BY 1974, I had grown increasingly absorbed in the new scholarly field of the history of sexual behavior and had been making periodic research trips looking for buried source materials in various manuscript libraries. “I’ve long said that historical study isn’t ‘useful’ (relevant),” I wrote in my diary at the end of February 1975, “because past experience is so different from ours. Now, as regards my interest in sexual behavior in the past, I’ve realized its study is useful precisely because that experience was so different.”
I also began to teach a course on the subject and to review some of the books that were beginning to appear. One that I found particularly original—despite its exasperatingly misogynistic overtones—was C. A. Tripp’s 1975 book The Homosexual Matrix. I’d never heard his name before, but a few inquiries turned up the fact that, although Tripp was 56, The Homosexual Matrix was his first book. Intrigued, I dug a little deeper and discovered that he’d been born in Denton, Texas, in 1919, had studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, become a staff member in the Eastman Kodak Company’s research department, and served in the Navy during World War II.
In the postwar period, Tripp and a long-time friend, Bill Dellenback, started a small photographic firm. One early customer was the well-known psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who’d studied with Freud at the University of Vienna but had fled the Nazis (he was Jewish) in 1938, heading for New York. Lacking a medical degree, Reik had found himself at odds with the school of medically trained psychoanalysts then dominant in the U.S. and decided to found the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (which is still active) to train so-called “lay” analysts. Reik also wrote a number of influential books, including the 1948 bestseller Listening with the Third Ear.
Tripp’s marginal success as a photographer coincided with his growing interest in psychology, and Reik became something of a mentor, even writing a placating letter to Tripp’s parents expressing enthusiasm for their son’s gifts and characterizing him as “having an unusual facility for this kind of work”—being “just such young men we need [sic].” But it had been Tripp himself who, in 1948, immediately after reading Kinsey’s just-published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (co-authored with Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin), simply picked up the phone one day and called Kinsey directly. We have no detailed record of what was said, but Kinsey did take the call, and something about the young man’s authoritative boldness caught the older man’s attention.
Tripp made a point of letting Kinsey know that he was himself homosexual and was writing a book on the subject.
(He actually had begun, but The Homosexual Matrix was nearly three decades off.) He stressed, too, that he was a skilled photographer. Possibly Tripp had heard through the grapevine that Kinsey had decided to employ his skill at direct observation to filming actual sexual activity. In any case, he invited Tripp to visit his research institute in Bloomington, Indiana.
Tripp wasted no time. Within weeks, he showed up at Kinsey’s door—and stayed for the better part of three days. After returning to New York, he sent Kinsey an extraordinary letter of thanks (and Tripp was no one’s idea of a sycophant): “It is almost impossible for me to tell you how much I learned from you during my visit last week. … Little wonder you win co-operation from everyone. … I think it is your drive that makes everything such a success, then the honesty and personality stand out. For me, the greatest thing seemed to be the way you meet objections and the unspoken generosity you give at those moments when you meet something in another person which is contrary to what you know to be the case, or the kind way you have of rejecting what you consider worthless.” (Tripp had probably told Kinsey that he was leaning towards psychology as a career, and in response the good doctor possibly gave mild vent to his well-known hostility—even contempt—for psychoanalysis.) “Anyway,” Tripp concluded his letter, “I’m with you for life and everything I can do is not enough.”
Kinsey’s response was encouraging: “I very much enjoyed your visit here at Bloomington and look forward to contact with you when we come east to New York. You have been very good to offer such extended help and we shall be delighted to utilize it.” From that point on, Tripp, a masterful strategist, made himself entirely available to Kinsey, eager to do him favors and proving again and again in the coming years that nothing was too much for him. Tripp never became (or wished to become) a member of the staff, but, reliable and energetic, he served as a kind of courier, a listening post in faraway lands (the East Coast). Kinsey, in turn, became Tripp’s mentor, collaborator, and friend. In gratitude, Tripp would make Kinsey an occasional present of something he thought he’d enjoy, such as a recording of Gertrude Stein reading her The Making of Americans, or “paper-shelled” pecans. (Kinsey reported back that the Texas pecans “bring back memories of bug hunting days in Texas, and I like them very much.”)
