Andrea: Tell me how it was that you came to be a sociologist?

Jeffrey: [Laughs] Well, I actually started as a historian and my first degree was a history degree. When I was doing that, a very traditional history degree at UCL, I became interested in the more theoretical side of issues and gravitated towards the history of political theory, and that led me to an interest in social theory and sociological debates, because I was looking at political theory at the end of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century and it overlapped with sociological debates.

Especially as my MPhil thesis was called The search for community and that was in political theory but obviously overlapped with debates over community in sociology. So, I had a very strong interest in the subject from being an undergraduate but instead of doing a sociology master’s, which was an option, I decided to do what became my MPhil, and then I became interested in a completely different subject, which was the history and sociology of sexuality.

My earliest adventures in this field, as it happens, overlapped, to some extent, with the debates at which I had been looking at the end of the nineteenth century. I became interested in the history of sexology, in Havelock Ellis, the emergence of theories of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century, in Edward Carpenter, and the debates about sexual identity, gay identity and all of that. This was the early 1970s. There was no help at all within traditional history for what I was trying to do. I found the most useful insights from within sociology and a particularly key moment was encountering Mary McIntosh’s essay on ‘The homosexual role’, which inspired my research in its early stages (McIntosh, 1968) . This was passed around in early gay liberation meetings, which I used to go to at the LSE, and here I got to know Mary, and other young sociologists, like Ken Plummer, and eventually other people in the Essex sociology department. I went to Essex for a while to work with Mary, by then it was the late 1970s. I found that sociology was much better as a home for the work I was doing, which was, by its nature, interdisciplinary, than any history department was.