Reading the biography of Episcopal priest turned ethnographer of sex in St. Louis park restrooms turned professor turned police consultant and Marriage and Family Counselor Laud Humphreys (1930-1988) by sociologists John Galliher, Wayne Brekhus, and David Keys, I was frustrated by the superficial research. More than a third of the volume is reproduction of Humphreys's FBI file, one that is not particularly interesting. More interesting appendices are a cartoon that was at the center of a violent blowup at Washington University that was part of the devolution of the sociology program there, plus Laud's curriculum vitae.

The authors know that Laud was prone to self-mythologizing and try to sort out facts from myths with some success. Even though I know one of Laud's seminary gay classmates and was a student several sociologists who had been at Washington University around the time of his controversial PhD research, and considered Laud a friend and talked to him on several occasions about earlier incidents in his life, I learned much about his earlier life from the book. I knew that he had unresolved Oedipal problems (his father. Ira, worked for Southwestern Bell and had just been re-elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1953 when he died). After Ira's death, Laud learned that his father had regularly gone off to New Orleans for homosexual liaisons.

After alienating several Oklahoma Episcopal congregations by fervent advocacy of integration, Laud enrolled in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. His research on outwardly respectable, even-moralistic men who had sex with other men in public rest rooms was more of a search for the father with whom he had never discussed his own sexuality (and double life) than I knew. Laud was married and the father of two children and wrote of observations of other men's sexual encounters (which at the time were felonies). In Tearoom Trade, he explained that the sexual encounters were not interrupted by his presence because he served as a lookout for police or others who might be offended by what was going on. I always suspected that he was more a participant observer and less of a voyeuristic outsider than his thesis and the book derived from it could state. (Even as he presented it, there were attempts to have his doctorate revoked because he was an accessory to felonies.)

That he observed what "crimes" without reporting them to the police stirred controversy in Washington University (and beyond). What disturbed sociologists (and ethnographers in other academic disciplines) most was that he wrote down license plate numbers and later went to interview men whose "crimes" he had observed in the guise of a project on social and political attitudes. This had a potential of endangering the men. Knowing Laud, there is no question in my mind that he would have refused to provide the identifying information even if it were subpoenaed and would have gone to jail for destroying evidence (and did destroy the identifying information after interviewing the men). It is not a method I would be comfortable with others using and even in Laud's case it seems to me that there was implicit coercion for anyone who recognized him when he showed up at their door to agree to be interviewed. (I was hoping to learn if the questionnaire data Laud from a very targeted sampling gathered was excluded from analysis of data for the other study, but didn't.)

He found that the married men who frequented the tearooms tended to be hyper-conformist in other regards and politically very conservative. Like his father, they buckled on a "breastplate of righteousness" and social conventionality except when sneaking out to have illicit (and illegal) sex with other men in "public."

In addition to controversy about his research, the most famous sociologist at Washington University and the only one with more of a Messiah complex than Laud, Alvin Gouldner, believed that Laud drew the already-mentioned cartoon and physically attacked Laud. This scrap led to Gouldner's exile (to the Netherlands, not the best place to get away from open homosexuality!).

Laud went off to Southern Illinois University and in antiwar action at a Carbondale draft board office, symbolically attacked the US government by destroying the portrait of Richard Nixon on display there. He was convicted of destroying government department, and was imprisoned for three months. He always claimed that the symbolic destruction was an attempt to avert real violence. He also claimed to be a convicted felon, though the plea bargain removed the felony charge.

After a summer in jail, Laud took up a position at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont colleges. He wrote an underappreciated book on the early gay liberation movement, Out of the Closets, came out professionally in a dramatic 1984 confrontation with Edward Sagarin, an advocate of trying to "cure" homosexuality who continued to be an avid renter of young black male flesh (and had earlier been active in the less confrontational homophile movement as Donald Webster Cory until he was defeated in a bid to become president of the New York Mattachine Society, about which he wrote a dissertation that did not mention his participation or bitterness about rejection...).

Laud left his wife for Brian Miller, a Canadian then-graduate student in sociology who was researching gay men who had fathered children. They coauthored a few pieces and both pursued licensing as marriage and family counselors. Laud neglected his classes at Pitzer for consultant work with police forces and being a therapist. He also stopped publishing after the pieces coauthored with Brian that appeared in 1980. (He did desultory work on a book on moral entrepreneurs (elaborating on the "breastplate of righteousness" findings of his tearoom research, and including an uncompleted chapter "When Model Citizens Kill"). Especially as his relationship with Brian unraveled, he hit the bottle heavily. As was the case for Arturo Islas (see my review of Dancing with Ghosts), after overcoming his alcoholism, Laud became ill and died of lung cancer in 1988. (The self-destructiveness and limited productivity of rather easily tenured academics with secret lives are also parallel.)

The book provides a good, if superficial introduction to the life and works of Laud Humphreys and is sympathetic but not uncritical about his professional and personal self-destructiveness in his several careers and two major intimate relationships. I wish that the authors had sought more perspectives on the conflicts between Laud and criminologist Hans Toch (at SUNY, Buffalo), had sought out Laud's correspondence, and researched his involvement with gay rights organizations, particularly his foundational role in the Sociologists' Gay Caucus (SGC) following the session with Edward Sagarin in which Laud publicly came out as gay.

The authors claim that their snowball sampling "was pursued until no new personal contacts could be elicited." This is nonsense! It's not just that they did not reach me, but they did not reach others who served with Laud on the SGC steering committee. And I could reel off a list of names of people who knew Laud before he moved to California whom I have talked to about him not listed among those they reached. Moreover, there were many people (I was one) in the ballroom at the Queen Elizabeth Hilton in Montreal where the Humphreys/Sagarin confrontation occurred. Instead of reports from anyone who was there, they repeat the myth that Sagarin burst into tears.

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I have written about the longer-running antagonism beween Humphreys and Sagarin in "Humphreys vs. Sagarin in the sociological study of gay movements" in International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24(2004):128-145 and about Sagarin's illegitimate posture of objectivity in "Donald Webster Cory, 'p. 333-343 in Vern Bullough (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (Binghamton, NY: Haworth).

For other biographies, etc. in this year's LGBT writeoff, see links on my profile page.



Recommended: Yes