The Kinsey Report – Part 3

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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 the third and final episode of a series on the life, work and cultural impact of Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Now that we’ve reached the last leg of our story, I’d like to take a moment to say: ‘thank you’. I’m fully aware that for longtime listeners of the show, this topic is a bit of a departure from our usual bread & butter. Typically, we discuss military conflicts, political struggles, and social upheavals, so a three-part labor of love on a troubled sexologist from the 1940s is definitely off the beaten path. Or maybe it’s the beaten-off path?

[Anyway – I know it’s] It’s unconventional, it’s challenging, and it’s definitely not for everyone, so if you’re still with me at this point, I appreciate your faith in me as a storyteller. / if you’re still here at the finish line, I appreciate you sticking with me. Hopefully you’ve found some value and insight in this weird little topic. [Because] I certainly have.

But all that said, the story is not over yet. Far from it, actually. Believe it or not, things are about to get even crazier in Bloomington, Indiana. So before we land this bird, let’s take a look back at what we covered last time, so we can dive back in with a fresh understanding of the story threads we’ve already established.

In the Kinsey Report Part 1, we got to know Alfred Kinsey as a man.

In Part 2, we got to know him as a biologist.

Last episode, we opened with a discussion of Kinsey’s first scientific specialty, the North American Gall Wasp. This flightless, terminally boring bug dominated Kinsey’s imagination for the first two decades of his academic career. In many ways it was his claim to fame; he was the world’s foremost - and probably only - expert on the gall wasp.

But Kinsey’s obsessive approach to collecting, categorizing, and characterizing that humble insect would have a profound influence on how he studied sexual behavior. By the time Kinsey set his sights on sex, he was determined to amass more data on it than anyone in the history of the world.

After a mercifully quick discussion of the Gall Wasp, we zipped forward in time to 1938. By that point, Kinsey was teaching the wildly popular and extremely controversial Marriage Course at Indiana University. The students loved it, but the faculty were incensed by the graphic content and transgressive nature of the curriculum. They were also uncomfortable with the fact that Kinsey was using his students as interview subjects, collecting their sexual histories like so many gall wasps in a display case / box.

 By 1939, the University gave Kinsey an ultimatum: Teach the Marriage Course – or Research Sex. One or the other. Kinsey, of course, chose the latter; and thus his great project, his great crusade, began in earnest.

From there, we spent some time talking about Kinsey’s unique method. His fierce commitment to confidentiality, singular gift for building rapport, and encyclopedic command of over 600 interview questions allowed him to coax incredibly detailed information from his rapidly growing list of interview subjects. By 1942, Kinsey had refined his process to such an impressive degree, that he was able to secure funding from the National Research Council, backed by the philanthropic leviathan, the Rockefeller Foundation.

Unsatisfied with the shallow, one-dimensional demographics in rural Indiana, Kinsey took his show on the road. In the late 1930s, Kinsey started visiting Chicago in search of more interview subjects, and that is when the Professor entered one of the most important periods of his life.

As he explored the hidden world of homosexual subculture in the big city, Kinsey experienced a bisexual awakening. He realized, or perhaps accepted, that he was sexually attracted to both men and women. With the chains of inhibition cast aside, Kinsey experimented freely with that exciting new preference in the gay clubs and speakeasies of Chicago.

But Kinsey, let’s not forget, was married. Clara Kinsey – whom he called “Mac”, was back home in Bloomington, unaware that her husband was spending his weekends having anonymous gay sex a couple hundred miles to niorth. But Kinsey to his credit, told Mac about what was going ot the right away. Their marriage was built on honesty, open communication, and a healthy attitude toward sexual desire. And Mac, to her credit, did her best to understand and accept her husband’s shifting identity.

Chicago not only satisfied Kinsey’s sexual desires, but his craving for more data. After that, the research project began gathering steam very fast, accumulating more funding from the NRC and the Rockefellers with every passing year. By 1947, Kinsey and his benefactors had established an official organization for the project, The Institute of Sex Research, headquartered at Indiana University.

