John Gagnon, a former Stony Brook University sociologist, dies

John Gagnon, a former Stony Brook University sociologist who wrote about sexuality, died Feb. 11 at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 84.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Cathy Greenblat.

Gagnon and a colleague, William Simon, introduced sexual scripting theory, a model of sexual identity as socially constructed. Sex, according to the theory, has to do with the roles and patterns of learned behavior.

Gagnon was a distinguished emeritus professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, where he taught from 1968 to 1998. From 1959 to 1968, he was a staff member at what is now known as the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University.

In hundreds of scholarly and popular publications, which Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel described in an interview this week as “field-changing,” Gagnon both extended and reinterpreted the work of Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering researcher whose work documented human sexual behavior.

John Henry Gagnon was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on Nov. 22, 1931. When he was 4 years old, Gagnon, his father, a miner, and his mother, a hotel maid, moved to Bisbee, Arizona.

He worked at a slaughterhouse and at other jobs to pay tuition at the University of Chicago, where he received a degree in liberal arts in 1955. It took him six years to finish, alternating semesters of study and work.

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He received his doctorate in sociology from the university in 1969, and an honorary doctorate from Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland in 2006.

Besides his wife, Gagnon is survived by daughters Andrée Gagnon, of Seattle, and Leslie Greenblat Shah, of Silver Spring, Maryland; and sons Christopher Gagnon, of Odell Lake, Oregon, and Kevin Greenblat, of Austin, Texas.

He was cremated Monday at Forest Lawn mortuary in Cathedral City, California. The family is planning a memorial service on April 24 at Stony Brook Manhattan, 387 Park Ave. S.