Laud Humphreys was studying to be an Episcopal priest in the mid-1950s when he learned, shortly after his father's death, that his father, Oklahoma State Representative
Ira D. Humphreys, took trips to New Orleans to have sex with other men. After being dismissed as an Episcopal priest in the 1960s, Laud Humphreys then enrolled as a sociology grad student where he completed a dissertation about men who had sex with other men in
public bathrooms in St. Louis, which Humphreys researched by agreeing to serve as a
"watch queen", looking out for the police. After writing down the license plate numbers of the men having sex, Humphreys traced the men's addresses and contacted them in disguise, claiming to be collecting data for a public health survey. The research, which was condemned as
unethical for its use of
covert methods, was published in 1970 as
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.
[more inside]
posted by jonp72
on Sep 8, 2007 -
58 comments
