John H. Gagnon (November 22, 1931 – February 11, 2016) was a pioneering sociologist of human sexuality who wrote and edited 15 books and over 100 articles. He collaborated with William Simon to develop the piece he is perhaps best recognised for: "Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality" (1973). He was Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught and from 1968 to 1998. In that same time frame, he also dedicated himself to advancing the field of sociology through his research. Life Gagnon was born on November 22, 1931, in Fall River, Massachusetts. He became an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, gaining his BA in 1955 and his PhD in 1969. After working as an assistant to the Sheriff in the Cook County Jail, he became a Senior Research Sociologist and Trustee at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana from 1959 to 1968. At the Kinsey Institute, Gagnon worked with his friend whom he had met in the midst of his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, William Simon - they started a brief but highly productive collaborative period. In fact, the aforementioned work, Sexual Conduct (1973), was developed during these years. Kinsey had been dead a few years and there was a sense of 'winding down' at the institute. Prior to the arrival of William Simon, Gagnon worked primarily on the Sex Offenders legacy project, the computerization of the original Kinsey sex histories and the maintenance of the Kinsey Archives and Library. After the arrival of Simon in 1965, in addition to the essays that made up Sexual Conduct, they started two major projects: a national study of sexual development among a national sample of college students and a major project on homosexuality. This was his induction into mainstream survey research, but it also set up a permanent tension in his work between conventional empirical research and the problem of theorizing sexuality adequately and taking seriously how social the sexual was. These ideas haunted him for the rest of his life. Subsequently, Gagnon's major academic post was to be held at the University of New York at Stony Brook between 1968 and 1998, where he became a Distinguished Professor of sociology. During this time he chaired and sat