Books for learning

I understand that news organizations and journalists are scrambling for information on same-sex cruising in public to help them understand and explain the Larry Craig fiasco.

Apparently, people have latched on to Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, published in 1970 and authored by Laud Humphreys. This is a horrible book! Yeah, it won the C. Wright Mills Award in Sociology in the 1970s, but that isn't saying much.

The methodology of this book is entirely suspect and has become a case study in Sociology of how not to do research on human subjects. The book is based off of Humphreys' dissertation, in which he observed public toilets where men have sex with men. Writing down the license plate numbers of these men, he would then go to the police station, concoct some kind of story, and dupe the police into giving out the names and addresses of the cars' owners. Humphreys would then visit the men, at their homes, telling them he was conducting research for a marketing company. Once inside, I gather, he'd drop the boom.

It's a bad book. Don't read it.

A much better book is a collection of essays edited by anthropologist William L. Leap called Public Sex/Gay Space, published by Columbia University Press in 1999. The book provides some excellent case studies arguing for new distinctions between public and private space as well as argues for the importance of cruising sites for proto-gay communities. Basically, many emergent gay communities rely on gay cruising sites for social cohesion and community building--especially in repressive cultures.

For a much more radical appraisal of gay sex in public places, I'd recommend Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism by the collective known as Dangerous Bedfellows. This book was incredibly influential for me when I was doing my undergraduate degree. Written in response to New York City's crackdown on whores, the poor, drug dealers, and gays in the 1990s (leading to the 'Disneyfication' of Manhattan the shuttering of many of the city's gay bookstores, bathhouses, and porn theaters), the book argues for a new, radical, sex-positive agenda among urban queer cultures. It's pretty fantastic and provides some compelling arguments for seriously reconsidering what the legal definitions of 'public space' should be and making compelling arguments for gay sex clubs as opportune places to promote safe sex! I've found it quite inspiring!

Two other books I'd recommend that I think would prove insightful if you are interested in the media spectacle surrounding Larry Craig and the geneaology of the gay community's reaction, would be The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner and Beyond Shame by Patrick Moore. Again, Warner's book has been incredibly influential to my own thinking regarding ethics, public culture, and the politics of shame. Warner analyzes how notions of 'normalcy' are deployed politically in cases like this to create distinctions and boundaries, to separate moral people from immoral people, good from bad, those who are worthy from those who are not. In the end, it comes down to power (doesn't it always?) as hierarchies are established by which certain members of the gay community can point to their own 'upstanding' ways as superior from Larry Craig's.

Patrick Moore's book, which I admit I've only been able to read parts of so far, traces the history of the political dimensions of sex within the gay rights movement. For a brief period, before AIDS, gay sex in all its degenerate, public, anonymous, and celebratory beauty, went from being shameful to being revolutionary, forming the ethical underpinnings of gay communities in urban centers such as New York, San Francisco, Paris, and London, among other places. The move set up a show-down between assimilationists and sex-positive queers, and by most accounts, the assimilationists won. Moore's argument is that for a brief moment, AIDS and gay sex united a gay community in positive ways and that today the common denominatory is shame--shame over sex, shame over AIDS, shame over people like Larry Craig.