Letters To the Editor

Homosexuality

To the Editor:

I've read C. A. Tripp's “The Homosexual Matrix” twice and do not recognize Herbert Hendin's description of it (Oct. 26). One can't ask a reviewer to agree with the opinions of a given book. But one can insist that he gets those opinions straight before he assaults them. 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, “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. This he does most notably in the chapter “The Psychology of Effeminacy,” a remarkable tour de force. Not only does he make distinctions between a variety of external gestures, but he connects them to varying internal states. In so doing he illuminates a set of behavioral styles and also establishes a paradigm for how all human beings “solve” feelings of hysteria and aggression —how different individuals invent different strategies to preserve self‐esteem, diminish stress, regulate the flow of energy. For that chapter alone, “The Homosexual Matrix” would be a major contribution to our understanding of sexually related behavior.

Herbert Hendin never once mentions it. Instead he focuses on a few limited aspects of the book—and in the process distorts most of them. One example will have to suffice. Hendin says that for Tripp “love is hate, all passionate sex is eroticized anger.” This is an absurd reduction of a complex argument, making the book sound like some dim‐witted scenario for “The Night Por‐ ter.” What Tripp is in fact attempting in that section of the book is an analysis of why relationships of deep complementation and understanding lose their erotic zest after a time. His conclusion—presented with care and subtlety—is that “sexual interest is whetted by stress and by barriers that have to be surmounted”; sexual attraction hinges to a significant degree on distance and tension—“resistance” is Tripp's preferred phrase. And he does not use the phrase, as Hendin claims, as a “euphemism” for anger. Nor does he deny, as Hendin also claims, the desirability of tenderness and affection as components of a sexual relationship (though he does reveal, and brilliantly, that what we casually label “affection” is in fact a bundle of ideological expectations).

It's Hendin's 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 that Tripp's book—perhaps the most important statement of recent decades on the nature of sexuality, —has been so caricatured and trivialized. I can only hope that potential readers, unlike The Times's reviewer, will prove willing to confront its bold, discomforting propositions.

MARTIN DUBERMAN New York City

To the Editor:

I am quite concerned with your choice of Herbert Hendin to review “The Homosexual Matrix.” It is very much like having Ron Nessen review Richard Reeves's book on Gerald Ford. Hendin has already expressed his antihomosexual biases in previous writing and his review in The Times reveals nothing more than these same biases working overtime to give a completely false picture of the most important book on homosexuality that has been written in a long time.

I have found no sex researcher or scholar yet who has anything but unqualified respect for this book. Newsweek (Oct. 20) published a balanced review of Tripp's book in which they said that “‘The Homosexual Matrix’ is a remarkably persuasive attempt to destroy many of the myths that surrounded homosexuality” and “it might well become a best seller—among ‘straights’ and ‘gays’ alike.”

In fairness to your reading public I would urge you to publish an unbiased and impartial review of this important book.

WARDELL B. POMEROY New York City

To the Editor:

Your review of “The Homosexual Matrix” seemed to me very unjust. Hendin says that. Tripp managed to ignore women in his book. I wonder how carefully he read it. As an active feminist for the past five years, I would like to say I found the most complete and moving defense or women as well as an understanding and a scholarly consideration of their role throughout history in the chapter entitled, “The Origins of Heterosexuality” that I have seen by any author male or female to date.

ALICE FENNESSEY New York City

To the Editor:

… When I realize that The New York Times chose this man, with the full knowledge that he would do a hatchet job on this admirable book I was disgusted to the point of anger. …

(MRs.) HALCYONE H. WHITTAKER Nyack, N.Y.

To the Editor:

About five years ago I originated the word “homophobia,” which describes the irrational rage and revulsion toward homosexuals and anything reminiscent of homosexuality. Herbert Hendin's review is a pure example of what I and others have been talking about …

GEORGE WEINBERG New York City

To the Editor:

… Hendin is notorious in the gay community for his attempts to devise more subtle justifications for antigay prejudice to replace now discredited ones.

KEMEYS GOETHE New York City

Herbert Hendin replies:

C.A. Tripp tells us that “sexual attraction thrives when and only when the partners are In some sense alienated from each other…in new relationships and in marriages torn by fights and clashes… the highest erotic attachments flourish.” Over and over his picture of sex is one of eroticized anger. Over and over Tripp tells us that “personal closeness and the stuff of sexual attraction are at cross purposes.” For anyone to deny that Tripp sees sensuality and tenderness as opposed, that lie has difficulty in even imagining they can enhance each other, or that his view of sex is one of eroticized anger is to ask us, in Groucho Marx's phrase, “Who do you believe, me dr your own eyes?”