The ISR was staffed with many talented researchers, but three in particular were very important to Alfred Kinsey and his project. Last episode, we took a little time to introduce these three men. There was Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist who had a mind for data and a distinctive mustache. There was Wardell Pomeroy, a handsome, hypnotic interviewer who could charm people almost as well as Kinsey. And then finally, there was Clyde Martin, a data specialist who also happened to be a romantic partner for the Kinseys.

I say the Kinseys plural, because, as you’ll recall, Clyde Martin ended up establishing ongoing sexual relationships with both Clara and Alfred Kinsey. Prok, after all, did not know the meaning of the word ‘jealousy’, and he was happy to allow his wife whatever sexual experiences she wanted, as long as he was allowed to do the same. Clyde, for his part, was just happy to be a part of the project, and if that meant sleeping with his boss’s wife from time-to-time, so be it.

And so, it is there, with the ISR established, the team introduced, and the Kinsey marriage careening into polyamory, that we left off.

This time, we will finally get to the actual ideas and research that Alfred Kinsey is remembered for. The books, the backlash, and the bitter implosion that followed.

But enough foreplay, let’s get started.

Welcome to The Kinsey Report – Part 3.

So now that we’re all refreshed and caught up, we can jump right back into the story.

Let’s get started.

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It’s the Fall of 1947.

We’re in the city of Philadelphia - at the printing press of Saunders Company Publishing.

This morning, like every morning, employees file into the cavernous facility. Switches are flipped, levers are pulled, and countless machines roar to life. Today is a big day. Because today, they are going to be making a book. A brand-new book.

Making a book in 1947 is a multi-step affair involving dozens of specialists, a room full of noisy machines, and no small amount of OCD. It begins, with a manuscript. A typed, master copy of the book-to-be, provided by the author. This spotless, virginal document is the single cell that will be duplicated many, many times over before the day is done.

Once received, the delicate manuscript is given to an employee called a Typesetter.

For the next several hours, if not days, the Typesetter perches over a set of more than 100 keys, containing every letter, number, and punctuation mark in the English language. For hours on end, he re-types the author’s manuscript, word-by-word, line-by-line. As he does this, a machine bathes letter molds in liquid metal, creating thin rectangular bars, each imprinted with words. The Typesetter will do this thousands and thousands and thousands of times, but when he is done, every sentence in the entire book will have been rendered into metal form.

With blurry eyes and aching fingers, the Typesetter hands things off to the next employee in this elaborate industrial chain. The Composer.

If the Typesetter spins the thread, the Composer sows it all together. Carefully checking each individual line for continuity, the Composer slots and arranges them into 9 x 6” wooden frames. Each frame represents a single page of the book. Once every line is in the correct order, the Composer locks the bars in place with a special turnkey, then pounds the surface with a hammer to create a uniform level.

These soft metal bars, embossed with the text, are not strong enough to withstand the print order for one hundred thousand copies that this particular book carries. So, a stronger plate must be made. The frames are sent to a room filled with bubbling vats of molten copper. The frames are carefully dipped into the liquid metal, and once they harden, the resulting copper plates can be used over and over again.

When the dipping is done, the plates go to an employee called a Ready Man, who places them in a machine called a press bed. Each press bed contains 64 plates for 64 pages of the book. The plates in the bed will be inked, rolled, and pressed against a massive, spinning drum of paper, creating the physical pages of the book. The resulting pages are then folded, sliced, glued and bound.

Throughout this entire process, mistakes can happen very easily. One line out of place, one page in the wrong order, and the entire printing run is ruined. Money is lost, clients are angered and reputations are mangled. But if everything goes right, if the minds and reflexes of the technicians are sharp, then this long, tedious process will result in a clean, bound, beautifully printed book, ready for shipping.

And today, everything goes right. The Publishing house fills with that new book smell as dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of copies roll off the assembly line. The employees of Saunders Company Publishing are very good at what they do, and the proof of their skill can be seen in the final product.

