The Tea Room Trade by Laud Humphreys

Well, for the past month I have fallen off the reading wagon, but I nevertheless can claim the distinction of remaining a Te[a]totaller this month, and in some pretty public places too.

A lot has already been said about the ethics of the research design that informed Laud Humphreys' Tea Room Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (lookit me! citing Wikipedia :S), so I will not say too much about that here. I would just encourage people who think that his method sounds appalling that they should read the book; Humphreys really lays it out, and engages with his critics.

What was most striking to me was how different my impression of the book was relative to another summary I had heard of it. In an undergraduate introduction to research methods, one relatively coarse course instructor described Laud Humphreys as this researcher who spied on gay men when they had sex in washrooms. According to this man, Humphreys then followed them back to their houses and extorted people’s compliance with his research by interviewing them while their wives were at home. However, upon reading the book, what stood out to me was how my instructor re-evaluated its findings when he summarized it. Indeed, in this work, Humphreys distinguished several types of people who would be sexually active at the tea rooms, only one of whom might be called homosexual/gay/etc. However, my instructor apparently felt that he could dismiss this part of the analysis.

Like others many others I think treating sexual acts between men and homosexual identity as metonyms is a feature of the present day. This was underlined by what was not present in this book. Indeed, Humphreys did not take a stand about the logical difficulty of conflating acts with identity. Perhaps this is because this work was born in the 1960’s, before the Gay Liberation Movement suggested that being gay was a choice and presumably depended on the fulfillment of a set of (sexual) acts.

What was more pressing to Humphreys was critiquing the religious beliefs that he thought contributed to men’s experience of frigid relationships, and with which they were well-versed enough to hide behind whilst still engaging in illicit sex. Given his background as a radical Episcopal priest, this critique seems natural.

Sadly, the compelling argument with which Humphreys concludes—in which he refers to his findings that tearoom sex is not exploitative, that sex in private is much more likely to involve violence, and concludes that police harassment of people who engage in such sex does not contribute to public safety—was obscured by the ethical mess of his research design. In any case, the innovative method, and provocative arguments are definitely worth revisiting even forty years later.