Inside Higher Ed recalls the early work of Laud Humphreys on what was in the 1960s, euphemistically called the tearoom trade.

"Tearoom" is argot for public restroom and the unfortunate activities of Larry Craig have created a renewed interest in Humphrey's controversial 1970 study of the comings and goings in a St. Louis, MO public park restroom.

Controversial because of Humphreys' methods, which included flagrant misrepresentation and collaboration with law enforcement. Humphrey's represented himself as a "watchqueen" or voyeur and surreptitiously recorded the license plates of the visitors, having police later match those with names and addresses. He then visited those homes under the guise of survey taken to obtain personal information.

I know you aren't shocked--liberal-left gay activists routinely invade their targets privacy for reasons much less noble than Humphreys'. Before Craig got busted in the Minneapolis airport, lefty gays had already outed him the year before.

Humphreys, who was at the time an in-the-closet-homosexual, was a flash-in-the-pan--his subsequent career saw few publications, and a paper purporting to link closet homosexuality with efforts to perfectly model social orthodoxy in all other aspects of their lives. A lot of people already take that as a given, but Humphreys never published the paper which his peers judged posthumously to be "a mess" and "unpublishable".

Nevertheless, The Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places revealed that gay men in the mid-sixties, avoided social marginalization by keeping their unapproved sexuality a closely held secret.

I found the aspect of the study rather interesting because it is by no means limited to homosexuality, but represents a survival behavior engaged in by all sorts of people hoping to avoid social consequences for their behaviors. Mafia dons live in the suburbs, hopelessly narcissistic Hollywood stars attend charity events (or go to rehab), inmates find Jesus. Hiding our worst selves from others starts with lying to your parents about what you were doing last night.

The obvious question? Is this bad?

It seems to me that there are lots of reason to hide behavior from others:

Avoiding consequences. We undertake certain behaviors with the certain knowledge that if we get caught, it will be bad. We do them anyways and take measures to hide our crimes. Sometimes they aren't crimes at all, but simply ideas and views that we simply know will be misconstrued. A Mormon friend of mine, during a business dinner, avoided the obvious explanation why he wasn't drinking the wine. To my utter amazement, he professed that he was was a recovering alcoholic. I asked him about it later and he confessed that no one questions why a recovering alcoholic isn't drinking, but if you don't drink for religious reasons, explanations are demanded, misunderstanding are inevitable and it all becomes a great big hassle. He wasn't ashamed of his religious affiliation, but he nevertheless wanted to avoid the consequences of admitting it under the circumstances.

Shame. We engage in certain behaviors that aren't illegal, but will result in our being shamed. The left in particular are highly adept at shaming people into, if not political compliance, at least silence. The left variously discourages shame (George Michael's "tearoom" antics) and encourages them (Larry Craig's "tearoom" antics. Its clear that in this case, the shaming is a social tool. There is little rhyme or reason to what society declares shameful and what it doesn't. Everyone farts, but we still feel shame when we do it in front of others.

This isn't 1965, and being gay isn't the shame that it was then, so why are there still gay men in the closet?

I think the answer is simple enough--being gay, or differing from "the norm" in any way is an isolating experience. Isolation is painful and people avoid pain if they can help it. I suspect that a lot of gay men don't particularly relish the idea of being ghettoized by their homosexuality--they value the relationships that would otherwise be strained by such revelations.

Here is where it gets interesting. Political power comes from homogeneity, from building constituencies with common interests and objectives. Groups must "concentrate" their membership, differentiate them from the masses. In effect, gay and lesbian politics benefits, and may even encourage gay alienation. If gays are "normal", then there is no GLBT alliance.

The reality for the Democrats is that once you form a constituency, it must be kept intact, made permanent--persistent alienation from the mainstream. Blacks are at the bottom of the socio-economic stack in spite of block-voting for Democrats since before I was born--why should anyone actually try to "solve the problem", when the persistence of the problem is so politically lucrative?

Feminists on the other hand, successfully achieved their political goals and then simply vanished as a political force. Young women take equality and opportunity for granted without having to endure alienation from the mainstream. The lack of a female "ghetto" means that Democrats can no longer depend on block voting by so-called feminists.

The ghetto is essential.

It used to be that we didn't talk religion or politics with acquaintances--sort of like not admitting you like to have sex with men--all to smooth over the social interaction and stress our commonality instead of our differences. Of course there is no political profit in that.

Now, an incredibly private matter becomes a kind of "Star of David"--the first thing you know about someone.

"Hi, I'm gay."

Larry Craig simply didn't want a Star of David on his lapel; didn't want to live in the ghetto. You can call him a "hypocrite" as much as you like, but for the one finger pointing at him, there are four pointing back at you.

Everyone has a secret life.