The finished book has a dark, crimson cover. On the spine, etched in gleaming gold letters and printed in all-caps, is the title:

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE

Below the title, also in gold, are the last names of the authors. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin.

After 10 years of research, 12,000 interviews and countless hours of analysis, Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s explosive book is finally ready for public consumption. On January 5, 1948, the volume will hit book shelves across America. And no one, not even its author, is fully prepared for the tempest it will trigger / reaction it will provoke.

The physical book itself may have been born in a Philadelphia publishing house, but the ideas within it had been conceived 700 miles away, in a sleepy college town in Indiana. From his office at the Institute of Sex Research in Bloomington, Alfred Kinsey had painstakingly compiled a mountain of hard data about what people did – really did – sexually.

“This is first of all a report on what people do,” Kinsey wrote, “which raises no question of what they should do.” His stated goal was to “to accumulate an objectively determined body of fact about sex which strictly avoids social or moral interpretations of the fact.”

In other words, this book is not a sermon. It’s just a mirror. All I can do is show you the facts that I have found. And if anyone wanted to avoid gazing into that mirror-mirror-on-the-wall, they would’ve found it almost impossible. The Kinsey Report, as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became known, was prefaced by a whirlwind of media attention and hype.

Kinsey was a scientist first, but in another life, he was most definitely a publicist. Using the same disarming charisma that had convinced thousands of strangers to reveal their most intimate secrets, Kinsey charmed the pants off the press. In matters of publicity, foreplay is key, and Kinsey skillfully whetted reporters’ appetites for his book. By the date of publication, they were practically begging for it.

“In half a million years of mankind’s history,” wrote Look Magazine, “it is to be the first, adequate, large-scale inquiry into man’s sex life.”

The Kinsey Report promises to be, gushed Reader’s Scope, “the most complete and objectively scientific report ever assembled on the sex life of American men.”

“Many of our most deep-rooted concepts of sex and marriage are about to be blasted by a soberly documented report by a group of University of Indiana scientists,” wrote Harper’s Magazine.

One publisher remarked: ‘I think it is probably the most widely publicized unpublished book on record.”

By January 5^th, the pump was primed. In preparation for consumer demand, the publishers at Saunders Company printed 100,000 copies of the book. It was, historian James Jones points out “an extraordinary number for a work of fiction, hence an unbelievable figure for a scientific report.”

Alongside pulp paperbacks, breezy romances, and home cookbooks, the Kinsey Report towered like a crimson colossus, gold and thick and intimidating. “It is hard to imagine a book that looked more imposing than the male volume,” writes Jones, “It had all the trappings of heavy-duty science. Topical headings in bold print announced subjects, 173 graphs and 162 tables laid out the evidence in mind-numbing detail, and an impressive bibliography commanded the literature.”

But despite the book’s esoteric style, tens of thousands of Americans nervously spread its pages, looking for truth, scandal, or vindication. They got all three in spades. As Kinsey wrote:

“The publicly pretended code of morals, our social organization, our marriage customs, our sex laws, and our educational and religious systems are based upon an assumption that individuals are much alike sexually, and that it is an equally simple matter for all of them to confine their behavior to the single pattern which the mores dictate.”

In other words, writes historian Jon Gathorne-Hardy:

“Most people think that whatever they do sexually is what everyone else does – or should do.”

But people, Kinsey asserted, were just as varied and unique as the gall wasps he had studied for decades. “There is no American pattern of sexual behavior,” he wrote, “but scores of patterns.” What American men are supposed to do, Kinsey declared, is not what they actually do. As historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman write:

“The study of the male revealed that masturbation and heterosexual petting were nearly universal, that almost ninety percent had engaged in premarital intercourse and half in extramarital sex, and that over a third of adult males had had homosexual experience. Virtually all males had established a regular sexual outlet by the age of fifteen, and fully ninety-five percent had violated the law at least once on the way to orgasm.”

In one stroke, so to speak, Kinsey exposed a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of American culture and law.

