This is interesting. Since the Larry Craig incident there’s been an uptick in interest in one Laud Humphreys, whose 1970 work “The Tearoom Trade” was one of the first attempts to study, and explain, what happens anonymously in those men’s room stalls.

Humphreys noted that a great many of the men who got their jollies in such a fashion were law and order (and morality) conservatives. And in a subsequent work, not finished before his death, he suggested that these guys put on their “breastplate of righteousness,” were finger-wagging moralists specifically because of their secret pursuits:

Unable to control themselves in that part of their lives, they put on the defensive “breastplate,” redoubling their efforts elsewhere: “Motivated largely by his own awareness of the discreditable nature of his secret behavior,” wrote Humphreys in his dissertation, “the covert deviant develops a presentation of self that is respectable to a fault. His whole lifestyle becomes an incarnation of what is proper and orthodox.”

They do it, so they know other people do it; and they want, perhaps, the law to address it, to try and put a stop to that which they cannot themselves stop.