ABSTRACT
Like other games of chance, deviant sexual encounters focus on an eventual reward. The tactics are determined by the players' calculations of how best to maximize profit, the primary reward being sexual pleasures under preferred circumstances and the chief cost being possible exposure to a hostile community. A man who knows nothing of the homosexual game in progress may enter a restroom, spend a minute urinating, and leave, unwittingly playing an important role in a tearoom encounter. Unlike rules, strategies vary considerably from car to bar to bathhouse, coffeehouse, or tearoom. Within the boundaries of the game, one world of rules, roles, strategies, and goals is in operation; outside the membrane, another world is in effect. Arrival through the membrane constitutes a "birth" into a new world of action; departure from this world constitutes a "death" to the world of the encounter and a payoff stage for the participant who passes on.
