[2] He "brought a postmodernist sensibility to a field long bound by historical assumptions", wrote the New York Times, describing his belief "that there are no fixed points in the geography of sexuality, merely an ever-changing terrain that has less to do with biology than with accidents of history.
In 1953, he attended the American Sociological Association's annual meetings and while speaking was noticed and invited to meet David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, who helped him gain admission to the University of Chicago's graduate program in 1955 where he met John Gagnon and earned his doctorate.
In the 1960s, Simon worked at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
They rejected "the unproven assumption that 'powerful' psychosexual drives are fixed biological attributes" as well as "the even more dubious assumption that sexual capacities or experiences tend to translate immediately into a kind of universal 'knowing' or innate wisdom - that sexuality has a magical ability, possessed by no other capacity, that allows biological drives to be expressed directly in psychosocial and social behaviors.
[6] From this, Gagnon and Simon proceeded to investigate three layers of scripting: historical and cultural, interactive and interpersonal, as well as its intra-personal or intra-psychic dimensions.
Looking at later separate contributions, Gagnon took a more empirical and sociological turn drawing from methodology and Durkheim) whilst Simon continued to have a more political bent whilst simultaneously showing a greater interest in intra-psychic scripting under the influence of the psychoanalytic works of Robert Stoller (1924–1991) and Heinz Kohut (1913–1981).
The irony of his work that while he spent much of his professional life trying to improve the social conditions of the sexual worlds of others, he was also trying to suggest that sex may not even be as important as people try to make it.