The Homosexual Matrix

The Homosexual Matrix

Cover of the first edition
Author	Clarence Arthur Tripp
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Homosexuality
Published	1975 (McGraw-Hill Book Company)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	314 (hardcover edition)
ISBN	978-0070652019

The Homosexual Matrix (1975; second edition 1987) is a work about homosexuality by psychologist Clarence Arthur Tripp. The book was influential, and has received praise as an important discussion of homosexuality, but has also been criticized on various grounds.

Summary

Tripp expounds a social learning theory about the development of sexual orientation, arguing that heterosexuality and homosexuality are the result of societal expectation: people are gay or straight because they are taught to be that way.^[1] He gives a critical account of psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality,^[2] arguing that they are based on flawed assumptions.^[3]

Discussing the nature of eroticism, Tripp argues that physical attractiveness is the most important determinant of sexual desirability, while social class and status are relatively unimportant.^[4] He believes that high levels of erotic feeling depend on resistance and the overcoming of barriers, especially for men.^[5] Tripp notes that brief sexual encounters can be affectionate and romantic, like love affairs in brief, and that for many men one of the primary attractions of impersonal sex is that it allows each participant to imagine that he is having sex with the ideal partner.^[4] Tripp states that human males have a stronger sex drive than human females,^[6] and that while the sexual activities of lesbians are not focused on the genitals, those of gay men are.^[7]

Tripp points out that some gay men are able to maintain long-term monogamous relationships, and that such relationships may have been underestimated in the literature. He suggests that long-term gay couples owe the stability of their relationships to their understanding that sexual intensity with a single partner wanes, and that an appetite for new partners is inevitable. In Tripp's view, sexual jealousy can sometimes be overcome because of each partner's intuitive insight into the peculiarities of male sexuality.^[8]

Scholarly reception

Anthropologist Donald Symons, writing in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), argued that Tripp's hypothesis that erotic feeling depends on resistance makes adaptive sense, since females may almost always have been a scare sexual resource in natural human habitats and selection favors the experience of pleasure or satisfaction not only in consummation but in the effort to consummate.^[5] Psychologist Alan P. Bell and sociologists Martin S. Weinberg and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, writing in Sexual Preference (1981), observed that Tripp ridicules the way in which theorists have attributed the development of male homosexuality to "almost any kind of maternal relationship". In their view, while Tripp correctly cautions against adding further "post hoc" explanations, some studies suggest that "prehomosexual" boys have atypical relationships with their mothers.^[9]

Sociologist Jonathan Dollimore described Tripp's account of psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality an over-simplification bordering on parody.^[2] Jurist and economist Richard Posner wrote that Tripp revives psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's theory that masturbation helps to cause homosexuality by fixating a boy on the male genitals, based on evidence that homosexuals begin masturbating earlier than heterosexuals. Posner criticized the theory on the grounds that "homosexuality and early masturbation could be effects of whatever it is that causes homosexuality".^[10] Geneticist Dean Hamer wrote that The Homosexual Matrix was influential, and that Tripp provides the clearest articulation of the social learning theory of sexual orientation. However, Hamer found the theory implausible, and rejects it on numerous grounds, arguing that it is inconsistent with anthropological evidence and human evolutionary history, and fails to explain the existence of homosexuality.^[1] Historian Martin Duberman described The Homosexual Matrix as "rich and (especially in its misogynistic passages) flawed".^[11] Gay scholar John Lauritsen commended the book as a useful work on homosexuality.^[12] Queer theorist David M. Halperin noted that Tripp expands on Alfred C. Kinsey's observation that "inversion and homosexuality are two distinct and not always correlated types of behavior."^[13]

References

Footnotes

1. Hamer 1994. p. 176.
2. Dollimore 1991. p. 197.
3. Tripp 1975. p. 80.
4. Symons 1979. p. 295.
5. Symons 1979. p. 271.
6. Symons 1979. p. 264.
7. Symons 1979. p. 298.
8. Symons 1979. pp. 296-297.
9. Bell 1981. p. 43.
10. Posner 1992. p. 54.
11. Duberman 1996. p. 44.
12. Lauritsen 1998. pp. 89-90.
13. Halperin 2014. pp. 45, 468.

Bibliography

Books

• Bell, Alan P.; Weinberg, Martin S.; Hammersmith, Sue Kiefer (1981). Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-16673-X.
• Berman, Louis A. (2003). The Puzzle: Exploring the Evolutionary Puzzle of Male Homosexuality. Wilmette, Illinois: Godot Press. ISBN 0-9723013-1-3.
• Dollimore, Jonathan (1991). Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-811269-6.
• Duberman, Martin (1996). Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971-1981. London: The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-16024-6.
• Halperin, David M. (2014). How to be Gay. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-28399-2.
• Hamer, Dean; Copeland, Peter (1994). The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-88724-6.
• Lauritsen, John (1998). A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love. Provincetown: Pagan Press. ISBN 0-943742-11-0.
• Posner, Richard (1992). Sex and Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-80279-9.
• Symons, Donald (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502535-0.
• Tripp, Clarence Arthur (1975). The Homosexual Matrix. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company. ISBN 0-07-065201-5.