The Kinsey Report – Part 2

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to Part 2 of a three-part series on the life, work and cultural impact of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. We’re going to hit the ground running today, but before we jump back into the story, let’s take a few minutes to remind ourselves what we’ve covered so far.

Last time, in The Kinsey Report – Part 1, we spent some time getting to know the eponymous professor. But rather than open on his childhood, rather than begin the story at Chapter 1/Square One, I wanted to introduce Kinsey through the eyes of the most important person in his life.  His future wife: Clara McMillen – or “Mac”

Chronicling their courtship at warp-speed, we watched as Mac & Prok met, fell in love, and got married in a whirlwind romance beneath the trees at Indiana University. But the Kinsey’s fairy tale love story was stopped in its tracks by a rude awakening on their honeymoon. Not only were they both virgins, but casualties of the pervasive sexual ignorance of the time. An era where basic biological facts about reproductive anatomy were barely taught or even mentioned. Needless to say, Mac & Prok’s first attempt at getting down was a painful and embarrassing disaster.

For Kinsey especially, it was a vivid reminder of his unhappy childhood, dominated by a fundamentalist father who drenched the topic of sex in a radioactive slop of repression, religion, and guilt. But Kinsey eventually moved past all of that. He dropped his Bible like a bad habit and picked up a science textbook instead. A few years, hundreds of exams and a couple degrees later, the shy boy from Hoboken had broken his cocoon to become a respected and outgoing professor at Indiana University.

Despite he and Mac’s initial hurdles in the p-in-v department, they were able to remedy the problems with a quick surgery and heavy dose of curiosity. As Prok learned more about sex, both in theory and practice, he developed an interest in the scientific study of the topic. Unimpressed with the literature he found, Kinsey became more and more focused on researching and teaching about this forbidden and misunderstood topic. Which all culminated in a revolutionary and fairly transgressive lecture series that Kinsey began giving at Indiana University in 1938.

Officially, the University called it the Marriage Course. But the student body called it the Sex Course. And that’s exactly what it was. A refreshingly scientific and uniquely graphic deep dive into reproductive anatomy, health, and social theory.

The students gave the class an A++. They absolutely loved it. For most of them, it was the first time anyone had explained sex in real detail. There were girls in Kinsey’s class who thought kissing made you pregnant, and boys who thought foreplay was some kind of golf term. Before long, the results were in. The Marriage Course was a hit.

But for Kinsey, it was only the beginning of his crusade to explore the mysteries of sexual behavior and bring his findings to the masses.

And that, more or less, is where we left off.

This time, we’re going to move into a new phase of Kinsey’s research. We’re going to see how he developed his methodology for investigating sexual behavior, the support structure he built to make it happen, and the way he procured that all-important life blood of scientific research: money. But we’ll also continue diving into Kinsey’s private life, and what we find there, will be…interesting to say the least.

So, now that we’re all caught up, we can dim the lights, draw the shades, and jump back into our story. Let’s get started.

Welcome to The Kinsey Report – Part 2.

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It’s the summer of 1932.

6 years before the debut of Alfred Kinsey’s marriage course at Indiana University.

And 16 years before the publication of the Kinsey Report.

We’re in Mexico; somewhere in the Sierra Madre mountains.

Like a jagged backbone in the earth, the mountains dip and soar across the horizon, sheltering a wilderness of bending rivers and towering trees. The kind of landscape that rarely exists outside a Bob Ross painting.

Yes, this is “Nature” with a capital N.

The kind of place you can hike for 50 miles in any direction and not see a human face.

The kind of place where if you break your leg, you should probably start drafting your will.

But despite the dizzying, endless emptiness of it all, the Sierra Madre is positively teeming with life. Flora and fauna of every feather, stripe, and stem. Black bears and bobcats. Elk and antelope. Hawks and jaybirds and whatever the plural of ‘grouse’ is.

And in the middle of all this natural splendor, leaping over streams and hauling a rattling field kit, is Dr. Alfred Kinsey. 38-years-old and 2,000 miles from his classroom in Bloomington Indiana.

The Mexican wilderness is the not the natural habitat of collegius professoris, but for Kinsey it was a second home. Ever the Eagle Scout, Prok could still hike a mountain and ford a river with the best of them. But Kinsey is not all the way out here, deep in a foreign country, in search of a little fresh air. No, he is in Mexico looking for something very, very specific. Something so small, so insignificant, that the naked eye can barely detect it.

Smaller than any tree or bush or twig or leaf. Smaller, even, than the width of a human fingernail. With a practiced eagle eye, Kinsey scans the bark of an oak tree, searching its cracks and crevices. And then, he sees it. The creature he has traveled all this way to find.

Hymenoptera cynipidae (hai-muh-nahptra sen-ippidee)

Or as it is commonly known: The gall wasp.

In the Animal kingdom, there are millions, of fascinating and beautiful creatures…and then, there is the North American gall wasp. That’s g-a-l-l. Gall wasp.

“The gall wasp,” writes historian Jonathon Gathorne-Hardy, “is a tiny and paradoxical insect about the size of a small ant. Despite its name, it can neither sting nor fly.”

With a deft, delicate hand, Kinsey scoops up this almost-invisible insect, and gently places it in a sealed container. Inside, there are hundreds of others just like it. Another one down, 100,000 to go.

Before he became obsessed with the study of sex, Alfred Kinsey was obsessed with the study of the gall wasp. And although the two subjects may seem entirely incompatible, as distant from each other as Bloomington, Indiana and Sierra Madre, Mexico…Kinsey’s methodology for the latter would very much have an impact on the former.

On a surface level, there aren’t a lot of reasons to care about gall wasps. They’re not particularly beautiful or ecologically influential. There are no known medical benefits of gall wasp physiology – no venom to extract or toxin to analyze. Although as a discussion topic, they are a very effective sedative in certain classrooms.

To put it bluntly, the gall wasp is a deeply unsexy animal. Even the most kind-hearted preacher would’ve questioned how two gall wasps got a spot on Noah’s Ark. It was an insect which, in Kinsey’s own words, “you have probably never seen, and about which you certainly do not care.”

But Kinsey was interested in gall wasps precisely because no one else cared.

Way back in 1917, as a young Harvard grad student looking for a topic for his doctoral thesis, Kinsey stumbled upon the humble gall wasp in a dusty entomology book. And from the second he clapped eyes on this ugly, flightless little insect, it was love at first sight. As Jones writes:

As an evolutionary biologist, Kinsey was excited by the vivid contrasts gall wasps presented. Some species resembled each other so closely they were hard to tell apart, while some individuals of a species differed so markedly, they appeared to belong to separate species. By studying each species, Kinsey expected to learn something about evolution, as variation offered unmistakable evidence of change over time, and change over time was but another term for evolution.

As fascinating as they were from an academic perspective (and that’s about the only perspective they were fascinating from), the gall wasp held another, selfish sort of appeal for Kinsey.

“They were almost completely unresearched,” writes John Gathorne-Hardy, “To study something no one else had studied meant the possibility of becoming a world expert.”

As a young, ambitious scientist in search of a specialty, Kinsey had found his soul mate in nature’s immense tapestry. No competing research. No rivals. A virgin world to conquer. What began as simple thesis topic morphed became a 19-year fixation. From 1917 to 1936, Kinsey made the gall wasp his life’s work.

