As the first president of Philadelphia’s Gay Activists Alliance in 1970, he co-founded and edited The Gay Alternative, a pioneering journal of gay culture and politics and one of the skein of influential, early queer publications that helped mold and spread gay liberation’s first wave.
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Why would a noted gay intellectual devote his time to a history of the queer porn industry? Because, as Jeffrey Escoffier demonstrates in his fascinating account of this billion dollar business, same-sex pornography has not only been a window on changing sexual styles and identities but has helped to shape them.Īs Escoffier writes in “Bigger Than Life,” just published, “The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies would never have taken place without a series of extended legal and political battles over obscenity and pornography.” Escoffier chronicles how a series of “struggles over free speech and the First Amendment that were also business ventures… helped to create a public space where it was permissible not only to discuss patterns of sexual behavior but also to portray sexuality honestly and bluntly in fiction, on the stage, and in movies.”Įscoffier has been both a product of that sexual revolution and a significant intellectual force within it.