Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology
by John F. Galliher, Wayne H. Brekhus, and David P. Keys
University of Wisconsin Press. 214 pages, $18.95
LAUD HUMPHREYS was the author of what was in 1970 a landmark research monograph, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Humphreys, an Anglican priest during the Vietnam War era, was arrested for activities on several fronts of political activism before publishing his controversial work. He took part in civil rights, anti-war, and gay rights protests—where he was labeled a “nigger and a Commie lover.” At one point he was jailed for leading an antiwar match into a Selective Service office and destroying a portrait of Richard Nixon. Critics describe Humphreys as a “one hit wonder,” since Tearoom Trade turned out to be his only book (though he did publish a few scholarly articles). Nevertheless, Tearoom Trade upset the world of academic sociologists at the time, even as it put Humphreys on the map as the first gay sociologist to come out of the closet.
The idea for Tearoom Trade began when Humphreys studied the gay community in St. Louis for his dissertation. His thesis advisor suggested that he focus on where “the average guy goes to get a blow job.” The budding graduate student was on his way: “Once I got started in the subject, I was fascinated. Like most men who are married and closeted—and I was both in those days—my sexual outlets were largely furtive and impersonal. Tearooms held both sexual and intellectual fascination for me.” Humphreys began his research as a “watch queen” or voyeur in a number of settings where men had anonymous sex, mostly in public restrooms. But to gain the trust of the men, Humphreys realized that he also would have to be an active participant in the activities. He would record the license plates of the men he encountered in tearoom sex in order to track them down for a face-to-face interview in their homes. He would of course have to assure them of their complete anonymity as respondents in his research. Indeed he kept the names and addresses of the men in a safe deposit box. His findings about who uses tearooms indicated that the majority were married men who went “to great lengths to maintain exemplary marriages” and to appear as model citizens in their community. A large group had no homosexual identity at all. We all know the type—the right-wing politician, the antigay crusader, the Bible-thumping minister—who’s really a closeted gay man trying to compensate for his secret life and avoid exposure. But Humphreys was the first to identify this phenomenon and document its practitioners in action. Quite a few, it turned out, were military men, and in describing their sexual practices Humphreys offered the following wry observation: “All of the ex-Navy men in the deviant sample were observed in the insertee role, whereas the ex-Marines were all inserters.” Humphreys himself was no stranger to what he called the “breastplate of righteousness,” that façade of ultra-respectable heterosexuality. His own marriage was a cover for his homosexuality for years before he came out and left his wife and family. The guardians of orthodox sociology reacted with horror to the study. Even today Humphreys’ use of the participant-observer method to study underground sexual behavior is held up to ridicule. Critics have impugned the ethics of his method of meeting and finding men to be interviewed, but this has often been based on distortions of his work, including the charge that he followed subjects to their homes and published his findings without their consent. Humphreys himself was arrested while acting as a watch queen and chose not to identify himself as someone doing research, but he was booked and locked in a cell. “Because I am a minister and have an astute attorney, my case never appeared in court. I am an arrest statistic, not a conviction statistic. Other men without legal resources could have been destroyed for the mere act of standing near a tearoom,” he wrote. Tearoom Trade was credited when it came out with raising an important question about what constitutes “public” and “private” sexual behavior. The following appeared in Criminal Law Bulletin in 1971: “Humphreys’ work has the effect of raising profound questions as to what is private. If ‘in private’ is simply another aspect of consent—consent to be approached, to view and to engage … the games people play in tearooms may be no less private than those played at cocktail parties. … Law enforcement should cease its surveillance of restrooms in search of sexual encounters.” The authors of this provocative biography note that the issue is still with us—or with us again—nearly 35 years later, and call for a rethinking of the definition of public and private behavior. Indeed the entrapment and arrests are back in many cities—as we were recently reminded in Philadelphia, where sixteen men were recently arrested in a department store—making Humphreys’ work as relevant today as when it was first published. Thom Nickels’ Out in History will be released in late summer 2005. Philadelphia Architecture will be published in the fall.
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