Tripp tells us that the family is not a significant factor in causing homosexuality, that neither fear of nor anger toward women play a role, that homosexuality is not a reflection of confusion or anxiety over sexual identity. The reader is expected to accept these statements simply because Tripp makes them. The book is a succession of such unsubstantiated statements that contradict, without evidence, the vast body of knowledge about homosexuality that has been accumulated over the last 50 years.

Far from ignoring women, Tripp treats them with a contempt that is unrelenting. He sees them as basically unfit for what .he has defined as the sexual emotions. “The generally lower sex drive of women, and particularly their peripheral rather than focal interests in sex, leave them quite unmoved by the more resistant forms of sex.” Tripp's own bias, while not explicitly stated, is clear “When two men are excited and unrestrained in their sexual interaction, the fire that is fed from both sides often does whip up levels of eroticism that are rarely reached elsewhere.”

Tripp goes to such extremes in his attempt to sell homosexuality in the guise of scholarship that I felt the only accurate way to review his book was to quote it extensively. When Tripp tells us that all we know for sure about the origins of homosexuality is that homosexuals come from a “sexually precocious segment of the population” and have “a larger‐than‐average penis size,” it may well seem that to quote the book is virtually to parody it. The book is, in a sense, an unhappy parody of the language of science to advance opinions unsupported by scientific evidence.

Unfortunately the publication of this book is being treated as a political event by gay militants and by those with a homosexual bias. Their usual tactic is to picture anyone who disagrees with any of their assumptions as biased. But the best protection against bias toward homosexuals lies in the understanding by the heterosexual world of what homosexuality is and is not about. Books like Tripp's make that end harder to achieve and suggest that the author fears that honest examination is impossible and unbearable.

Most young homosexuals today do not seem to need or want the distortions of those militants about homosexual life any more than ‘they need or want the distortions of those who are not gay. Most homosexuals are not militants and are not interested in politicizing or proselytizing homosexuality. They do want to be able to lead their lives openly without interference or harassment either by the heterosexual world or by gay militants who pressure them to deny whatever pain, anguish or conflict they feel about their lives.

It should be kept in mind that being homosexual is no assurance that one is unbiased about the subject. Nor does being openly homosexual make one an authority. Nor does the label “sex researcher” protect us against bias; in recent years it has often served to help conceal such bias. The only protection against bias of any kind is documented research, not unsubstantiated assertions that try to convert psychosocial problems into political issues.

Ad Errata

To the Editor:

Why do your staff writers engage in gratuitous sexism? The Oct. 19 “Paper Back Talk” and “Book Ends” columns contain two flagrant examples: Morris Hershman writes gothics “under the nom de crinoline of Evelyn Bond.” Isn't the pen a sexually neutral instrument, used equally often (or these days, equally seldom) by men and women whether writing in their own names or under opposite‐sex pseudonyms?

An author is accused of attacking two reviewers using “the ad hominem‐or rather, ad femina‐approach.” This is not only bad taste but bad Latin, and there are two Latin errors, one of which compounds the sexism: “To the woman” should be rendered as ad feminam, and homo does not mean “man (male)” but “man (human being).”

JOHN L. HAMMOND New York City

Intolerance

To the Editor:

In my review of Giorgio Bassani's “The Smell of Hay” (Oct. 19), I unintentionally left the impression that the physician in the novella, “The Gold‐Rimmed Eyeglasses,” was of the Jewish faith. Actually, his religion is unmentioned; it is the narrator and his family who are Jewish and living under the racial laws in Fascist Italy. My aim was to refer to the doctor's homosexuality and the narrator's Jewishness. In Bassani's subtle work, the juxtaposition unfolds two forms of intolerance—sexual and racial.

HERBERT MITGANG New York City

Gulag Chronology

To the Editor:

There is an error in my review of Vol. II of “The Gulag Archipelago” (Oct. 26). Gulag was seized by the K. B. G. in August 1973 (not 1974, as the review stated). Solzhenitsyn consequently gave the signal for the publication in Paris, and the Russian language edition of Vol. I appeared in December 1973.

PATRICIA BLAKE New York City

Kafka In Russian

To the Editor:

It is not true, as William Phillips states in his review of Erich Heller's book, “Franz Kafka” (Oct. 12), that “Kafka is still banned in the Communist countries.” I am not aware of the situation in all of those countries, but I have before me a Polish translation of “The Trial” which came out in 1974, and the Soviets published some Kafka stories in 1964, “The Trial” in 1965, and excerpts from the diaries in 1968. As for efforts to rehabilitate him, which Professor Phillips implies have only been undertaken recently, the first large‐scale attempt to do so was made in 1963 in Czechoslovakia.

EMILY TALL Buffalo, N. Y.