One of Kinsey’s more important early requests was for Tripp to arrange for, produce, and occasionally star in filmed sessions of sexual activity. Tripp himself made a number of masturbation films, as well as several with an assortment of male partners—though his lover, the dancer Oliver (“Ollie”) Kostock, was initially reluctant to become involved. Ollie had during the 1940s and ‘50s been building a reputation with a variety of companies that included the Alwin Nikolais Dance Theater, the Murray Louis Dance Company and, most prominently, the Hanya Holm troupe. When Tripp finally succeeded in getting Ollie to make a film, Tripp confided in a letter to Kinsey that “the psychology involved is formidable.”
Tripp found it relatively easy to hire “models” for most of the films. He paid $3 per orgasm or $6 for each pair of performers. Within a few months, he’d produced, along with a considerable number of “stills,” 250 feet of “motion pictures on a masturbation composite,” which amounted to seven rolls. Fifty feet of it included “16mm rolls of homosexual petting and intercourse between two nineteen-year-old boys.” He also succeeded in enlisting Bill Dellenback, his earlier partner in a short-lived photography firm. (By spring 1950, Dellenback had taken up permanent residence in Bloomington.) The many other diverse—and unpaid—recruits included a graduate student and his wife, the latter insisting that her face not be shown. Kinsey was particularly pleased with the still photographs, declaring them “the best that any photographer has yet made,” and he suggested that henceforth he refer all magazine and newspaper requests directly to Tripp. “Thanks tremendously for this work,” Kinsey added. “It is splendid, and definitely what we need.” He would eventually elevate Tripp to the exalted rank—there were only 45 members—of “visiting specialist,” and the only two people Kinsey saw with any regularity on his trips to New York were Tripp and the gay novelist Glenway Wescott.
Perhaps the most notable contribution Tripp made during the first two years of his acquaintance with Kinsey was securing the bulk of Robert Latou Dickinson’s archives immediately following the pioneering gynecologist’s death in 1950. Dickinson was among the first obstetricians to obtain detailed sexual histories—5,200 in all—and from 1935 to 1941, he also carried out a path-breaking study of human homosexuality that strongly influenced Kinsey’s own interview techniques. On learning of Dickinson’s death, Kinsey immediately notified the Institute’s lawyers—Morris Ernst, co-founder of the ACLU, and Harriet Pilpel, the prominent women’s rights activist—for help in securing Dickinson’s library, notebooks, and case histories. He also urged Tripp to put himself at Ernst and Pilpel’s disposal in securing and transporting the material to Bloomington. Tripp went to work immediately, and within two weeks he was able to write Kinsey that the job had been successfully completed and that 41 packages containing the contents of Dickinson’s archive were on their way via Railway Express.
Despite Kinsey’s scorn for psychology, he took note of Tripp’s growing interest in becoming a therapist and encouraged him to enroll in a doctoral program. Tripp followed his advice and enrolled in NYU’s program in clinical psychology. “Frankly,” he wrote, “it almost ‘did me in.’” Yet he completed the work in 1957, the year after Kinsey’s death. Tripp soon opened a private practice and taught for nearly a decade at New York’s Downstate Medical Center. By the mid-1960s, he had a thriving practice as a psychoanalyst, and he and Ollie had bought a house some twenty miles from New York City with a spectacular view overlooking the Hudson River at the Tappan Zee bridge. He even went back to his abandoned project of writing a book on homosexuality, and within a few years he thought he finally had enough material. Doubleday agreed and gave him a contract.
