In Bruce Jackson's view "Legman is the person, more than any other, who made research into erotic folklore and erotic verbal behavior academically respectable" and who made accessible to other scholars material that scholarly journals had long been afraid to publish. Gershon Legman died February 23, 1999, in his adopted home country, France, after several years of debility, and a week after suffering a massive stroke. According to George Chauncey's book "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940", Legman was a homosexual and is credited with having invented the vibrating dildo when he was only twenty. However, Mikita Brottman holds that he was exclusively heterosexual, accounting for both the abandonment of his proposed volume on fellatio as well as, possibly and in some measure, for his contempt for Alfred Kinsey. He was married for many years to Beverley Keith (died of lung cancer, 1966), married briefly to Christine Conrad, ended by annulment, then to Judith Evans.