Jeffrey Escoffier

Jeffrey Escoffier (born October 9, 1942) is an American media strategist, writer, editor, and activist. He was the director of health media and marketing for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 1999 to 2015. Escoffier has long been an active participant in the LGBT community in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York City.

In 1972 he co-founded and served on the editorial board of The Gay Alternative (1972-1976), a gay and lesbian cultural magazine. He moved to San Francisco in 1977 where he co-founded the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. In 1978 he joined the editorial board of Socialist Review, a democratic socialistic journal, and served as its Executive Editor from 1980 to 1988.

In 1988, Escoffier co-founded OUT/LOOK: A National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, which was one of the first joint lesbian and gay cultural ventures. Starting in 1990, OUT/LOOK sponsored, under Escoffier’s leadership, a series of conferences called OutWrite that brought together over 1,200 LGBT writers from across the U.S. These conferences brought together several notable writers such as Judy Grahn, Allen Ginsberg, Cherrie Moraga, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and Essex Hemphill. In the wake of the OutWrite conferences he worked as a literary agent for lesbian and gay authors across the Bay Area.

Escoffier 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.

In 1995, he joined the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as the Deputy Director of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health. In 2000 he became the Director of Health Media and Marketing and held that position until his retirement in August 2015. In that position he supervised the Department’s media and public education campaigns on severals topics, such as smoking cessation, HIV prevention and testing, anti-obesity, Ebola, influenza, and immunization.

• John Maynard Keynes (New York: Chelsea House, 1995)
• American Homo: Community and Perversity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (New York: Marlowe & Co., 2001)
• Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2003)
• Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009)