on many committees and held many visiting positions at The Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard University; Churchill College, Cambridge; at the University of Copenhagen; and at the Universities of Essex, Princeton and Chicago. He worked on many leading projects connected with sexuality including the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; chaired the SSRC-Ford Foundation committee on Sexuality Fellowships; and was a member of the National Research Council's CBASSE committee on the HIV-AIDS epidemic. In his retirement, he moved with his (second) wife, Cathy Greenblat, the sociologist and photographer, first to Nice and latterly to Palm Springs. Most recently he held a consultancy with the Laboratory of Robert Grant, Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, San Francisco, California. Gagnon died on Thursday, February 11, 2016, from pancreatic cancer. Gagnon's autobiographical reflections on his life until 1973 can be found in Authors of Our Own Lives, edited by Bennett Berger (1990). Ideas and contribution Gagnon is seen as the founder of a distinctly sociological approach to human sexuality. Michael Kimmel has called it 'revolutionary' and in a book devoted to articles inspired by the work of Gagnon, he claims that the book Sexual Conduct (1973) 'heralded the new paradigm from which all subsequent readings of sexuality in the social science and humanities have sprung' (Kimmel, 2007:pix). Gayle Rubin has also commented that Gagnon and Simon 'virtually reinvented sex research as social science' (Rubin, 2002: 28). Often linked to symbolic interactionism, but also tempered with Durkheim, his work has inspired and shaped a whole field variously called 'the constructionist approach to sexuality' Social constructionism or 'critical sexualities studies'. His ideas may also be seen as a precursor of 'queer theory' Queer theory. He has briefly summarized his own work thus: (1) Sexual conduct is entirely historically and culturally determined; (2) the meaning of conduct does not reside in a reading of the bodily activity of individuals; (3) sexual science is historically and culturally determined in equal measure ;(4) sexuality is acquired, maintained, and unlearned in all of its aspects and is organized by social structure and culture, and (5) gender and sexuality are both learned forms of conduct and are linked differently in different cultures. (Interpretation of Desire 2004 p136). Gagnon's contribution lies in four key fields. First, he pioneered an account of human sexuality that was not to be driven by an overwhelming prominence being given to the biological. With Bill