America's Toe-Tapping Menace
Turner
September 2, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
America's Toe-Tapping Menace
By LAURA M. Mac DONALD
WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig's bathroom arrest is not
what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that
Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40
years most police departments have been aware of something that still
escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places,
gay or "not gay," are, for the most part, upstanding citizens.
Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.
In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he
wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called "Tearoom
Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places." Because of his unorthodox
methods - he did not get his subjects' consent, he tracked down names
and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in
their homes in disguise and under false pretenses - "Tearoom Trade" is
now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.
That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr.
Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals - the
foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning - are all parts
of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes
that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put
simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or
cough or look went unanswered.
Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased
by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical
advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, "because of
cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need
fear being molested in such facilities."
Mr. Humphreys's aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate
to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed
in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the
implausibility not only of Senator Craig's denial - that it was all a
misunderstanding - but also of the policeman's assertion that he was a
passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that
both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to
continue.
Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are
remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig's behavior
given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks
into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the
policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and
touches it to the officer's shoe, which was positioned close to the
divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are
more phases in Mr. Humphreys's full lexicon - maneuvering,
contracting, foreplay and payoff - but Mr. Craig was arrested after
the officer presumed he had "signaled."
Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig's intentions, the police entrapped him. If
the police officer hadn't met his stare, answered that tap or done
something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr.
Humphreys was adamant and explicit: "On the basis of extensive and
systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective
or otherwise) who claims to have been 'molested' in such a setting
without first having 'given his consent.' "
As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator
would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys's research
says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man
himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn
that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit
nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated,
worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the
community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially
conservative, and quite vocal about it.
In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had
nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached
about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox "the
breastplate of righteousness." The more a man had to lose by having a
secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability:
"His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends
to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his
everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous - an exemplar of
good behavior and right thinking."
Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are
outed: "The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than
the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving
indignation, when he is discovered and discredited."
This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at
the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and
homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard,
Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that
Larry Craig was arrested.
Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing
consensual acts does not help. "The only harmful effects of these
encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,"
Mr. Humphreys wrote. "Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of
reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the
tearoom scene." What community can afford to lose good citizens?
And for our part, let's stop being so surprised when we discover that
our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being
more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of
others.