After Kinsey’s death, it seemed likely for a time that a fraught controversy over the succession at the Institute would end with Paul Gebhard and Wardell Pomeroy jointly sharing leadership. Certain prominent insiders, however—not including Tripp—insisted that Pomeroy’s “frivolous” side (which seems to have meant, in part, his “excessive” enjoyment of sex) was not to be trusted. In the upshot, to avoid a protracted battle, the mantle was passed to Gebhard, about whom Tripp had decidedly mixed feelings. In a confidential letter, he predicted “the fast erosion of the Institute’s prestige within the scientific community” and declared that the outline it was circulating for a pending study of homosexuality asked “the wrong set of questions,” the result of “aggressive ignorance.”
Kinsey had been Tripp’s hero, and Kinsey was gone. “Looking back,” Tripp wrote Gebhard early in 1967, “I’ve decided I may never understand how a man with his ‘square’ background ever managed to walk thru the minefield of homosexual research without making any real errors. Of course, he didn’t cover much of the ground that now lies before you. Nevertheless, he just should have made more errors; it’s like some curious piece of magic to me.”
MY OWN ACQUAINTANCE with Tripp began some eight years later, when the New York Times Sunday Book Review weighed in with a blistering review of Tripp’s long-incubating book The Homosexual Matrix. The Times had assigned the review to Dr. Herbert Hendin, director of “psychosocial studies” at the Center for Policy Research—the same Hendin who two months earlier had published an op-ed in the Times warning that “the increasing acceptance of homosexuality parallels increasing attacks on the family.” Harvey Shapiro, head of the Book Review and known to be somewhat homophobic, had his man: he promptly asked Hendin to review Tripp’s book.
The review appeared on October 26, 1975. It met all the requirements—of the homophobes, that is. Hendin labeled the book “pseudoscience” and summarily dismissed its author as “an erudite con man.” He mocked Tripp’s suggestion that homosexual males may come from a “sexually precocious segment of the population” and accused him of attempting to “hawk” homosexuality. Hendin rejected Tripp’s denunciation of psychotherapists “who try to change homosexuals who do not want to change,” deploring instead those therapists who pressured or encouraged young men to accept their homosexuality.
Publishers get an advance copy of the Sunday Times Book Review, and Tripp’s editor—Tripp and I had still not met—sent me a copy of the review. I immediately wrote to Harvey Shapiro (whom I knew only as a voice over the phone to discuss various review assignments) protesting the Hendin review as a “disastrously simple-minded (and mis-stated) summary of what is probably the most complex statement on homosexuality—on all sexuality—made in several decades at least.”
I made it clear to Shapiro that I was writing to him privately, not as a “letter to the editor,” in the hope that it wasn’t too late to do justice to the book, perhaps in the form of a “Last Word” column, a sort of second opinion that the Times periodically featured. I expressed a willingness to take on the assignment, but having earlier come out as gay, I acknowledged that “I’m not thought to be a disinterested party,” and suggested a few “neutral” names, including the psychiatrists Robert Coles, Robert Gould, and Robert Liebert. The important thing, I wrote, was not that I do a counter-review but that “this remarkable book should not be jeopardized by the small-mindedness of a single reviewer.” “Nor should the Times,” I brazenly added, “be irrevocably linked with that single point of view.”
Within 48 hours, Shapiro bluntly responded: no second review would be possible. Period. Tripp dropped me a note of thanks for at least having tried and—in a letter to his friend Clark Polak (the Philadelphia gay activist, co-founder of the Janus Society and Drum magazine)—expressed concern that my intervention might cost me: “Duberman has gone so far out of his way in support of Matrix, and is cited so much in all sorts of correspondence [that]I’m sad … the wound being opened again may bury him altogether with the Times in future … tho maybe he’s already buried there.” (It was hard to know. After I came out publicly in late 1971, ever fewer invitations had been arriving to write for mainstream publications like The Nation, The New Republic—and the Times.)
