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Understanding where our ideas and perspectives on issues come from is an age-old question. Identifying who has influenced our thinking, and who has truly taught us about the issues and problems in our lives is one of the most interesting investigative quests that we as individuals, and as societies, can pursue. In the academic realm schools of thought are well recognized, and the intellectual influences of major theorists often serve as organizing principles in the study of a particular discipline's theories. Less frequently focused upon is the way in which a researcher, and a particular approach to a social issue, can and does influence subsequent generations of researchers.
Laud Humphreys is one of those thinkers and researchers who have spawned a succession of scholars, although he is seldom recognized for such. Humphreys opened a new world of research questions and challenged us to re-consider our methodological approaches to marginalized social issues and groups. As a result, his work has provided a unifying theme and guiding set of beliefs, assumptions and principles to scholars interested in the oft-ignored issues of alternative sexualities and intimate-yet-anonymous interpersonal relations. While primarily generating scholars interested in similar issues and those seeking creative methodological approaches, Humphreys has also indirectly contributed to the development of social theory.
Although perhaps not his intent (or even anything he could have foreseen), the research findings and thinking that Humphreys introduced has been a significant contribution to contemporary sociological theorizing. Humphreys' study of men's (often publicly proclaimed "heterosexual" men's) anonymous sexual encounters with other men spurred a re-consideration and re-configuration of scholars' understandings of the issues of sexuality and sexual identity. This is a cornerstone of the more recently recognized field of queer studies/theory. Although the formal recognition of queer studies/theory did not come for about two decades after the appearance of Humphreys' classic work Tearoom Trade, it is clear that lines of inquiry such as that initiated by Humphreys have converged and congealed as one of the important influences on this arena of inquiry.
More directly, Tearoom Trade has generated a lineage of research that in content and application has proven both groundbreaking and of great social import. As succinctly stated by Bapst (2001: 89) "Humphrey's classic 1975 study Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public...