“The overwhelming fact,” Harper’s Magazine observed, “is that sex acts condemned as immoral and illegal in our law books are so commonly practiced as to make criminals of the vast majority of the American population.”

As Americans devoured the book chapter-by-chapter, the bombshells continued to fall.

“Unsettling as many of his findings were,” write D’Emilio and Freedman, “none proved more shocking to conventional values than the incidence figures for homosexual behavior. Kinsey’s estimates dwarfed all previous calculations. Among males he found that fifty percent acknowledged erotic responses to their own sex, over one-third had had a post adolescent homosexual experience that resulted in orgasm, four percent were exclusively homosexual as adults, and one out of eight respondents were predominantly homosexual for at least a three-year period. Kinsey claimed that homosexuals were scattered throughout the population.

“Persons with homosexual histories,” he wrote, “are to be found in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and on farms, and in the most remote areas of the country. . . . In large city communities . . . an experienced observer may identify hundreds of persons in a day whose homosexual interests are certain.”

Now, it's important to remember that the sexual politics of the 1940s were very, very different from what they are today. Especially ideas about sexual orientation, gender, and identity. This is before pride parades and rainbow flags. Before birth control and bikinis. The Sexual Revolution was still a couple decades away. As a scientist, Kinsey approached the issue of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ from an incident-based perspective. He saw them as patterns of behavior, not identities.

“For Kinsey,” writes Jones, “labels such as “homosexual” and “heterosexual” did not make sense. People engaged in homosexual acts; they were not homosexuals. Therefore, the only proper use for the word “homosexual” was as an adjective, not as a noun. Pressing this point vigorously, he declared, “It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience.”

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, homosexual and heterosexual,” Kinsey continued, “The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. Only the human mind invents categories to force facts into separate pigeonholes.”

After all, Alfred Kinsey certainly didn’t think of himself as exclusively gay or exclusively straight. For decades, he had been married to a woman who he enjoyed having sex with. And yet, as much as Kinsey valued his relationship with Clara, he also enjoyed having sex with men; he’d even fallen in love with a man, his research assistant, Clyde Martin.

Had people known the full truth of his private life, the foot soldiers of Christian morality would’ve labelled Kinsey a freak of nature, a deviant, an aberration outside God’s good and natural order. But he had a hunch that in the real world, beyond the pews and prying eyes, things were not so cut and dry. And all the data he had found, in 12,000 interviews across dozens of states, reinforced that hunch. Just as no two gall wasps were totally alike physically, no two people were totally alike sexually.

“The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects,” Kinsey wrote, “The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

To visualize this continuum, this vast spectrum of sexual behavior, Kinsey created a simple instrument for measuring sexual preference. It is arguably his most famous and widely known contribution to the field of sex research. There’s a pretty good chance you’ve already heard of it.

It’s called the Kinsey Scale.

On page 638 of the First Edition of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, you will find a chart labeled the "heterosexual-homosexual rating scale”.

It divides sexuality into numbers, ranging from 0 to 6.

If you are a 0 on the scale, that means you are exclusively heterosexual. If you are a 6, on the opposite end, that means you are exclusively homosexual. But in his research, Kinsey found that 0s and 6s were very, very rare. Most people fell somewhere in between those polar extremes. Numbers 1-5 represent the gradations and variations in sexuality that occur in the vast majority of the population.

A 2, for example, represents someone who is “predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual”. A 3 would be “equally heterosexual and homosexual” and so on and so on.

Kinsey was quick to note, however, that the scale was only a guide, a way of approximating sexual preference. The numbers were just mile markers; between each one was an infinite spectrum of behavior. He also stressed that a person’s number could change over the course of their life. After all, people change, and so can their sexual preferences. You might be a 4 in your 20s and then a 0 in your 30s. You might start life as a 2 and then end up as a 6.

 “The portrait of human sexuality that emerged from his research,” writes James Jones, “was an intricate mosaic, rich and diverse.”

