Craig's foibles have a basis in scholarship

Yes, Larry Craig's toe-tapping techniques were described in a book some four decades ago. But there also has been some scholarly research into the field:

Back in the 1960s, long before a U.S. senator got busted for allegedly lewd behavior in an airport bathroom, it was called “the tearoom trade.”

But social researchers knew almost nothing about it.

So Laud Humphreys, a young graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, spent months hanging out in the public restrooms of St. Louis’ Forest Park.

He wanted to observe the tearoom trade in action: men who met for brief, anonymous homosexual trysts in public. He wanted to discover what compelled them.

Humphreys, who died in 1988, would have been transfixed by the senator’s case, his biographers say.

He discovered that the majority of men visiting “tearooms” were married and generally upstanding citizens who wanted a quick sexual release. Many did not think of themselves as gay or bisexual.

In his 1970 Ph.D. dissertation, “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Personal Places,” Humphreys detailed the trade’s constant rituals: shoe-tapping and reaching under the stalls as a covert way to seek out willing partners.

“This is exactly what you find in the case of (U.S. Sen.) Larry Craig,” said John Galliher, sociology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and co-author of a Humphreys biography.

Humphreys noted how the men would use silent signals — call-and-response foot-tapping and finger-pointing — to seek out willing partners.

It was as if the Craig case had been plucked from Humphreys’ pages, said Wayne Brekhus, sociology professor and biography co-author.

Kind of blows the "wide stance" defense right out of the water, doesn't it?

So to speak ...

(h/t Eschaton commenter smarty jones)