C. A. TRIPP was born in Denton, Texas, a small town not far north of Dallas, on October 4, 1919. His father was an amiable cabinet-making teacher and hardware store proprietor. His mother, the descendant of early settlers, came from a family that owned much of Denton’s real estate and lived in its grandest residence. More temperamental than her husband, a fierce champion of conservative Christian values, she was quick to condemn what she viewed as immorality. In short, Tripp’s mother was a classic Southern-belle enforcer of “good behavior.”
Perhaps, then, it is something of a wonder that her son went on to write a book that turned traditional notions of sexual behavior upside down. The Homosexual Matrix, published in 1975, was the first work to explain in cogent psychological terms why homosexuality is not a developmental failure to achieve heterosexuality. That had been the standard view: gays are defective straights. Several prominent sex researchers, notably Alfred Kinsey, psychologist Evelyn Hooker, and Yale biologist Frank Beach had published evidence that challenged the accuracy of this mainstream belief. But until Matrix came along, no one had produced a systematic analysis of the basic mystery: if homosexuals aren’t wrecks on the highway to heterosexuality, then what are they?
Tripp turned the question around and asked, What are heterosexuals? His answer appalled many clinicians and much of the general public. With a novel theory of sexual attraction, synthesized from the work of others and from his own insights gathered during a long career as a psychologist in private practice, he argued that gay people and straight people develop their orientations in exactly the same ways. In other words, they are equally valid products of the same sexual system. The idea jolted champions of the orthodox belief that homosexuality derives from negative experiences. Tripp declared that, on the contrary, positive experiences are what propel people down any specific path, whether it be gay, lesbian, or straight.
“[P]erhaps the single most troubling assumption,” Tripp wrote in Matrix, “has been that every mature person would be heterosexual were it not for various fears and neuroses developed from parental and social misfortunes.” In the preface to the updated edition (1987), he noted that even scientists can “backslide into the popular but untenable position of artificially dividing all people into heterosexual and homosexual categories, and thinking of them as normal versus abnormal. To the unwary this supports the unsupportable notion that maleness comes in two varieties: regular and impaired (except that if you are on top you are never impaired, and if you are on the bottom you always are).”
Tripp went even further. Citing Alfred Kinsey’s data on the consequences of early puberty in human males, and Frank Beach’s experimental findings about the sexuality of higher mammals, Tripp suggested that many gay men, far from reaching their sexual destination on the breakdown lane, in fact get there via the fast lane. Kinsey found, for example, that males who hit puberty early tend to have a much higher “sex rate” (number of orgasms) than those who reach it late, not only during adolescence but also for the rest of their lives. In addition he found that males early to puberty are more likely to engage in homosexual behavior—again, both during adolescence and throughout adulthood. Beach found that in rats, the “champion mounters,” or the most vigorous copulators when mating with females, are more inclined to homosexual behavior than are average mounters, and even reverse sex roles from “top” to “bottom” with greater alacrity. Indeed, these rats surpassed the more heterosexually inclined rats when it came to hormone measurements. High sex rates and high testosterone levels are, of course, prime gauges of virility. Their correlation with homosexuality therefore challenged the idea that gay males are damaged goods in the masculinity department. Indeed, it suggested quite the opposite.
Matrix delved into many other research findings that showed that homosexuality is an integral and natural component of human sexuality. This overall message, based as it was on impeccable science, made an enormous impact when the book appeared. Wardell Pomeroy, a co-author of the Kinsey Reports, called it “[u]nquestionably the best book I have ever read on the subject of homosexuality. … A book destined to become a classic.” Merle Miller, the respected novelist and broadcaster who in 1971 had published On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual, wrote, “I am not inclined to superlatives, but I have found it the most valuable book on the subject that has ever been published. … I feel much enlarged by having read it.” Many other prominent sex researchers and critics agreed, as did a big chunk of the general public, which bought a total of nearly 500,000 copies, surely the still-standing sales record for a book on homosexuality.
How did a product of small-town Texas, the son of a matriarch who espoused ironclad traditional morality, become a prime mover in America’s shift toward a more tolerant view of homosexuality? One answer is that Tripp, even as a very young boy, was sexually precocious. At first glance this idea may strike many as glib or even prurient. Hold on.
Kinsey’s findings on the correlation between early puberty, high sex rate, and homosexuality are a subject deserving much further study. The main question is, Why do boys who are able to ejaculate at, say, age eleven, later exhibit such marked differences from boys who hit puberty at thirteen or fourteen? The differences are, in fact, quite striking indeed. But here is not the place to itemize all the known details of those differences, or to go into the background of what admittedly remains something of a mystery. Interested readers should consult Tripp’s Matrix, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and, this October, C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (to be published by Free Press).
Of concern here is the psychological impact of early puberty among males. Both Kinsey and Tripp discussed the possibility that, if one gets to potency well before the average age (13-ish), three factors shape what follows. First, adults are not policing sexual behavior because they don’t expect it to be taking place. Second, thus the children in question aren’t getting messages that sex is a shameful thing. Third, they find out for themselves that God is not going to strike them dead for daring to experiment.
