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Robert Allen "Laud" Humphreys
(October 16, 1930 - August 23, 1988) U.S.A.

Laud Humphreys

Sociologist

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Laud Humphreys was born Robert Allan Humphreys in Chickasha, Oklahoma, to Ira Denver Humphreys and Stella Bernice Humphreys. Laud graduated from Chikasha High School in 1948 and studied the following year at the University of Virginia. He graduated from Colorado College in 1952.

Although his family was Methodist, Laud was drawn to the Episcopal Church and attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, graduating in 1955. Signaling his new life of faith, he was baptized in 1955 and took the name "Laud," from William Laud, Anglican leader who was Archbishop of Canterbury in 17th century England.

He graduated from the Seabury-Western Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1955, and served as an Episcopal priest. He earned his Ph.D from Washington University in St. Louis in 1968. Due to the perceived dishonesty of his research methods, there was a failed attempt by some faculty members at Washington University to rescind his PhD.

Humphreys was married to a woman from 1960 to 1980 and eventually came out as a gay man. Humphreys was a founder of the Sociologists' Gay Caucus, established in 1974.

Humphreys is best known for his published Ph.D. dissertation, Tearoom Trade (1970), an ethnographic study of anonymous male-male sexual encounters in public toilets (a practice known as "tea-rooming" in U.S. gay slang and "cottaging" in British English). Humphreys asserted that the men participating in such activity came from diverse social backgrounds, had differing personal motives for seeking homosexual contact in such venues, and variously self-perceived as "straight," "bisexual," or "gay".

Because Humphreys was able to confirm that over 50% of his subjects were outwardly heterosexual men with unsuspecting wives at home, a primary thesis of Tearoom Trade is the incongruence between the private self and the social self for many of the men engaging in this form of homosexual activity. Specifically, they put on a "breastplate of righteousness" (social and political conservatism) in an effort to conceal their deviant behavior and prevent being exposed as deviants. Humphreys tapped into a theme of incongruence between one's words and deeds that has become a primary methodological and theoretical concern in sociology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Humphreys' study has been criticized by sociologists on ethical grounds in that he observed acts of homosexuality by masquerading as a voyeur, "did not get his subjects' consent, tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers and interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses."

Still, according to Jack Nusan Porter, a sociologist who knew Humphreys and studied under Howard S. Becker at Northwestern University from 1967-1971: "Humphreys was enormously influential on graduate students and younger scholars in the field of deviance, ethnography, and what we called 'participant observation'. True, today one could not do such research because there was no 'informed consent' but then again, in many cases, when doing research on deviant behavior, one will never get 'informed consent' so we miss out on a lot of important findings. He was a true pioneer and a hero to all of us in these fields."

In 1972, Laud published Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation , a textbook that covered the history and patterns of discrimination against gays and lesbians, as well as their resistance to this oppression. After years of writing from the closet, Laud came out dramatically at the 1974 meeting of the American Sociological Association during an emotional exchange with Edward Sagarin who wrote under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory. This thrust Laud into the limelight as an openly gay sociologist but also ended his marriage.

He served as professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California from 1972 to1988 and died of lung cancer in 1988. His biography was published in 2004, under the title Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology . Humphreys' research materials, including detailed diagrams and maps of tearoom activity he observed, are housed in the collections at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia & https://www.lgbtran.org/

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