Funded by a modest but steady flow of stipends and grants from Indiana University, Kinsey crisscrossed the nation, collecting gall wasp specimens by the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. When it came to this tiny insect, no number was too large. His travels took him from the swamps of Louisiana, to the forests of Colorado, to the grasslands of west Texas. By 1936, he had traveled a total of 75,000 miles. And as his collection of gall wasps grew, one thing continued to amaze Kinsey. According to Gathorne-Hardy.

“Not one was the same. Each tiny gall was different from every other tiny gall wasp. And the same was true of every fish, every daisy, every worm, tomato, ant, each of these, like everything else, was different from every other fish, daisy, worm, tomato and ant. “

“Diversity,” another historian wrote, “diversity is life’s only irreducible fact.”

Living things, Kinsey came to realize, exist on a continuum. A great scale. Not in broad, sharply-defined boxes but in a gradient of infinite variation. And the gall wasp was the perfect example of this insight. All gall wasps were gall wasps, true - but the sheer amount of variation they exhibited proved that lumping them into categories of normal and not normal was a fool’s errand. As one historian put it, “variation is nature’s only given”

For better or worse, the gall wasp taught Alfred Kinsey another very important lesson:

The only way to truly understand something, the only way to sharpen the fuzzy contours of a scientific theory was to collect, collect, collect. And then when you were done - collect some more. In his quest to understand the scale of gall wasp variation, Kinsey amassed huge, ludicrously large sample sizes. “Get-A-Million Kinsey” they called him at the University.

“The method”, one historian wrote, “was to collect vast numbers of whatever it was you were studying, indiscriminately and from everywhere. You would thus have created an enormous reservoir of ‘the fact’ and deduced from this, endless studies and books would flow.”

In some ways, it was a compulsive need to have more than anyone else – to know more than anyone else. As Kinsey himself said in this telling quote:

“Some folks collect stamps, others collect cigar bands, or autographs, a pocket full of junk, or dollars and dollars. Whatever their value or lack of money value, all collections are very real possessions to their owners. If your collection is larger, even a shade larger, than any other like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness. It shows how complete a work you can accomplish.”

So – you might be wondering to yourself: What does any of this have to do with the science of human sexual behavior?

Well, as it happened, when Kinsey turned his attention to sex research in the summer 1938, he brought his gall wasp methodology with him. And this obsession with big sample sizes, this “collector’s mania” as one historian put it, would have huge implications for Kinsey’s work. He just didn’t know it yet.

Fast forward to 1939.

By the summer of that year, Kinsey was on his third or fourth semester teaching the wildly successful Marriage Course at Indiana University. As the enrollment grew larger and the hype grew louder, the “Sex Class” became the talk of the town.

“It fills a significant need that should have been met long ago on this campus,” one student wrote.

“There is a genuine need for instruction in a thing which affects the lifetime happiness of so many people”another said.

And in a comment that would’ve certainly caught Kinsey’s eye, one student wrote that “More people with the frankness and understanding of Dr. Kinsey are needed today.”

The positive feedback was certainly validating, but what most excited Kinsey was the data he was gathering from the student body. At the end of every class, Kinsey encouraged his students to complete an anonymous questionnaire about their sexual history. And if they had any specific concerns or questions about the material, his door was always open for a one-on-one consultation. According to James Jones:

“Thanks to the marriage course, Kinsey suddenly had scores of students who needed help. Indeed, he was besieged with questions. With varying degrees of desperation, former students (and their friends) sought advice on secret marriages, marriage between first cousins, the keys to marital compatibility, the remedies for sexual incompatibility, frigidity, birth control, sterility, premature ejaculation, homosexuality, and sundry other matters. A less dedicated man might have been overwhelmed by the number and the complexity of these queries, but Kinsey responded to each and every cry for help with remarkably thorough and detailed recommendations.”

As a man who had grown up under a shadow of sexual repression, Kinsey was very sympathetic to these students’ cries for help. And some of those questions started to hit very close to home. One young woman approached Kinsey with a problem that was almost exactly, word-for-word, what he and Clara had struggled with 17 years earlier. The young woman explained that she and her husband were completely inexperienced sexually, had no idea how to please each other, and it was causing big problems in their marriage. Kinsey responded with an empathy and warmth that would become his trademark in these kinds of exchanges:

“Difficulty in reaching climax is a very common one among newly married people who have not had previous intercourse. It sometimes takes long practice to have nerves and muscles develop to the point of efficient response. If you cannot remedy the situation immediately, do not be discouraged, for that may still come in time.”

As he answered these kinds of questions, it dawned on Kinsey that people tended to much more honest about the private details of their sex lives in face-to-face meetings. As one student complained: “I do not like to put such things in writing, as writing is so dern permanent.” The written questionnaire yielded some marginal insights, but the 1:1 consultation – that was where the good stuff was at. And so, as more and more students sought his advice, Kinsey began developing an interview technique for capturing a person’s entire sexual history in a single consultation.

By 1939, hundreds of people in Bloomington, Indiana had agreed to have their histories taken. But for a man who’d collected gall wasps by the tens of thousands, such a puny sample size would not do. He needed to think beyond the confines of Bloomington, Indiana.

“This must be published,” a friend and colleague urged, “This is important data. You must formalize … your interviews.”

But just as he was developing grand plans for a broader study of sex, Kinsey hit a snag.

A big one.

As it turned out, not everyone on campus was so excited about Kinsey’s course and the effect it was having on the student body. While most of the feedback Kinsey received on the Marriage Course was encouraging, the negative feedback could be white-hot in its anger and virulence. Many members of the faculty, especially, were not pleased.

“By 1940,” James Jones writes, “Kinsey was under attack.”

Kinsey’s Marriage Course, sneered one doctor, was little more than “smut session”. A disgusting and morally outrageous display of indecency, disguised as education. This course was having a corruptive effect on the hearts and minds of Indiana’s pliable youth. As one professor fumed:

“95% of those young people in that class don’t give a tinker’s damn about marriage as a social or biological fact. They just want to know about it for their own personal satisfaction. They are tremendously enamored of its possibilities for personal enjoyment.”

In other words, these students don’t know anything about sex, and Kinsey is giving them a user manual. If we’re not careful, other faculty members fretted, the University could face serious blowback for the course. As a Dr Thurman B. Rice complained:

“Let us suppose that a little rosebud of a girl from the ‘sticks’ arrives on the campus,” he intoned. “She, in the opinion of her parents and the local minister, is as pure as a drop of dew. As she comes into the new environment,” he continued, “she is likely to be stimulated sexually and may very easily, in the course of the next few years acquire sex habits not to her credit and not unlikely may acquire a baby.” Damaged goods, she would have to go home “in disgrace,” whereupon her outraged parents would immediately “look around for a ‘fall guy.’ ” When this happened, predicted Rice, “they are going to put the blame, not on themselves or on the girl, but on you and the University and the whole idea of sex education. And some of these days they are going to make that blame stick!”

Other faculty members, like the Dean of Women, Kate Mueller charged that Kinsey was just using the Marriage Course as a way to strip mine the student body for useful data. Alfred Kinsey had always been an ambitious man; He’d made his reputation going further and farther than anyone else in his search for gall wasps. The Marriage Course just more of the same. One man prioritizing his own career over the welfare of his students. As Mueller said:

“Mr. Kinsey has pressed the students for conferences more than they wished. He has used the course to collect data for studies of his own.”

