John Gagnon
(November 22, 1931 – February 11, 2016) was a sociologist who shifted the ground in sex research by proposing that sexual behavior could better be understood by looking at social forces rather than biology or psychology.
John Gagnon
(November 22, 1931 – February 11, 2016) was a sociologist who shifted the ground in sex research by proposing that sexual behavior could better be understood by looking at social forces rather than biology or psychology.
Professor Gagnon established his career as a researcher at the Institute for Sex Research (now the Kinsey Institute) at Indiana University in the 1960s, and in the 1990s carried out a comprehensive survey of sexual behavior in the United States. He saw human sexuality as a social construct rather than a primal urge or fixed identity rooted in the psyche. In Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality, written with his fellow Kinsey researcher William Simon and published in 1973, and in the essays collected in An Interpretation of Desire from 2004, he explored the notion of sexual scripts written, so to speak, by political, economic and social forces, and sexual behavior as a kind of performance.
Sexual conduct is learned, acquired and assembled in human interaction, judged and performed in specific cultural and historical worlds, he and Professor Simon wrote in Sexual Conduct. John Gagnon has perhaps contributed more than any other individual in taking sexual research from the margins to the center, and in doing so, from the vantage point of the social construction of sexuality, he has inspired a generation of scholars, Lenore Manderson, an Australian medical anthropologist, wrote in The Journal of the History of Sexuality in 2006.
John Henry Gagnon was born on Nov. 22, 1931, in Fall River, Mass. His mother, Mary Emma Murphy, was a hotel maid, and his father, George, was a miner and an anarchist. As the Depression deepened, the family moved to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Vermont and later to Bisbee, Ariz. In an autobiographical essay for the book Authors of Their Own Lives, Professor Gagnon wrote of this period, Goodbye to respectable poverty; hello, raggedy-ass poor. After George Gagnon's left-wing political views made him unwelcome in Bisbee, he moved the family to Long Beach, Calif., where they lived in a wooden shack with a canvas roof for two years before he found shipyard work during World War II.
After graduating from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, Professor Gagnon enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he drifted from one subject to the next while scraping together tuition money working at the Continental Can Company and the aircraft-engine division of Ford Motors. After receiving a bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1955, he continued to graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he ended up concentrating on sociology by process of elimination. In the meantime, he found work as the assistant warden of the Cook County Jail, an experience that offered rich material for his first book, Sex Offenders, written after he began working for the Institute for Sex Research in 1959. In 1968, after editing the essay collection Sexual Deviance: A Reader with Professor Simon, he joined the sociology faculty at what is now the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island. Because he had not gotten around to writing a dissertation, he was given the entry-level title of lecturer, which was upgraded to associate professor after he was awarded a doctorate in 1969. In the late 1980s, working with two colleagues at the University of Chicago and the National Opinion Research Center, Professor Gagnon designed the first comprehensive survey of sexual behavior since the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports, which had been based on interviews conducted as early as the late 1930s. Unlike the Kinsey studies, which were based on selected samples and anecdotal evidence, Professor Gagnon's survey used sampling techniques to arrive at a representative population of about 3,400 adults between 18 and 59. It offered a more accurate picture of American sex lives, with reliable numbers on gay men and their behavior that were desperately needed as the AIDS crisis deepened. In contrast to the Kinsey reports, the survey asked respondents to reflect on why they had sex and what they thought about it. We don't just want to list what people do; we want to begin to explain why they do what they do, Professor Gagnon told Science magazine in 1989. The survey was published in 1994 as The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. A companion volume, aimed at a general audience, was published the same year under the title Sex in America.
Among other findings, the survey showed that most married Americans were monogamous and not particularly adventurous in their sexual practices. We have had the myth that everybody was out there having lots of sex of all kinds, Professor Gagnon told The New York Times in 1994. That's had two consequences. It has enraged the conservatives. And it has created anxiety and unhappiness among those who weren't having it, who thought, If I'm not getting any, I must be a defective person.' Good sense should have told us that most people don't have the time and energy to manage an affair, a job, a family and the Long Island Rail Road. Professor Gagnon's other works include Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, edited with Richard G. Parker in 1995, and In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter H.I.V./AIDS, edited with Martin P. Levine and Peter M. Nardi 1997.
Gagnon died on Feb. 11, 2016, at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 84. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Cathy Greenblat, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University, said. Professor Gagnon's first marriage ended in divorce.
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