[5] Jeffrey Paul Escoffier was born to Iris (Miller) Wendel and George on October 9, 1942, in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Manhattan and Staten Island.

Starting in 1990, OUT/LOOK sponsored, under Escoffier's leadership, a series of conferences called OutWrite that brought together over 1,200 LGBT writers from across the U.S.[10] These conferences brought together several notable writers such as Judy Grahn, Allen Ginsberg, Cherrie Moraga, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and Essex Hemphill.

In the wake of the OutWrite conferences, he worked as a literary agent for lesbian and gay authors across the Bay Area.

[11] Escoffier served on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York from 1992 to 1995 and then from 2010 to 2013.

There he supervised the department's media and public education campaigns on several topics, including smoking cessation, HIV prevention and testing, anti-obesity, ebola, influenza, and immunization.