Tripp further elaborated this line of reasoning. In his forthcoming book on Lincoln, he suggests that the early discovery that orgasm is a joyful and amazing but almost effortless experience serves as a kind of inoculation against all kinds of shame-based teachings. Crudely put, it provides a defense against conventional anti-sex morals. (Kinsey’s findings about early puberty apply only to boys—a rather puzzling result, for which I have no good explanation.) In other words, a boy discovers that orgasm is wonderful before his parents or other elders have told him it is reprehensible self-pollution. A year, or two, or three follow, and the warnings are duly delivered. The boy then begins to realize that not everything the elders say is true, for he has simple proof: familiarity with a pleasure for which he has received zero punishment (unless, of course, he’s suffered the misfortune of a judgmental guardian catching him in the act).
What traits, Tripp goes on, would one expect to find in individuals thus blessed? Short answer: independent thinking, coupled with a reflexive skepticism of righteous authority figures, such as preachers warning of hellfire and damnation.
THE QUESTION has doubtless arisen: What does any of this have to do with Abraham Lincoln? As Tripp’s forthcoming book will make clear, a great deal. The book goes far beyond this particular subject, with analysis of Lincoln’s life through the prism of many other aspects of sex research. But the following offers a small preview of what’s in store.
One of Lincoln’s outstanding traits was that he had very little use for conventional, hellfire-based morality. At the same time, however, he had a supremely developed sense of ethics: not for nothing was he nicknamed Honest Abe. He believed in fair play, he abhorred injustice, he painstakingly held himself to the highest standards of right versus wrong. But when it came to “morals”—a sense of sexual taboo, for example—he was remarkably blithe. He also didn’t believe in a punitive afterlife, or indeed in any kind of afterlife. Neither hell nor heaven played a role in his view of human destiny. Actually, he took little stock in organized religion of any kind. Some scholars and general readers will dispute this assertion. Their objections are addressed in Tripp’s book.
It is perhaps not generally known that Lincoln had an amazingly bawdy sense of humor. The evidence for this from contemporary sources is massive and incontrovertible, but for some reason—one doesn’t have to think very hard to figure it out—the iconic Lincoln in the public imagination was not a man who reveled in telling off-color jokes and stories. But he was just such a man, extraordinarily so. Indeed the only American president who perhaps even approached the intensity of Lincoln’s sex-mindedness was John F. Kennedy.
How was it that Lincoln made a point of adhering to the strictest ethical standards on the one hand, while on the other flouting Victorian conventions of prudery with a zest that astounded—and in many cases, horrified—men who personally knew him? (Lincoln limited his “dirty” jokes and stories to all-male audiences.) One answer, Tripp argues, was his extremely early puberty. Via a reliable eyewitness account of the age at which Lincoln hit his adolescent “growth spurt”—a developmental phase that generally arrives some months after the ability to ejaculate—Tripp places Lincoln’s onset of puberty at age nine.
Recall Kinsey’s findings about the correlates of early puberty (which, by the way, strengthen markedly the earlier the onset comes). First, there is the high lifetime sex rate. Second, there is the increased probability of lifelong homosexual behavior. Add to this Lincoln’s apparently very robust sexual fantasy life, as evidenced by his jokes and storytelling, and a rather compelling picture begins to emerge. The minimum one can conclude is that Lincoln very likely was a highly sexed man, that he had a strong sex drive. One wonders: what did he do with it?
The record shows that Lincoln didn’t exert much effort to find a sexual outlet with women. Yes, he married and he had four children. But there is no reliable evidence that he ever had sexual relations with any woman other than Mary Todd. Moreover, the Ann Rutledge legend notwithstanding (see my article in the March-April 2004 G&LR), there is no reliable evidence that he ever felt sexually attracted to, or romantically pursued, any woman except for his wife. Quite simply, he was not a woman chaser. Very much the opposite, in fact, and for this there is abundant and vivid evidence: Lincoln almost literally ran away from eligible girls and women until he married at the late age of 33, a union he had delayed and agonized over, and finally consummated with what appears to have been considerable reluctance.
Who, then, did Lincoln chase sexually, and whose sexual overtures did he welcome? The answer will be available in October with the publication of Tripp’s book. Let the foregoing serve as an introduction to Tripp’s case that Abraham Lincoln found his sexual satisfactions not with women, but with men.
Tripp put final touches on his Lincoln book on May 3, 2003, two weeks to the day before he died. He sustained lucidity and maintained an almost superhuman stamina, diligently working at his computer every day, until practically the very end.
How was he able to produce the mores-defying Matrix, never mind the even more incendiary Lincoln study, given the deeply conservative, morals-obsessed environment of his childhood? Courage, certainly, played a role, as did simple strength of conviction. But neither courage nor conviction fully explains it.
The question of early puberty also cannot fully explain it. But it happens to have been a factor in Tripp’s case. The details I will not go into here. Suffice it to say, Tripp knew from an early age that his mother’s admonishments about sex did not square with what he personally knew to be true. That knowledge gave him room to grow, and with it the license, much later in life, to tell the truth as he saw it.