Still, the “Shapiro incident” may not have been causal, but merely coincidental. In fact, a month after my attempted intervention, Shapiro printed only brief excerpts from half a dozen letters responding to the Hendin review, omitting the one from Tripp entirely, but gave my letter a full, unedited two columns. I acknowledged in my letter that “like all highly innovative work, Tripp’s study is open to challenge. I was myself bothered that some of his generalizations seemed based on limited evidence. And I think his view of female sexuality is, in part, outmoded and patronizing.” Nonetheless, I went on, “The Homosexual Matrix is literally astonishing—it opens the eyes. Time and again Tripp takes our culture’s set formulas—that homosexuality is far more characteristic of city than of town life; that promiscuity is a function of ‘neurotic insecurity,’ etc.—and examines them with such devastating logic and imaginative force that we can never again settle for the familiar clichés.”
Tripp even dares, I went on, to argue that “sexual interest is whetted by stress and by barriers that have to be surmounted, [and that]sexual attraction hinges to a significant degree on distance and tension—‘resistance’ is Tripp’s preferred phrase.” As for Hendin, I wrote that “it was his prerogative to disagree with Tripp’s analyses, but he has the responsibility to portray them accurately rather than to parody them. He also has the responsibility to uncover his own attitudinal bias, to try to understand how his distaste for a line of argument might lead him to distort its premises (thus conveniently avoiding its consequences.)” “It’s dismaying,” I concluded, “that Tripp’s book … has been so caricatured and trivialized. I can only hope that potential readers, unlike the Times’ reviewer, will prove willing to confront its bold, discomforting propositions.”
As is well known, controversy often quickens book sales. In the upshot, The Homosexual Matrix would in the years ahead sell some half a million copies. But back in the mid-’70s it looked for a time as if the book might sink under the weight of the Times’ displeasure. Convinced that The Homosexual Matrix warranted serious appraisal, and out of concern that its uncommon insights would be ignored and its provocations buried, I decided to put together two informal gatherings of LGBT scholars. To that end I invited some fifteen or so lesbian and gay academics to gather at a friend’s spacious apartment with Tripp to discuss the book—including what some of us took to be its shortcomings. The first session met on February 2, 1976.
Shortly before that, I got a somewhat frantic call from Arno Karlen (who I knew only casually and who in 1972 had published Sexuality and Homosexuality), saying he had to see me, and promising that it would be “for fifteen minutes, not more.” We—or rather Arno—went on for almost three hours, ablaze with outrage, denouncing Tripp’s book as “junk, disreputable, dishonest.” Arno had chosen to vent in my living room, it turned out, on the theory that—because I’d blurbed the book—I was somehow tied into what he called “the conspiracy to elevate it to respectability.” I pointed out that a number of prominent figures had also praised the book, including the Johns Hopkins sexologist John Money, Kinsey’s co-author Wardell Pomeroy, the anthropologist Frank Beach, and the psychiatrist Judd Marmor, president of the American Psychiatric Association. The praise, Arno fumed, “was part of a larger disintegration of standards, a conscious willingness to applaud the politically chic at the expense of scientific truth.”
During Arno’s self-indulgent rampage, I tried to suggest several times that some of his fury might relate to the fact that Tripp’s book challenged several of his own assumptions in Sexuality and Homosexuality, primarily the assertion that psychiatric treatment could cure the “maladjustment” of homosexuality. When, on the third go-round, he continued to ignore the suggestion, I became explicit: “I’ve re-read Sexuality and Homosexuality several times,” I bluntly said, “and each time I’ve become more aware of its homophobic subtext.” I told him that in a limited way I did agree with his criticism of Tripp, and in particular with his failure to cite evidence in support of some of his more suspect assertions (for example, the larger penis size of gay men). Comparable criticism regarding evidence and bias, I added, could be made of any book in the social sciences. “No!” Arno spat out furiously, “not to the same degree!” With his anger verging on hysteria, and after having rehearsed the same arguments over and over, I simply called a halt, telling him that I was already late for an appointment.
* To be continued in the next issue…
