tence “anger” could become a synonym for “hostility,” which in turn could get equated with “aggression”—without any of the three ever being closely defined. Where one minute he seemed to equate “resistance” with “eroticism” (omitting tenderness, etc.), the next he’d be saying that resistance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for erotic arousal, and then two beats later he’d be discussing “compatibility” as no less necessary an ingredient, even though he’d earlier argued that erotic zest necessarily declines in direct proportion to harmonious domesticity. He was a maddening conversationalist, all at once bracing, elusive, seductive, amusing—and profoundly self-satisfied. WHEN I RECOUNTED all of this to my close friend, the literary critic Dick Poirier, it turned out he’d recently had dinner with Tripp at Gore Vidal’s place. (Gore was one of many celebrities who cooperated with Kinsey in recording their sexual history.) Immensely shrewd about people, Dick’s conclusion was that Tripp was a “medicine man”—meaning “an impenetrable bundle of inside information, magical insights and pure hokum. I could have listened to him all night.” As quixotic, if provocative, as I found Tripp’s claims, he proved entirely on target in his prediction of my likely reception at the Kinsey Institute. During my research travels in the past few years in search of manuscript sources relating to the history of sexuality, I found the archivists at most of the libraries I visited—and especially the Lilly Library in Indiana, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Countway Library of Medicine in Boston—willing to go out of their way to be helpful. Without hesitation (and with occasional glee), they dug out an assortment of “forbidden,” and uncatalogued, material for my examination. However, at the very citadel of sexology, the Kinsey Institute, the reception was quite different, just as Tripp had predicted. The night before I left for Indiana, he had me to dinner to “prepare” me for the current politics in play there. Kinsey, he told me, had been especially interested in historical material and collected a large amount of it—but it was all now under lock and key. Paul Gebhard, then the head of the Institute, was by nature a cautious man and unlikely to be forthcoming. That proved an understatement. On my first day at the Institute, I did as Tripp advised: I told Gebhard that Tripp had made me aware of the Institute’s uncatalogued storehouse of historical material and had in particular recommended that I look at Kinsey’s lengthy correspondence, beginning in 1951, with an international businessmen named Sixt Kapff, who in his letters to Kinsey described in rich detail his homosexual adventures while traveling the world. Tripp told me that Kapff had also served as Kinsey’s guide when he visited Europe in 1955, which had put to rest any doubts Kinsey may have had about Kapff’s reliability as a witness. Accompanying Kapff on his varied rounds, Kinsey became fully convinced that his reports, scrupulous and unique, were a kind of “World Guide to Gay Male Sex.” Soon after, Kapff also served as Tripp’s guide when on a trip to Europe. Tripp returned home with a full set of photocopies of Kapff’s lengthy correspondence with Kinsey. “[C]ertainly,” he wrote Kapff, “it’s a treasure trove of cross-cultural sex information, containing as it does many delicate differentiations you January–February 2022 29
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