Starring Mark O’Halloran in the lead role of pre-queer sociologist Laud Humphreys ( † USA 1988), Part I begins in St. Louis in 1967 to give poetic insight into how the civil and social rights movement created the backdrop for his still controversial PhD, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Part II begins tensely in Los Angeles in 1975, where Humphreys is on the cusp of republishing Tearoom Trade in the radically different post-Stonewall and post-Watergate USA. The relevance one of sociology’s most radical studies has to contemporary discussions of intimacy, social presentation, surveillance and data control is delicately carried by visual intensities and rich performances that keep as many secrets as they give away.