Some, like Dr. Edith Schuman, took issue with the sex advice Kinsey so enthusiastically doled out the private consultations. After all, he was an entomologist, not a trained physician. He had no right to give them guidance on what was essentially a medical matter. “From a medical standpoint I did not feel that he should counsel them,” she huffed.

Even the occasional student had choice words about Kinsey’s course. “The only thing boys need to learn about sex is ‘more chastity” one wrote. The lectures, another wrote, “are definitely intended to destroy marriage as we know it.”

Indeed, Kinsey’s reputation preceded him among the more conservative students. During a regular Biology class which was not part of the Marriage Course, Kinsey quizzed a female student “What part of the body can enlarge ten times its size? According to Jones:

“She stood up and said pertly that she didn’t know, but ‘you had no right to ask me such a question in a mixed class!’ Kinsey looked at her coldly, “I was referring to the pupil of the eye, and I think I should tell you young lady, that you are in for a terrible disappointment.”

Kinsey could trade barbs with the best of them, but by August 1940, the tenor of outrage had reached a level that could not be ignored, and he was called before the President of the University, a man named Herman B. Wells. In truth, Wells took no pleasure in calling Kinsey to account; He liked the man, and respected what he was trying to do. No one had ever attempted to modernize sexual education or collect the kinds of research Kinsey was pursuing. In President Wells’ opinion, Kinsey was a visionary, not a vulgarian. But still, he had a faculty to appease, and political concessions must be made.

In the end, Wells gave Kinsey a choice. An ultimatum.

You can continue to teach the Marriage Course, or you can pursue your research and collect interviews. You cannot do both. The student body, however grateful it may be, cannot be your personal research laboratory. President Wells was not particularly surprised by the answer he received. As James Jones writes:

“While Kinsey had bitterly resented the decision he was forced to make, the choice itself had been easy. As a vehicle, sex education had carried Kinsey far, but it was not his primary interest. First and foremost, he was a research scientist. Sex research filled too much space in his life for him to give it up. By the summer 1940, the marriage course was expendable. Thanks to his expanding network of contacts, which, as he was fond of saying, were “growing like the branches of a tree,” Kinsey was now in a position to get all the sex histories he could take. He no longer needed the course. It had served its purpose.”

Just as Kinsey had ventured far and wide across the Americas in search of gall wasps, he would now do so in pursuit of willing interviews for his research on sex.

“No previous investigator had ever attempted what he had in mind,” writes Jones, “Kinsey meant to recover every knowable fact about people’s sex lives and erotic imaginations. He intended to learn how people thought and behaved, how frequently they engaged in such thought and behavior, and with whom or with what they did so. Because he believed that people routinely hid the truth about their private needs and behavior, Kinsey was determined to strip away denial, to get at the hidden side of life, to discover what people actually thought and did behind closed doors, safe from the scrutiny of judgmental others.”

There was just one little problem.

To conduct research on the scale that Kinsey had in mind, he needed financial support. Far beyond what the University could or would provide. As one historian put it: “However sordid it may sound, “big science” usually costs “big bucks.”

Kinsey needed money.

Thankfully, he had a few ideas about where to get it.

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It’s December of 1942.

We’re on a public bus, somewhere outside of Indianapolis. This bus is completely full, packed with passengers and luggage and all the assorted smells and sounds. Hacking coughs and sniffly noses and sudden bumps and jolts. The myriad indignities of public transportation.

Standing on this bus, gripping a steel pole, wishing he’d gotten on in time to get a seat, is a 66-year-old-man named Robert M. Yerkes. That’s Y-E-R-K-E-S. Yerkes.

Yerkes is annoyed. He is not a “take the bus” kind of guy. He is a “get picked up at the train station in a nice car” kind of guy. But unfortunately for him, today he is a “my ride didn’t show up” kind of guy. So now he is here, bumping and bobbing and balancing on a stupid bus on a stupid Indiana highway.

With his tweed suit, downcast eyes, and a receding hairline that lost the good fight a long time ago, Yerkes looks like just another old man on a bus. Someone’s grandpa on the way to an appointment. But the truth is, Yerkes is a very important man. At least in some circles. The kind of circles that know the difference between entomology and anthropology and are more than happy to explain it to you.

If Yerkes were to introduce himself to a stranger on this bus, he would’ve handed them a business card that said: Robert M Yerkes, Chairman of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, a branch of the National Research Council’s Division of Medical Sciences.  Translated from academic into English, that means that Yerkes is a scientist. A very well-funded scientist, who specializes in the research of sex from a social, psychological, and biological perspective.

“The Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS),” writes James Jones, “was far and away the most important source of funding for sex research in the United States from the 1920s through the early 1960s.”

And the person who controlled that funding, the man with his hand on the purse strings, was Robert M. Yerkes. For years, Yerkes had been hunting for a promising researcher who could seriously devote energy to unraveling a deeper understanding of human sexuality. But every lead had been a dead end. He had never been able to find a someone that was doing anything remotely interesting in the field.

Until, that is, he heard about Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Kinsey had first popped up on Yerkes radar in early 1941. At the time, Kinsey was just “a solitary figure in a third-rate university, financing his research out of his own hip pocket.” According to one historian. But the research Kinsey was doing was anything but third-rate. It held, in Yerkes view, tremendous promise.

Kinsey claimed that since 1938, he had collected the sexual histories of 1,700 people. Men and women, rich and poor, white and – well, white. Somehow, this Professor Kinsey had convinced almost 2,000 people to submit themselves to interviews, for multiple hours, where they divulged every sexual thought, urge, preference, and experience they’d ever had. From their earliest memory to last weekend’s hookup.  

Yerkes was intrigued, but skeptical. How could Kinsey know that these people were telling the truth? And who would actually sit down and submit themselves to such an interrogation? Only freaks and outcasts, surely. Yerkes realized he had more questions than answers.

And so, like a cautious gambler, Yerkes threw a few chips onto the table. In July of 1941, he approved a tiny $1600 grant for Kinsey’s research. It was barely enough to pay the annual electricity bill in the Chemistry Building at Indiana University, but it was a start. A show of interest. A little fiscal flirtation.

Later that year, Yerkes and Kinsey met in-person at a conference. There are some people who couldn’t win an argument with themselves in the shower, but Kinsey was not one of them. “Few people could be more persuasive than Kinsey in one-on-one discussions,” writes Jones. The professor said that he wanted to launch “nothing less than the most extensive and intensive fact-finding survey ever attempted by science, and he touted his record in taxonomy to show that he could handle a job of this magnitude.”, according to one historian.

After listening to Kinsey talk passionately about his research, Yerkes came away from the conference very impressed, if not entirely sold. In April of 1942, he approved a $7500 grant. Still small, but four times larger than the initial grant the previous summer.

Yerkes dared to hope. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the guy we’ve been searching for, all this time. Someone who can blow the doors off and answer some fundamental questions about sexual behavior. As Jones writes:

“Yerkes had always wanted to back investigators who worked on human behavior, and Kinsey was far and away the most productive researcher the committee had encountered. As a seasoned officer of the NRC and director of his own research institute, Yerkes was not the sort of man who thought small.”

But still, he required more assurance. If he was going to open the purse strings and let money flow into Kinsey’s pocket, he needed to see this methodology firsthand. He needed to travel to Bloomington, Indiana and see Dr. Kinsey do his thing up close and personal.

