Simon, he rejected 'the unproven assumption that "powerful" psychosexual drives are fixed biological attributes. More importantly, we reject the even more dubious assumption that sexual capacities or experiences tend to translate immediately into a kind of universal "knowing" or innate wisdom – that sexuality has a magical ability, possessed by no other capacity, that allows biological drives to be expressed directly in psychosocial and social behaviors.' (Psychosexual Development, 1969.) Much followed from this, as whole new field of analysis opened up. Secondly, and above all, Gagnon inspired many to think critically and seriously about human sexuality as a theoretical problem. Although he worked alongside the sexological profession, he remained very sceptical about its basic assumptions. (With Bill Simon, he developed the sociological theorization of human sexualities. Many ideas were formulated here, but the key was the significance of scripts as a metaphor for understanding human sexualities. Human sexuality far from being a simple biological drive should be seen as a socially organized script. We see sexual behavior therefore as scripted behavior, not the masked expression of a primordial drive. Psycho-sexual development 1969. Gagnon and Simon then proceeded to investigate three layers of scripting: historical and cultural, interactive and interpersonal, as well as its intra-personal or intra-psychic dimensions. Thirdly, having established a major social study of homosexuality at the Kinsey Institute, Gagnon challenged studies of 'homosexuality' to move away from the clinical and the pathological path, which dominated till the 1970s, towards the social and the political. "We have allowed the homosexual’s object choice to dominate and control our imagery of him" Formulation, 1967. A new approach was established which investigated the social and cultural situation of the homosexual. This was a little before the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and marker events of the Stonewall resistance to police harassment. Finally, Gagnon was an early empirical investigator of the AIDS pandemic and his work helped shape an understanding of the role that different kinds of communities play in shaping the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Honors Gagnon was an NIMH Post Doctoral Fellow in 1972–3, was made a fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and subsequently received the SSSS lifetime achievement award for research into sexuality in 1981 and was President of the International Academy of Sex Research 1987–8. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded an