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. 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.

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. 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.