“In Kinsey’s view,” writes Jones, “Yerkes and his colleagues on the CRPS had been nibbling at the bait long enough. It was time to set the hook. Consequently, when Yerkes proposed a site visit in Bloomington to review data and plan for the future, Kinsey accepted happily. From Yerkes’s perspective, this was a make-or-break affair.”

And so, Robert M. Yerkes boarded a train bound for Indiana. When he stepped off the platform into the wind and bitter cold, Yerkes scanned the station for the car that was supposed to pick him up and take him 50 miles south to Bloomington. He waited, and waited, and then waited some more. The car never showed up. Clearly there had been some miscommunication.

Yerkes dragged his luggage to the bus station and bought a ticket. A few hours later, he was clinging to a bus pole, with aching knees and a deeper appreciation for private transportation.

This grand exhibition of Dr. Kinsey’s method was off to a bad start. Poor Yerkes did eventually make it to Bloomington, and after a good night’s sleep, he arrived at Indiana University prepared to evaluate Kinsey’s research with a keen and critical eye.

Kinsey, writes James Jones, was “raring to go. Aware his visitors had come on a fact-finding mission, he buried them in facts. For an entire day, he talked nonstop about his methodology for taking and recording histories and about his statistical treatment of data. […] “After spending just one day in Kinsey’s laboratory, Yerkes had seen enough to form a judgment. “He is doing well what has many times been bungled. Already he has gathered nearly 3500 sex pattern histories. His goal is 10,000. I hope he may be able to achieve it.”

Yerkes was dazzled, but before he left, he wanted to know how Kinsey conducted his interviews. Perhaps could listen to a recording or read a file or take a peek at the list of questions Kinsey asked his subjects? That’s impossible, Kinsey responded. There are no recordings, all the interviews are strictly confidential. You can’t read the files, because they are kept in code, the cypher of which is known only to myself. And you cannot look at the questions, because I have memorized them all.

Yerkes was stunned. But Kinsey quickly gave a counter-offer:

Let me show you. Exactly how it works. Let me take YOUR sexual history.

And so, 66-year-old Robert Yerkes sat down in a chair, in a quiet room, and became acquainted with Dr. Kinsey’s method. This was his introduction to, as Gathorne-Hardy writes, “the extraordinary instrument Kinsey had devised, capable of ‘an authentic tour de force in which every scrap of sexual information available to memory was wrenched from the subject in less than 2 hours.”

To this day, we do not know what Yerkes told Kinsey in that room. We can never know, and we will never know; because the contents of the interview are still under lock & key in the archives at Indiana University. Just like the other 18,000 interviews Kinsey conducted during his lifetime.

And that secrecy was very much intentional. Throughout the course of his research, Kinsey’s principal concern was confidentiality. As Jones writes:

“He understood that the vast majority of human beings at one time or another had done or fantasized about things of a sexual nature they did not wish revealed. Some secrets were large, others small. Whether significant or trivial, these hidden truths needed to be discovered if science had any hope of mapping human sexuality. And that was why confidentiality had to be preserved at all costs.”

And let’s not forget: these secrets, these hidden wants, desires, and experiences – could incur very tangible costs if revealed to the wrong people. Jones continues:

“Written sex histories could be used by the authorities to violate people’s right to privacy and to incriminate those who confessed to illegal behavior.”

“One has to remember,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “that probably at least ¾ or more of what Kinsey’s informants ordinarily did was against the law and carried severe penalties. Homosexuality was illegal in all states, any form of oral sex was illegal, in Indiana it was an offence to ‘incite or encourage masturbation.”

“Kinsey,” another historian wrote, “made his devotion to confidentiality the cornerstone of his pitch to volunteers.”

And many of those volunteers, including Robert Yerkes, wanted to know how Kinsey could possibly ensure that this incredibly sensitive information would not be misplaced, or leaked, or used as blackmail? After all anything physically recorded on a sheet of paper was vulnerable to exposure.

When Yerkes asked the question, Kinsey smiled and turned the sheet of paper around. The sheet of paper that contained a record of his entire sexual life. And all Yerkes saw was a bunch of symbols and boxes and scratches and scribbles. It was a code. A cypher that Kinsey had developed himself. Through this code, Kinsey was able to condense 25 pages worth of information onto a single piece of paper. As Gathorne-Hardy writes:

“No names appeared and, shown their sheet, people who gave their history saw something totally incomprehensible, visual proof, as it were, of the confidentiality Kinsey promised, absolutely.

“This system,” writes Jones, “rendered his records unintelligible to anyone who did not know the code. To enhance security, Kinsey refused to produce a written key for his system. Instead, he memorized all the questions, both in sequence and in any possible combination or order.”

And on that one little page, Kinsey was able to fit answers to anywhere from 350 to 600 questions. Questions that came at the subject in a staccato, rapid-fire tempo.

“This method,” writes Jones, “reduced the time a subject had to think up false but plausible answers. He also made a point of maintaining eye contact, believing it would be harder for people to lie to someone who looked them straight in the eye.”

It wasn’t just the speed of the questions that mattered, it was the phrasing. Kinsey asked people not IF they had ever done something, but WHEN they had done it. As Jones writes:

“Kinsey quickly discovered that people could be inveigled into admitting a greater variety of behavior if they bore the burden of denial. He assumed that everyone had engaged in forbidden behavior unless she or he said otherwise, and he phrased his questions in such a way as to facilitate confession. For example, instead of asking people if they had ever masturbated, he would inquire how old they were when they started masturbating.”

A psychologist named Frank Beach, who’d let Kinsey take his history, couldn’t help but laugh at the unique but effective method:

“It wasn’t ‘Have you ever?,’ it was ‘When did you last make love to a pig?’ You said ‘Never!’ OK—but he had you hooked if you were a pig lover”

But all of this begged the question, how in the world did people not clam up under this kind of assault? Constant eye contact, rapid-fire questions, deeply intimate subject matter? Well, Kinsey had a secret weapon. And that was his seemingly inexhaustible empathy. As Jones writes:

“His greatest asset as an interviewer was his gift for establishing rapport. Over time, he became a master of putting people at ease and of earning their trust. As people told their stories and asked their questions, he somehow found the right words to bathe them in warmth and compassion. Invariably, his language resonated to their individual predicaments and conveyed his approval of them as human beings. Not that words were his only means of communication. Again, a nod of the head here, a smile there, a hand placed kindly on the shoulder in response to some shameful revelation, all served to get the message across.”

“He didn’t judge or condemn or comment at all,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “He just listened.”

One interviewee recalled: “You were instantly … at peace with yourself with him. You just knew whatever you had done he was on your side.”

 “You had agreed to surrender, to trust,” one subject named Dorothy Collins recalled, “the speed which meant you were revealing things before you realized and then, as we plunged into the intimate, all the bars were down, no further resistance, the experience, in the end, it seemed to me, was an exhilarating experience.”

“He was in control every second,” another said, “But he did it in such a clever and unobtrusive way that you were scarcely aware [of it]. One got the impression of great interest, and not only interest but sympathetic interest,” which made it “very easy to talk to the man.”

One interviewee named Helen Wallin said: “It was as though I was in a bubble. I told him things I’d never told anyone before or since. After the bubble burst, it was all over. I was amazed at myself.”

And so it went with Robert M. Yerkes, head of the CRPS.

When Kinsey had asked his last question, Yerkes felt as if he’d poured his entire life out onto an 8.5x11” page. All his secrets, his desires, his wants, his needs – locked forever in the vault of Kinsey’s code. A credit to science, but never a liability to its owner. As Yerkes wrote in his diary that night:

“I am agreeably surprised to find the picture much better than I had hoped or expected. Kinsey in the course of one to three hours of interview questioning gets a history which he records by code on a printed form. A single page carries a [great] deal of information—no copying is necessary: only coding and Hollerith transfer. It is a very well-planned system.”

A colleague of Yerkes agreed, saying: “I was astonished at his skill in eliciting the most intimate details of the subject’s sex history,”

After that day, Yerkes was sold.

Kinsey would get every dollar the CRPS could reasonably conjure up. As Jones writes:

“In May 1943, the NRC announced a $23,000 grant in support of Kinsey’s research. This grant, which represented nearly half of the CRPS’s annual budget from the Rockefeller Foundation, was only the beginning. Over the next decade, the NRC would give Kinsey hundreds of thousands of dollars, rapidly increasing his awards to $40,000 annually.”

As he waved goodbye to Yerkes, Kinsey was practically beaming. He had made an excellent impression. Knocked it out of the park, you might say. Now that his project had real money behind it, he could ramp things up. Not only could he expand his research efforts, he could start building a more robust team to assist him.

But somewhere in the back of his mind, he could not help but acknowledge a troubling fact.

Yerkes had seen every facet of Kinsey’s research, but he did not know everything about his new beneficiary. If Yerkes and his organization had known the full truth about him, he would never have gotten the funding. If anyone knew the full truth about Alfred Kinsey, then his reputation, his career, his family, his marriage, his freedom, everything – would be at stake.

Dr. Kinsey had a secret life.

Hidden things that even he had only just begun to grapple with.  

----- MUSIC BREAK ------ (13 pages)

It’s October 31^st, 1939.

Two years before Robert Yerkes visit to Bloomington, Indiana.

Two years before Dr. Kinsey’s project received full funding from the CRPS.

We’re at a Halloween party, somewhere in downtown Chicago. The beer is flowing, the bottles are popping and the hormones are raging. In many ways, this party is identical to the hundreds of other parties happening around the city tonight. People are laughing, dancing, kissing, and flirting. But there is something that sets this shindig apart.

This is one of the few places in the city, in the state, in the nation, in the world, where it is okay to be openly, proudly gay. In this very small, very fragile social bubble, gay men can meet, socialize and hook up without fear of being judged or ostracized. Here they can actually be themselves. Yes, at this Halloween party, everyone is wearing a costume, but no one is wearing a mask.

And in the middle of it all, like a 6-foot fish out of water, is Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Looming over the crowd, clutching a full cocktail and smiling nervously, Kinsey makes his way across the room. Needless to say, he stands out. In the words of one historian, Kinsey looks every bit the “tall, rather burly, Midwestern entomology professor, tousled, intense, and serious”.

As he made the rounds, some of the partygoers might’ve wondered…why in the world is this awkward biology professor attending a gay Halloween party 230 miles north of his home in Indiana? The answer, which Kinsey would’ve quickly supplied, was simple and innocuous.

Research.

At this point, in late 1939, Kinsey had collected hundreds of sexual histories back in Indiana. But thus far, his sample had been fairly one-dimensional / homogenous. Mostly young heterosexual university students. For an intrepid and curious researcher like Kinsey, who had traveled as far as Guatemala in search of rare and elusive gall wasps, this was simply not a diverse enough sample.

If his research was going to be even remotely representative of the massive spectrum of sexual behavior he believed existed in the American population, he needed to explore the margins of that spectrum. He needed to find the people who did not want to be found. Talk to the people who did not want to talk. Interview people who were terrified of committing words to paper.

And in 1939, that meant gay men.

As Kinsey slowly infiltrated this hidden world, most of the homosexual men he met were absolutely petrified of talking to him. And frankly, they had every right to be.

At this time, in the early 20^th century, homosexuality was considered to be a literal disease. A pathology. A mental illness. Socially, there was almost nothing worse you could be accused of. Because not only was it a disease, it was a crime. If credibly accused of a homosexual act, you could be sent to jail, institutionalized, or even sterilized. Every single state in the US had laws on the books condemning sodomy as a felony. And the definition of ‘sodomy’ was very broad; it also included oral sex. Essentially, anything except missionary position intercourse between a married man and woman was considered immoral, if not criminal. And at the apex of that criminal pyramid was gay sex. As Gathorne-Hardy writes:

“Homosexuality was quite simply too horrendous for many people to be mentioned in the America of Kinsey’s adolescence. It has become so invisible that it was the only sin the ministers did not feel it necessary to attack. “

The reasons for this hatred were myriad, as James Jones writes:

“Condemned as a sin, a crime, a disease, or any combination of the three (depending on who was doing the labeling), homosexuality violated every facet of Victorian sexuality morality. Sexual relations between people of the same sex shattered gender/role definitions, made a mockery of self-control and restraint, and separated sex from procreation in ways that seemed either unnatural or immoral.”

As a result, most gay people had to go underground. To hide. To bury their identities deep beneath layers of fabricated normalcy. As Jones continues:

“Buffeted by cultural condemnation, ignorant of their numbers, and paralyzed by fears of exposure, most homosexuals endured desperate lives. Rare was the homosexual who did not feel alienated and anxious, terrified his secret would be discovered. Convinced of their own depravity, most homosexuals struggled valiantly to suppress or deny their desires. But try as they might, most failed.”

This was the ecosystem Kinsey was attempting to infiltrate. And it was not an easy world to gain access to. As Jones continues:

Gay life revolved around a system of cafés, clubs, and bars—institutions that paralleled those of the dominant culture. Tucked away in neighborhoods and commercial districts not frequented by members of “polite society” after dark, most of these establishments catered to men. Within this all but invisible world, homosexuals created a social milieu that allowed them to drop their double lives, if only for a few hours at a time, and be openly gay.

This was a community that was incredibly guarded against outsiders, but Kinsey’s determination was inexhaustible. The best place to find large numbers of gay men in 1939 was in the city. And the closest big city to Indiana University was Chicago, a full day’s drive to the north. After cultivating a small network of contacts in the city, Kinsey began making weekend pilgrimages to Chicago in search of these elusive specimens.

Initially, he couldn’t get anyone to talk to him. After his first week in the city/CHICAGO, he’d only been able to find three people who would sit down for an interview. But those first few participants could not help but be impressed with Kinsey’s method, moved by his empathy, and shocked by his complete lack of bigotry. Here was a person who knew the truth about them, and didn’t recoil or rebuke them. As Jones writes:

“From the moment they had known they were homosexual, they had been taught to regard themselves with either pity, disgust, or contempt. And then suddenly they met this mild-mannered, soft-spoken, middle-aged scientist who learned their secrets and made it clear he approved of them as people. What with his baggy suit, bow tie, and gray-flecked, sandy hair, Kinsey must have appeared to many of these youths like an approving father.

Openly and without a moment’s hesitation, he let each subject know that he considered him a fine individual. Indeed, at a time when the news media were attacking homosexuals as sexual psychopaths, and even moderate people considered them diseased and degenerate, Kinsey seized every opportunity to affirm their worth and dignity as men.”



It didn’t take long for word to spread around town that this Dr. Kinsey from Indiana was actually a pretty alright guy. Jones continues:

“Serving as his private guide to their hidden world, they introduced him to their friends, got him into gay parties, accompanied him to the theater, walked him through the city parks and public urinals where gay men “cruised” in search of anonymous sex, and ushered him through the network of gay nightclubs and coffeehouses, pausing long enough at each spot for him to establish contacts that ensured that a new group of men would start the process all over again.”

All through the fall of 1939, Kinsey made trips to Chicago to interview members of the gay community there. But the truth was, there was another reason Kinsey felt such a pull to those clubs and parties and cafes. As Gathorne-Hardy writes: “It was not just the scientist in him who was catching fire.” For the first time, he was able to recognize something that he had known about himself for a very long time. Something that he had hidden and repressed and smothered whenever it threatened to rear up.

Alfred Kinsey was bisexual.

It’s unclear when Kinsey first realized that he was attracted to men. Most biographers point to his Boy Scout days as the genesis of the realization. But he would’ve felt it all through his life. Out in the woods with his fellow scouts. In the classroom with other young men in college. And every time he caught their eye, or his gaze wandered over a body, he would’ve felt a white-hot spike/sense of shame and panic. Kinsey knew the same cold truth that those gay men in Chicago knew. To pursue homosexual feelings in America in the early 20^th century was to court disaster, to flirt with the destruction of your entire life and possibly sacrifice your freedom.

Ironically, it was his relationship with Mac, his wife, Clara – that opened the door. Together, they pursued knowledge about their bodies, which led to a more enlightened view on sex, which ultimately led Kinsey to his research in the first place, which led to Chicago.

All his life, Kinsey had felt these feelings. But he did not act on those feelings until Chicago 1939. He arrived as a fish out of water, but as an ardent Darwinist like Kinsey would’ve attested: When fish left the water, they evolved into something new.

“The 1939 visits to Chicago,” wrote Gathorne-Hardy, “mark one of the most important watersheds in Kinsey’s life. […] “He finally threw off completely the inhibitions of his upbringing” 

At those Halloween parties in 1939, Kinsey was able to drop his mask, and explore that neglected part of himself. “During his many visits to Chicago,” writes James Jones, “Kinsey learned all about this world, both as an observer and as a participant.”

Free to hook up with impunity in the safe harbor of Chicago’s gay community, Kinsey let his flag fly. There were no attachments, no baggage. The sex was usually anonymous and disposable, bright as a match but gone just as fast. But god, the sense of liberation. For Kinsey, it was as if he’d been living his life in black and white, and suddenly everything was burning in technicolor. As if he’d been holding his breath for 45 years, trapped beneath a wave, and suddenly he breached the surface, inhaling fresh, clean air. For the first time in his life, he was himself.

But even freedom costs something. The secrecy, the risk, and the duplicity weighed on him. Self-gratification can cause ripples of pain and hurt. And they can ripple very far outside our own bodies. / very far indeed.

There was one person who somewhat less enthused about Kinsey’s bisexual awakening. And she was 230 miles to the south, cooking dinner for three kids in a two-story home in Bloomington, Indiana.

Clara Kinsey – “Mac” – was not an idiot. And Alfred – “Prok” didn’t treat her like one. He came clean about Chicago almost immediately. He didn’t try to cover it up, or lie to her. How could he? He loved Clara, he loved their family, their life together, but this was something he needed. An outlet he could not simply bottle up and hide under the floorboards. He could not deny oxygen to this entire other side of himself.

And Clara, surprisingly, didn’t ask him to.

Every marriage is different. Every marriage is complicated. Each one has its own language and secret history and negotiated boundaries. We can never know for sure what was discussed in the inner sanctums of the Kinsey marriage, but at some point, they talked about Prok’s bisexuality. And they came to an understanding. As Jones writes:

“What was the glue that held the Kinseys together as they made the transition from a respectable middle-class couple to sexual rebels? Love? Their children? Social pressures that condemned divorce? Unwillingness to admit failure? Fear of being alone? Economic considerations? To be sure, each probably had played a role. Yet, in the end, these factors probably would have failed to preserve their marriage if they had not managed to talk. Somehow, they had managed to develop a relationship that kept the channels of communication open between two people who, whatever their problems, cared deeply for one another and wished to remain together.”

But Clara was not content to simply let Alfred have all the fun. If this marriage was going to open up, it’d be a two-way street. Believe it or not, Mac and Prok’s marriage was about to get even more complicated.

And at the same time, Kinsey was embarking on of the most audacious research projects of the 20^th century.

---- MUSIC BREAK ---- 

It’s 1947.

Five years after Kinsey’s research received full funding from the CRPS.

We’re in the city of Indianapolis, at the US Customs Office.

Every day, hundreds of parcels, packages, boxes and bags pass through this squat little government warehouse. Tied up, taped up, and possibly a little banged up, these packages come from all over the world – from as far away as Australia, South Africa or the misty shores of Vancouver.

These packages contain many different items, with many different destinations. But they all have one thing in common. They must all be inspected by the watchful, vigilant eyes of the US Customs Service.

Under the fluorescent glow of buzzing lightbulbs, the employees of the US Customs Service search each and every foreign package for contraband. The list of banned items is long, including but not limited to: Undeclared seeds, soil, fruits, meats; textiles, absinthe, and certain motor vehicles. Illegal drugs, illegal rugs, and illegal bugs.

Like a red-white-and-blue sieve, the US Customs Service weeds out all these dangerous items for the safety and protection of the American people. And one fine day in 1947, just like any other day at US Customs, a box arrives from very far away. 6,462 miles away to be exact. This box, it seems, has come all the way from Japan.

The customs worker pries it open to inspect the contents. And what he finds inside, sets all his alarm bells ringing. At first glance, it looks like a book of beautiful art. Painted in the famous woodblock style, this Japanese print depicts a stylized scene of two couples wrestling on the floor. Sumo for skinny people, perhaps. But then, the Customs officer notices the details of this painting. Huge exaggerated phalluses, geishas in various stages of undress, and parts of the female anatomy that the officer probably did not have the vocabulary to describe. Oh, they weren’t wresting…they weren’t wrestling at all.

The box slams shut like the lid of a cookie jar, and off the worker goes to report the package to his supervisor. This item presents a clear-cut case of obscenity, banned under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. In the eyes of Uncle Sam, exotic is fine, erotic…not so much.

Yes, there is only one thing to do with this pornographic parcel: Confiscate it, quarantine it, and eventually destroy it. In the eyes of the US government, its cultural value is irrelevant. In this country, this kind of art is not art at all. Frankly, it isn’t worth the paper it’s wrapped in.

And where, oh where, was this package going? Who would dare to try and slip the all-powerful net of US Customs? A quick inspection of the parcel revealed the delivery address:

 1165 E 3rd St, Bloomington, IN 47405

The Institute of Sex Research

What in the gosh-darn heck, the workers at the Indianapolis customs office wondered, was the “Institute of Sex Research”? Little did they know, they were about to become *very* familiar with the ISR. In the coming years, they would see that address printed on hundreds of packages. A tidal wave of so-called smut flowing into the country, all bound for the campus of Indiana University and its rapidly growing library of sexual books, artifacts and materials.

Just what were they doing down there in Bloomington?

Since his successful meeting with Robert Yerkes five years earlier, Alfred Kinsey had been very busy. With respectable money flowing into the project, Kinsey was free to expand his operation. He hired a team, refined his research methods, and traveled from coast-to-coast in a never-ending quest for more willing interview subjects. From this point on – that will become a theme with Kinsey: more, more, more.

More subjects. More data. More experiences.

The study of sex “engulfed him”, wrote John Gathorne-Hardy.

By 1947, Kinsey and his financial backers had decided to create a new scientific organization specifically devoted to the research and study of human sexuality. And thus, the Institute for Sex Research was born, headquartered just a brisk walk away from Kinsey’s home in Bloomington, Indiana.

“As 1947 drew to a close,” writes James Jones, “Kinsey was riding high. From his timorous beginnings as an obscure researcher, he had managed to place his research on firm financial ground. He was the head of his own research institute, and his support structure was firmly in place. In addition to that of Indiana University, he enjoyed the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave him access to seemingly unlimited funds—funds he could use to build a staff, to travel, to purchase books and other materials for the library, and to do whatever else he liked in order to advance his research.”

And what Kinsey liked to do….was conduct interviews. In his inexhaustible mania for numbers, Kinsey went searching for subjects in every nook, cranny, and orifice of America. With his irresistible interview technique and gift for establishing rapport, he collected hundreds and hundreds of additional sex histories. By 1947, he was up to something like 6,000.

The information from each of those interviews arrived at the Institute of Sex Research in the form of a single sheet of paper. Once it was safely back at the mothership, it needed to be decodified, processed and analyzed. Easier said than done, when you’re dealing with thousands of histories, each comprised of hundreds of answers.

Keep in mind, this is back in the cretaceous mists of the late 1940s. There are no thumb drives, no digital files, no Google drops, no cloud. Everything is physical. Everything is analog. But thankfully, Kinsey’s team at the ISR had a machine that was capable of running these numbers.

It was called a Hollerith Machine, or more commonly, a tabulating machine. The Hollerith, H-O-L-L-E-R-I-T-H, was what one historian called “the forerunner of the modern-day computer”. Although to be fair, that description paints a somewhat generous picture in the mind’s eye. I like Gathorne-Hardy’s description better: “Kinsey’s IBM Hollerith machine was the size of a chest of drawers and went ka-chunk, ka-chunk – the two Reports would have been impossible without it.”

Picture, if you will, an unholy union between a Xerox machine and an old lead-lined refrigerator. Fill it with wires, circuit breakers, drive shafts, and an oil pump. Then turn a couple cranks and ‘voila’, you’ve got a Hollerith machine. If you added some leather seats, you’d be well on your way to a functioning automobile. Believe it or not, in 1947, this was state-of-the-art computing. But it served Kinsey’s purposes. As Jones writes:

Ideally suited to his needs, this machine could run tables, figure frequencies, and calculate correlations on cases by the thousands. In the world of sex researchers, this placed Kinsey at the cutting edge in the use of technology. Indeed, few investigators of his day generated enough data to warrant machine-assisted analysis.

And all that data could be condensed onto a single punch card. If you’re an ancient, wizened child of the 90s like me, it essentially looked and operated like a scantron card. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these cards were fed into the Hollerith machine, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, and what came out the other side, was enough raw data to write a book on human sexuality. Several books in fact.

->

But Alfred Kinsey was far, far too busy to spend hours feeding punch cards into his tabulating machine. That task fell to his staff. Staff members like Clyde Martin.

Back in the late 1930s, hundreds of students at Indiana University took Kinsey’s infamous Marriage Course. They listened with fascination to Kinsey’s lectures, hanging on every word, and when he invited them to give their sexual histories, many of them jumped at the chance.

One of those young students was a 20-year-old economics major named Clyde Martin.

Clyde’s an important character in this story, so I want to take a second to paint a picture of him. Clyde Martin was American white bread in human form. Wholesome, handsome, and plain as can be. If you need a Hollywood comparison, think Jim Halpert from the Office, or a very young Tom Hanks. As historian James Jones, writes, Clyde was “a handsome young man with thick hair, broad shoulders, and a quick smile […] He was warm and soft-spoken, projecting [a] kind of innocence and openness.”

On December 17^th, 1938, Clyde Martin knocked on the door of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s office. He had liked the sex class - no, LOVED the sex class - and he wanted to contribute to the embryonic project that the professor was working on. Two hours and 300 questions later, Clyde Martin’s entire sexual life was condensed onto a single sheet of paper. Not that there was much to condense; this lily-white slice of Wonderbread had barely known the touch of butter, but still, it was a valuable contribution to the project.

Like most people who sat in a chair across from Alfred Kinsey, Clyde was immediately transfixed by the doctor’s charm, empathy, and compassion. To make Clyde more comfortable, Kinsey had even volunteered a few details from his own sexual history during the interview. From that day on, Clyde wanted to be a part of Kinsey’s world.  And Kinsey, taking a shine to the handsome young student, was happy to welcome him into it.

The two became very close, very fast.

Clyde would swing by the Kinsey house to help with gardening work, he’d stay late at the University to assist with the cataloguing of gall wasp specimens. From swinging a shovel to polishing a magnifying glass, whatever Kinsey wanted, Clyde would do. You can start to see where this is going.

At some point, Kinsey made a move on Clyde.

Unlike Kinsey, Clyde’s childhood was a not a minefield of trauma and baggage; His opinions on sex were as blank as fresh clay. As Clyde remembered many years later: “I really didn’t have much of an opinion as to whether sex between two men was good or bad or right or wrong; I’d never thought of it.”

But Kinsey had. In the garden, in the classroom, in his office – Kinsey had thought about having sex with Clyde many, many times. And Clyde, always the dutiful protégé, acquiesced to his mentor’s advances.

“But Kinsey was much more interested in having sex with Martin than Martin was with Kinsey,” Jones writes, “For a time, Martin was able to be sexually responsive, but homosexuality was not his inclination. He was much more interested in women. “Kinsey got Martin into all kinds of things, but Martin didn’t like it,” Clarence A. Tripp (an friend of both men) explained. In fact, it really was a case of Martin’s “being dragged against his will into it. Asked about the duration of the sexual phase of the relationship between Kinsey and Martin, Tripp replied, “I’m not sure … how long it lasted. I know that Kinsey was quite frustrated that Martin sort of wanted out of that…. I know it wasn’t Martin’s scene at all.”

In the cold light of the modern gaze, it’s pretty clear that Kinsey’s relationship with Clyde was wildly inappropriate, unethical, and built on a power imbalance. “After all,” Jones writes, “the power relationship between Kinsey and Martin was not exactly equal. Kinsey was older, well established professionally, and Martin’s employer. Kinsey worked hard at seducing this insecure, anxious, and financially strapped young man.”

But to Kinsey, who had just discovered his proclivity, if not preference, for men – Clyde was not just a sex object. He wasn’t something disposable, to be used and thrown away with last semester’s term papers. Clyde was smart, if not brilliant. Funny, if not charming. Most importantly, he made Kinsey happy. No, as Prok emphatically asserted, to Clyde and others, this young man eventually grew to be “the last love of his life”.

But things tend to get complicated when life has multiple loves occupying it.

Kinsey and his wife Clara had been married almost 20 years when Prok started acting on his dormant bisexuality. As with Chicago, he came clean immediately about his blossoming relationship with Clyde Martin. And Mac, as he called her, took the new development in stride.

In the words of one historian, “The simplest summation is that they were able to work it out because they wanted to, and they wanted to because they loved one another.”

But Mac extracted a price for Kinsey’s extramarital fun. And that was a little fun of her own.

One day, Clyde Martin came to Kinsey with an interesting request. He was wondering, possibly, maybe, if he could have sex with his wife. If he could have sex with Clara. Initially, Kinsey was caught off guard. “I have to tell you,” he replied, “that the idea never occurred to me.” But the idea didn’t offend him either, in fact, he discovered that he didn’t mind at all. If the two loves of his life wanted to make love to each other…well, all the better. You might say it was a practical arrangement.

For her part, Clara was very, very receptive to the idea. As Jones writes: “She probably welcomed the opportunity to have sex with a handsome, younger man who desired her, as a means both of reassuring herself that other men found her attractive and of demonstrating her sex appeal to her husband. Indeed, she would have been less than human had she not relished the idea of being pursued by the man her husband found so appealing. One takes power (and revenge) where one can.”

“Clara,” he continues, “had to claim for herself the same right to sexual freedom that Kinsey seized for himself and advocated for others. And in the years ahead, Clara would welcome other men to her bed, as she struggled to preserve her relationship with a man whose devotion to research and sexual needs threatened to pull him further and further away.”

For now, the Kinsey marriage was on sturdy, if shifting, ground. But Alfred Kinsey and Clyde Martin’s real focus was back at the University, back with the project. Clara, with her characteristic sharp humor liked to joke that “I hardly see him at night anymore since he took up sex.”

->

After Kinsey procured funding in 1942, he brought Clyde Martin on as his research assistant. In fact, Clyde was the very first person to learn the secret code that Kinsey used to maintain the confidentiality of his subjects. As Gathorne-Hardy writes: “The code alone took several months to learn – it was never written out, but taught, like the rites and rituals of some secret mystery, by rote to the acolytes of High Priest Kinsey.”

Not only did Clyde have to learn the code, he had to memorized the interview questions. All 600 of them. He had to know them backwards, forwards, horizontal and vertical. But most important of all, Kinsey’s interview technique demanded neutrality. The ideal interviewer, Kinsey said, had to be “absolutely without judgment, pro or con, on any item of human sexual behavior, or the subject will never expose his full and complete history.”

“What it amounted to, writes Gathorne-Hardy, “was that Kinsey wanted all interviewers to be replicas of himself.”

It was grueling work, and Kinsey drilled him ruthlessly, always demanding perfection. But Clyde believed in what they were doing. This wasn’t just a job; this was a calling. As he later recalled: “We did feel sort of being on the forefront of something and doing something of a real contribution. So, I was very proud of what we were doing, very enthusiastic.”

Other members of Kinsey’s staff agreed. The Professor’s enthusiasm was contagious, and they all felt that they were shedding light on a deeply misunderstood aspect of the human experience: As one recalled:

“This was a pretty important part of human behavior and [that] it didn’t seem to me that it was right to know more about the sex life of a drosophila [fruit fly] than about the sex life of a human. […] “We felt this might help people, help in counseling, in keeping people together and making adjustments, marriage counseling, student counseling.”

As the years passed, Kinsey’s team expanded rapidly. By 1947, the offices at the newly christened Institute of Sex Research were buzzing like a hive of gall wasps. Secretaries and statisticians, psychologists and archivists, a diverse team of people with a single mission: To learn more about what people did – truly did – behind closed doors. To create, in the words of one historian: “the most elaborate description of the sexual habits of ordinary white Americans ever assembled.”

And of all those people on the team, there were three jewels in Kinsey’s crown. Three people that were the cornerstone of his entire operation. One, we’ve already met, Clyde Martin. The full-time researcher and part-time booty call with a heart of gold.  

The second major addition to the research team was a loquacious lothario named Wardell Pomeroy. “Pomeroy,” writes James Jones, “was handsome enough to be a movie star, with a confident and engaging personality. Disarmingly smooth and outgoing, he was a born extrovert, a man who thrived on human contact.” But Pomeroy’s true value to Kinsey was his skill as an interviewer. He could illicit the most personal details from a subject in a way that rivalled Kinsey. He was also, in all probability, a sex addict. As one colleague remembered,” He just fucks everybody. It’s really disgusting.”

The third and final addition to the core team was a man named Paul Gebhard. A trained psychologist and anthropologist, the only thing Gebhard was more proud of than his education, was his mustache. When Kinsey hired him, he demanded that Gebhard shave the thing, worrying that the unfashionable facial hair would alienate him from interview subjects. But Gebhard refused, and Kinsey grudgingly dropped the subject. It’s so hard to find good people, and sometimes you have to tolerate a little eccentricity.

These three men, Clyde Martin, Wardell Pomeroy, and Paul Gebhard were all very different, but they all received the same grueling instruction from their boss. Alfred Kinsey had the kind of work ethic that would’ve considered God’s 7^th day of rest an act of spectacular laziness, and he expected his employees to jettison any ideas of work-life balance.

As a manager, Kinsey was “a benevolent autocrat”, according to one historian, “He’d check their arrival and departure; Gebhard you came in at 8:12 yesterday! […] He invaded their private lives. He tried to get them to live near him. In the name of science, they all had to fill in sex calendars, detailing their orgasms and their source. He invaded their dreams.”

As Paul Gebhard remembered “I would be about to have intercourse, and suddenly the door would fly open and there would be Kinsey staring at me and say “GEBHARD!”. He ruined more erotic dreams for me over the years than I like to remember.”

Kinsey was a gentleman in the streets, but a control freak in the lab. “He just ran it, “one team member recalled, “he just called the shots, and we did things the way he wanted to do them.” Kinsey would never have admitted it, but there were shades of his father, Alfred Senior, in the domineering, uncompromising behavior. Kinsey hated religion, but he ran his flock like a fire-breathing preacher.

But for all his bullshit, the team loved Kinsey. “Awed by the force of his personality, inspired by the depth of personal commitment, and intoxicated by the heady brew of sexual liberation,” writes Jones, “they could be counted on to follow him anywhere.”

And that was lucky, because Kinsey was about to lead them into a storm of controversy. As one historian wrote: “It was as though Kinsey had become Ahab, tossing his quadrant into a troubled sea and hurling his crew against his personal Moby Dick, Victorian morality.”

At long last, after all the years and interviews and data-gathering….it was time to shatter this “conspiracy of silence”, as one historian put it. To challenge the very foundations of American sexual convention. To reveal the lie.

It was time to write the book on sex, so to speak.

---- OUTRO ---- (25 pages)

Well folks, that is all we have time for today.

Next time, in the conclusion of this series, we’ll arrive at Kinsey’s big moment in the sun - and the tragic tailspin that followed.

 In Part 3, we’ll look at the release of Kinsey’s first volume: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. We’ll examine some of the key ideas in the book, the main criticisms of those ideas, and the massive pop cultural splash they made at the time. From there, we’ll move on to Kinsey’s second book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and how it triggered a political backlash that ultimately proved ruinous to Kinsey’s research and reputation.

Running parallel to all of Kinsey’s professional tribulations, we’ll also explore his increasingly libertine lifestyle. As time went on, Prok’s secret life became progressively more complex, mixing work and pleasure in ways that threatened to destroy his team, his legacy, and his sanity.

Look out for Part 3 sometime in the next couple of weeks.

As always, thanks for spending your valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time.

--- END ---