Ethical research was a bit of a fuzzy concept for us in the mid-1900s. So that time when a reverend Larry Craig’d a bunch of men for his sociology thesis, it caused a bit of a ruckus.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Tearoom Trade.
Until fairly recent history, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Laud Humphreys, born in 1930 and ordained an Episcopalian minister in 1955, had a research fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health when he decided he didn’t want to treat homosexuality. He wanted to understand it.
The best way to do that was to spy on the gays for science, obviously.
He reported in his thesis that his graduate advisor was apparently unimpressed with one of his early research papers on homosexuality. His advisor challenged him, asking “where does the average guy go just to get a blowjob? That’s where you should do your research.” The space race, dosing people with acid for research, and blowjob chasing. Science in the sixties was fucking lit.
Rev. Humphreys headed to where one goes for researching blowjobs: the tearooms.
My fellow enlightened sexual beings of 2021, you may be wondering what in Judy Garland’s name are tearooms? Public bathrooms. At the time, “tea-rooming” was slang for anonymous hookups in public bathrooms. In the early 1960s, nearly 500 men had been arrested on felony charges for alleged homosexual acts, out of which nearly 300 arrests occurred in public bathrooms.
This is what happens when we don’t let consenting adults fuck other consenting adults at home.
How exactly does one conduct research on sexual activity at a public bathroom in a time when people were liable to get arrested for that activity? Humphreys offered to be their ‘watchqueen,’ a term for the designated lookout to alert them if cops arrived. It gave them a helpful layer of protection from the police and unwittingly turned them into research subjects.
It’s true, we didn’t have IRBs or any of the types of ethical mountains we’re used to climbing for approval when this study was completed. So he wasn’t technically breaking any rules. That doesn’t make this next part any less fucking icky.
He used license plate numbers to track people down, interviewing about a dozen out of the fifty or so men in the study. He couldn’t blow his cover as a watchqueen, so he interviewed them in disguise, under the pretenses of “men’s health surveys.”
Nobody ever gave anything resembling informed consent. I’m pretty sure most of them aren’t aware, to this day, that they were part of someone’s research.
Though this was a small study, it had girth. Only 14% of subjects were gay men looking for relationships with other men. 54% of his subjects presented themselves to the world as heterosexual men with wives at home. Laud Humphreys branded some of their other social behaviors as putting on the “breastplate of righteousness,” an attempt to conceal that they could possibly be viewed as sexual deviants by waving a flag of purity.
You know the guy who cannot possibly tell you how much they love Jesus and hate the gays right up until the day that they need therapy for their “tendencies?” Humphreys had that guy nailed.
It’s hard to wrestle with something like the Tearoom Trade study today. On one hand, it’s been suggested that Humphreys’ research and efforts led to police departments cutting down on their persecution of this alleged crime once it was demonstrated to be victimless. It’s also part of a confluence of research that led to the American Psychiatric Association opting against continuing to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1970s. Even then, it took until 1987 to have “sexual orientation disturbance” removed entirely from the DSM.
On the other hand, Jesus fucking Christ, is it really too much to ask to refrain from stalking your research subjects, huh?
Laud Humphreys came out as a gay man in 1974, separating from his wife of twenty years in 1980 and living with his partner, Brian Miller, until his death in 1988.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you that the long arc of history bends away from the tearooms.
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