as smoking cessation, HIV prevention and testing, anti-obesity, Ebola, influenza and immunization campaigns.[11] He also pioneered the use of social media in public education campaigns. During his tenure the Health Department he became known for producing emotionally wrenching “hard-hitting” campaigns that were criticized for relying on generating fear for their effectiveness.[12] Health departments throughout the United States, as well as in more than 24 countries, adopted many of these campaigns.

PERSONAL LIFE
Jeffrey, currently, lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a visiting scholar at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and has been there since September 2015. Jeffery is in the process of writing two books, and conducting research in the following areas; the history of sexuality, sociology of sexuality, and queer economics.

WORKS
John Maynard Keynes (New York: Chelsea House, 1995) "Escoffier's book shows us Keynes as an immoralist, sexually in the Victorian sense, and economically in the classical sense. Not to be missed," concluded one Amazon reviewer.

American Homo: Community and Perversity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) "In the ... tradition of Foucault and Marcuse…” proclaimed the Library Journal

Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (New York: Marlowe & Co., 2001) edited by Jeffrey Escoffier and Matthew Lore. Robert Gottlieb, the New York Observer’s dance critic called it "An extraordinarily handsome new book... a thorough and valuable critique and appreciation of this glorious dance work..." Time Out New York echoed Gottlieb and claimed the book "A stunner."

Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2003) Edited by Jeffrey Escoffier with a foreword by Erica Jong. The Library Journal called the anthology the "definitive review of the most influential writing [on sex] of the last half-century."

Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009) Queer Times Weekly called it a "comprehensive, fascinating and well written book ... worth reading. Escoffier is no stranger to sex, having edited the groundbreaking anthology, Sexual Revolution.”