Larry Craig’s quickly becoming a queer culture mover and tapper. In addition to elevating the word “hypocrite” to new heights and exposing all of the GOP’s ugly angles, the toilet cruising Senator’s reviving old sociological studies:
[Craig] certainly deserves credit for renewing interest in Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, by Laud Humphreys, first published in 1970.
Humphreys, who was for many years a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, died in 1988. But his analysis of the protocols of anonymous encounters in men’s rooms – “tearooms,” in gay slang – has been cited quite a bit in recent weeks. In particular, reporters have been interested in his findings about the demographics of the cruising scene at the public restrooms he studied. (This research took place at a public park in St. Louis, Missouri during the mid-1960s.) Most patrons visiting the facilities for sexual activity tended to be married, middle-class suburbanites; they often professed strongly conservative social and political views.
Craig could very well have been one of Humphreys’ subjects!
Qjersey
Tearoom Trade is a fascinating read, including little diagrams of “where men stand” etc. Humphreys also goes on at length about the “lookout” whose job it is to keep an eye out for the police or innocent bystanders…while the other guys get it on. Craig could have use one of these!
I read the book after hearing in mentioned several times in undergrad and grad psych glasses.
It is often used as an example of unethical research… but not for why you think. Humphreys took down the license plate numbers of the men who stopped into the tearoom…and then had a friend at the police station look up their names and addresses…where Humphreys then showed up claiming to do a door-to-door survey.
And nothing has changed… tearooms are for closet cases…
eagledancer4444
In case Mr.B is wondering, yes, I also knew Laud. I would say I met him when I was a wee lad, but the “wee†might be taken out of context here…
I actually met him when I was working with the Kinsey Institute. When AIDS was really coming to the attention to the “establishment,†it was an interesting time when people knew what people were “doing,†but there was little “documentation†of what people were actually “doing.†Research may have been a bit shaky, and unethical by the standards of the 21st century, but the work of Laud in terms of cottaging and tearooms, as you can see, is even now invaluable. Leon McKusick (mayherestinpeace) did his dissertation work by going into gay bars in San Francisco and interviewing participants about what they really did (and had done in the last 30 days and the last 6 months), because up until that time, there was an “idea†of what “high risk behavior might entail, but one wasn’t able to say, oh, “32% of the men interviewed had engaged in unprotected anal intercourse within the last 30 days.†That also meant it was hard to see if prevention had generated any actual change in behavior, until the studies were done. Through a grant with the UCSF CAPS program, I worked with Leon, expanding the study into bars located in places like Denver, Portland, Albuquerque, Tucson, and other places.
Laud was this delightful, kindly white-haired gentleman in glasses that you would probably not pick out in a crowd as an expert in Tearooms. You could probably pick out Leon as someone who went into a lot of gay bars lol!