The More Conservative you Are: The Gayer You Might BE
CTModerate
Rarely does a political scandal inspire anyone to discuss sociological
research done 40 years earlier. But whatever else Sen. Larry Craig (R-
Idaho) may have contributed to public life, he 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.
. . . . .
By 1975, Humphreys was a full professor in the sociology department at
Pitzer College and a professor of criminal justice at the Claremont
Graduate School. But his productivity as a scholar decreased rapidly.
Within a few years, he was being reprimanded for substandard
performance in the classroom, failure to keep office hours, and
neglect of committee work. He suffered from insomnia and struggled
with alcoholism. Humphreys also smoked compulsively, which led to the
cancer that killed him at the age of 59.
His biographers give a detailed account of the manuscript Humphreys
worked on during his final years but never finished. It was to be a
book revisiting one of the themes in Tearoom Trade - the idea he
called "the breastplate of righteousness." That phrase was borrowed
from an epistle by St. Paul, while the argument owed a lot to the
Frankfurt School's analysis in The Authoritarian Personality.
Men he had observed having anonymous sex in a public place often
turned out to be ardent champions of law and order. Unable to control
themselves in that part of their lives, they put on the defensive
"breastplate," redoubling their efforts elsewhere: "Motivated largely
by his own awareness of the discreditable nature of his secret
behavior," wrote Humphreys in his dissertation, "the covert deviant
develops a presentation of self that is respectable to a fault. His
whole lifestyle becomes an incarnation of what is proper and
orthodox."
Revising this argument in his later years, Humphreys wrote about how
hypocrisy, self-loathing, and aggression fueled one another.
cycl...@gmail.com
doesn't like your kind is homosexual.
ricec...@yahoo.com
On Sep 14, 9:29 pm, cyclin...@gmail.com wrote:
> Because you're a repressed lesbian doesn't mean that anyone that
> doesn't like your kind is homosexual.
TOM!
How are you? Still slinging mud, I see!