The Scale was not a perfect instrument, of course. “The whole concept is fraught with difficulties and contradictions,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “Nevertheless, the scale did allow Kinsey to get an approximation of what he was finding.”

To modern ears it all sounds fairly obvious. But at the time, this was revolutionary thinking. The newspapers dubbed Kinsey’s book and the scale within a “social atom bomb”.

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“The immediate impact of Kinsey’s work,” write Jones, “was to heat up cultural wars of long standing. In the months and years following its release, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male precipitated the most intense and high-level dialogue on human sexuality in the nation’s history. Prior to Kinsey, Americans had debated a variety of sex-related issues, including prostitution, venereal disease, birth control, sex education, and Freud’s theories. But the cultural debate that greeted Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was far more important. It swept away the last remnants of the taboos that had inhibited Americans from engaging in public discourse about their erotic lives. In boardrooms, in barbershops, in cafés, in grocery stores, and on street corners Americans could be heard reciting his findings on the incidence of masturbation, homosexuality, premarital and extramarital intercourse, and the like. And wherever this happened, these and other topics became fair game for polite conversation.”

Yes, with his pioneering book, Kinsey had opened up the floodgates. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had given people an excuse to open up about what was going on inside them, to examine their desires, anxieties, pains and prejudices like never before.

It was the culmination of Kinsey’s own long, painful journey towards sexual self-acceptance and enlightenment. From the boy who thought he would literally die if he masturbated, to the young husband who had no idea how to please his wife, to the middle-aged man who discovered his attraction to other men….this was deeply personal for him. And he hoped that maybe, somewhere out there, someone just like him might take comfort in the facts he had found.

He had no idea how right he was.

As Jones writes: “If he required additional proof that the sexual attitudes that had so filled him with guilt as a boy still stalked Americans, Kinsey had only to read his mail”

“Thousands of letters arrived from total strangers. Surprisingly few came from people who condemned the research, and only a handful could be described as crank letters. Many people wrote to thank, congratulate, praise, and bless Kinsey, [….] Despite his busy schedule, Kinsey answered each and every letter.”

Alongside the praise, came questions. Endless questions. Kinsey’s hunch had been correct. Not only were Americans anxious, guilty, and tormented about sex; many were hopelessly ignorant.

As Gathorne-Hardy writes: “We have all had, or have, worries about sex. But we have to multiply and magnify these many times in return, to get some feeling of the ignorance, the anxieties, guilts, fears and frustrations that filled Kinsey’s correspondence, which he heard from his histories, and which he *knew* he could help.”

Over and over again, Kinsey heard the same thing. “Am I normal?” “Is something wrong with me?” “Am I broken?” “Please, help.”

As one historian recounts: “A YOUNG INDIANA SOLDIER wrote to [Kinsey] in great distress. On a date with an older woman, the soldier had attempted oral sex. Indignant, “she told me how low, dirty, mean, and contemptible I am—a pervert. Am I a fit specimen of a man after such conduct? I want to be a normal man.” Kinsey reassured him that there was “nothing in your experience which is in any fashion unusual or abnormal.”

More letters arrived every day.

“I am afraid that my organ is too long for intercourse with an average women,” another man wrote to Kinsey, “Something that I have always thought would be an advantage, I now wonder whether or not it is a handicap. I am not going to marry if my worries are founded. Will you please help and advise me?

Letter after letter, question after question poured into Kinsey’s mailbox at Indiana University. “What does the word ‘fellatio’ mean?” “Can sex while pregnant cause polio?” “Are tampons sexually stimulating?” “Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering?” “Does too much sex cause cancer?”

Hunched over his desk, late into the night, Kinsey did his best to offer advice and comfort to these anxious people. One young man, terrified that masturbation would destroy his health, wrote to Kinsey begging for guidance. As the professor carefully drafted his response, he might as well have been talking to his younger self:

“Masturbation does no harm, but the sort of worrying you are doing does wreck the life of an individual. You have to jerk yourself up by your bootstraps, and stop worrying.”

