William Simon (July 20, 1930 - July 21, 2000) influenced the study of human sexuality through his application of sociological methods and his rejection of traditional ideas of normal behavior.
Dr. Simon, who once worked at the Kinsey Institute for Social Research and
wrote numerous books and papers about sexuality, brought a postmodernist
sensibility to a field long bound by historical assumptions. His view was that
there are no fixed points in the geography of sexuality, merely an
ever-changing terrain that has less to do with biology than with accidents of
history. ''The most important truth about sexuality is that there may be no
important truths about sexuality that are permanent,'' he wrote in his last
book, ''Postmodern Sexualities'' (Routledge, 1996). As a consequence, Dr.
Simon, a professor of sociology at the University of Houston, was an advocate
for a much broader acceptance of differing sexual behaviors. He was an early
advocate of gay rights and testified against obscenity laws. He was willing to
defend depictions of the most extreme forms of sexual activity, as long as
they were consensual. ''It seemed so fundamental to him that the sexual was
quintessentially an area of expressive, meaningful communication,'' said Dr.
Simon's son Jonathan, a law professor at the University of Miami. Discussing
recurring scenes in romance novels popular with women in which female
characters are forced to have sex, Dr. Simon once told The Houston Chronicle
that the power of fantasy lay in the barrier between it and real life. ''The
kinds of things ordinary people think about while having sexual intercourse
are likely to make a monkey's hair stand up straight,'' he said.
Among his better-known books was ''Sexual Conduct,'' published in 1969 and
written with his longtime collaborator,
John H. Gagnon. It has been described as the first work to take a
rigorous, procedurally sound sociological look at sex, rather than a
biological or psychological one. He and Dr. Gagnon also wrote ''The Sexual
Scene'' and ''Sexual Outlaws.'' Julia A. Ericksen, a sociology professor at
Temple University, said the strength of Dr. Simon's work was his use of
carefully weighted research into sexuality, in which he sought out random
samples of people instead of relying on volunteers. If Dr. Simon took a
decidedly nontraditional approach to his field, it may have been because he
arrived there by such a nontraditional route.
William Simon was born on July 20, 1930, in New York, the son of Russian
immigrants, Morris and Yetta Simon, and spent his first 10 years in the Bronx.
His father, a supermarket clerk, moved the family to Detroit in 1940. By the
second grade, his teachers were summoning his parents to complain that the boy
would not keep still, and that he persisted in questioning their authority. By
age 13, according to his family, William Simon was protesting a meeting of the
isolationist America First movement, catching the attention of the Independent
Socialist Alliance, a Trotskyite group, for which he began organizing young
workers in the automobile industry. William dropped out of school in the
eighth grade and, using false identification, took a job as an assembly-line
worker. At 16, he went to West Virginia to organize mine workers, said Russell
L. Curtis Jr., a colleague at the University of Houston. At 17, he married a
fellow socialist, Bernice Stark; they were later divorced, and she died in
1957. ''He would simply run way,'' said Dr. Simon's brother Myron, an English
professor at the University of California at Irvine. ''If he had five bucks,
he might simply have grabbed a Greyhound and headed south.'' His family
reacted ''mostly with astonishment,'' Myron Simon said. At the age of 19,
while he was working as a keypunch operator, William was provisionally
accepted at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor with the help of Myron,
who was a student there. A year later, he ran out of money and dropped out. He
later re-entered the university, and although once again he did not graduate,
he so impressed faculty members at the University of Chicago that they invited
him to study sociology in the graduate program.
After earning his doctorate, Dr. Simon taught at Southern Illinois
University, Indiana University at Bloomington (where he worked at the Kinsey
Institute, and began his first work in sexuality) and finally, in 1975, at
Houston.
Friends recalled that though Dr. Simon managed to earn a doctorate without
having graduated from high school or college, the omissions weighed on him a
bit as he toiled on his Ph.D. thesis in Chicago. '' 'I've got to finish this
degree,' '' Dr. Gagnon recalled his friend saying. '' 'If I don't finish my
degree, I've got no diplomas at all.' ''
William Simon died on July 21, 2000, in Houston. He was 70. The cause was
cancer, his family said.
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