Were his methods ethical? Shit no! Very few fucks were given about his subjects' consent -- which is ironic, considering the many levels of fucking otherwise involved in the study. However, here's the absolute craziest part about Humphreys' study: It worked. Not in a "earned the dude scores of grants and accolades" way -- although the Tearoom Trade study remains a scientific landmark, that's mainly because it's a textbook example of unethical social research. No, the study actually yielded positive results for the gay community.

geralt/Pixabay
Plot twist, motherfuckers!

Before Humphreys' study, the public opinion about men participating in public gay shenanigans held that they were dangerous social and sexual deviants. The study revealed that they were mostly regular folks and upstanding citizens. In fact, the majority of them were regular family men who, due to the attitudes of the era, had no other outlet to this side of their sexuality. Though this presumably opened a whole new can of worms of the "Hold on, you told me you were working overtime" nature, the gay community by and large welcomed the study. Hell, even the 1960s police found itself putting one foot in the "gays are people, too" bandwagon (sort of), as many precincts realized the tearoom trade was a victimless "crime" and stopped actively stomping on the people practicing it, instead focusing on being the tolerant and fair organization we know the police as today.

His name was George White, and he was a noted federal narcotics agent and CIA "consultant" who somehow ended up with something of a no-nonsense reputation, despite being all nonsense. At some point in 1953, the CIA put White in charge of Midnight Climax, an illicit, barely-controlled operation that would run rampant until the Agency would relocate its bag of fucks to give in 1964. Over the intervening 11 years, White acted as a strange Opposite Batman. During the day, he was a hardass Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent. When the sun set, he put on his silk pajamas and started overseeing Midnight Climax, in which he and his cohorts spiked the drinks of thousands of unwitting San Francisco and New York men with LSD, luring them into agency-sponsored brothels just to see what would happen. Yes, the government created a Bill Cosby Division.

Viscious-Speed/Pixabay
Spoiler: As much illicit sex as the Johns could see behind the pretty colors would happen.

Amidst the dirty posters, velvet curtains, and barrages of nudity, agents were watching behind two-way mirrors and recording everything with hidden cameras and microphones. In the middle of it all sat George White, a demigod drunk on power and boobs, and presumably also the pitcher of martini he had about him at most hours. Again, not the wisest move in CIA history.

Technically, the program was all about finding out if LSD had military and/or espionage applications. In practice, things soon devolved into "titty titty titty titty beer!" However, they were able to uncover many handy things re: surveillance techniques, along with the inevitable experience in sexual blackmail, because of course. Perhaps most interestingly, the old adage that the post-coital cigarette break is the optimal time for a man to spill his secrets is said to hail from this study. Because sometimes, a good trope is worth the mental torture of thousands.

Let's say you're ambling around in a forest, when suddenly you come across a deep, wide chasm. Crossing it is a scary, ancient suspension bridge that looks not unlike the one Indiana Jones was forced to hack up in the finale of Temple Of Doom. Beside the bridge there stands an old man. He gives you a quest: You must walk across this dangerous, scary bridge. Then, once you get to the other side, seek out a pretty lady nearby and have a sexually suggestive conversation with her.

What the fuck, right? Are you now a character in the world's worst video game? Some strange, politically correct remake of Custer's Revenge with pixelated nudity and racism replaced with awkwardness and plain old stupidity?

Nope! Not only was what I just described an actual 1974 scientific experiment known as the Capilano suspension bridge experiment, but they didn't even play fair and recruit volunteers -- they just hung around a scary-ass suspension bridge and latched onto whatever action hero outdoorsman / complete idiot dared to cross it.

smh.com
"What about the 17 people we've seen falling down in the last hour?" "Eh, just chalk them up as a control group."

The bridge, as seen above, was a goddamned nightmare: a five-foot-wide, 450-foot-long rickety wooden-boards-and-wire-cables thing that was known to "tilt, sway and wobble", and was equipped with extremely low wire cable handrails which added to the "Fuck, I'm going to fall and die" effect seemingly custom-built into the design. During the experiment, the men who dared to cross the bridge were greeted on the other side by an attractive lady, who pounced on the adrenaline- and terror-addled guys. She said she was conducting a survey, and had them fill out a specifically designed questionnaire. After they were done, she'd engage in conversation, and cap things off by offering the subject her phone number "in case they wanted to discuss the results." Then they repeated the experiment with a male interviewer, and brought in a control group who crossed a nearby bridge that was much sturdier and a lot closer to the ground.

While no one really gave a crap about the male interviewer, the female one received a lot more calls. Incidentally, the same group also peppered their questionnaire with far more sexual imagery than the others. And that, friends, is how researchers found that fear and sexual desire are linked through misattribution of arousal, using the most bullshit plot available to science.

That is all legitimate and respectable science. It's just that even an important scientific discovery takes on a very different shade when you find out it was all orchestrated by a dude indulging in a creepy sex version of a gross-out game you played when you were five.