Blade

In the July-August 2004 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review  (Vol. XI, Number 4), Lewis Gannet’s essay, "C.A. Tripp, Sexual Emancipator," provides an insight into the role of the gay identity in the emergence of individualized sexuality, or sexual revolution.  He suggests that Tripp’s book, 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 is, not a mental illness, as it was categorized at the time. Gannet explains that in Matrix Tripp rejected the division of men into normal or regular (heterosexual) and abnormal or impaired (homosexual). According to Gannet, Tripp argues that “gays and straight people develop their sexual orientation in exactly the same way. In other words, [homosexuals] express a rational and valid sexual development...[that] is an integral and natural component of human sexuality.” Read more »