When another young man reached out to Kinsey with fears that he was a freak, that things he had done when he was younger would haunt him for the rest of his life, Kinsey responded:

“You are not feeble-minded and you are not abnormal just because you have particular things in your sex history.”

“In effect,” writes Jones, “he was saying, “You’re okay,” which, in turn, carried the unspoken corollary “And so am I.”

To the press, his colleagues, and his financial backers, Alfred Kinsey liked to present himself as an even-tempered scientist. Nothing more than a finder of facts. As he lectured a bit self-righteously:

[T]here is no right, no wrong, no beauty, no lack of beauty—nothing but the observed truth.… Any scientist who passes opinions on things spiritual or moral speaks as a theologian or as a mere man, and not as a scientist.

But whether he wanted to admit it or not, there was a revolutionary zeal burning beneath that tweed jacket. An activism driven by old wounds and fresh insights. As one close acquaintance observed:

“He has the temperament of a reformer rather than a scientist: fierily against hypocrisy and repressive law of every sort, censorship, etc., and against Judaism and Catholicism.

One of his fellow researchers, the mustachioed anthropologist Paul Gebhard agreed:

You had to really twist his arm to get him to admit to this humanitarian impulse, because ordinarily he was the objective scientist without any ax to grind, without any crusade to pursue. But underneath there was this powerful streak of crusading humanitarianism which, despite his attempts to cover it, show up in between the lines in everything he ever wrote.”

“[Kinsey] had led such a wretched, sexually inhibited life himself as a young man that he was determined that he was going to promulgate a more rational approach to sex so that people would be happier.”

He felt that knowledge would prevent tragedies, upsets, frictions, guilt—bad things of this sort. In other words, it is almost like the biblical saying ‘The truth will set ye free.’ If he could only get the facts and the truth to people, life would be a lot happier and less guilt [ridden]. That was motivation number one. Motivation number two was that “he was a great champion for tolerance and liberality.” Kinsey believed “that it didn’t much matter what you did sexually as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else and it made you and your partner happy.”

In other words, writes John Gathorne-Hardy:

“The most basic force behind his sex research was deeply personal and extremely simple, and it lies here: That no one else should have to suffer as he had suffered.”

And if the sales numbers of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male were any indication, Kinsey’s crusade was off to a great start. In time, he hoped to write a volume on Female Sexual Behavior, then a book on Sex Offenders, then a book exclusively about Homosexuality. With each volume he would peel apart the old dogma, superstitions, and ignorance. Eventually, maybe, the laws and biases that had hurt so many people might change.

“Tolerance,” writes Jones, “was the central message of the male volume.”

And in 1948, few people were positioned as well as Kinsey affect that sort of change. In the eyes of the media, he was a clean-cut, respectable scientist from Indiana. A family man in a bow tie. “Dr. Kinsey has few conventional vices,” wrote Time Magazine, “The professor does not swear and he does not smoke.”

But underneath the flashbulb-friendly image was a man with secrets. Many, many secrets. What was happening behind closed doors in Bloomington was becoming increasingly unconventional. In his quest for more data, more answers, more interviews, more everything… Kinsey was barreling down a dangerous road. And if anyone found out what was really going on, it would destroy his reputation, end his research and possibly even his career.

Fame, after all, is a double-edged sword.

It brings attention; and not all attention is welcome.

Worse still - since its publication, critics of Kinsey’s book had been taking a fine-tooth comb over some of his more shocking statistics. And they had some very unfavorable, and frankly valid/legitimate, critiques / pushback.

Kinsey’s crusade was about to endure its first major blow.

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It’s a hot summer night in 1949.

We’re in Bloomington, Indiana.

Home of the Institute for Sex Research and its now world-famous director, Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

But we’re not at the ISR.

We’re just a few miles away, at a lovely two-story house on 1320 East 1^st Street. With its irregular red bricks, charming chimney and winding stepstones, the home looks a bit like a gingerbread house, sweet and wholesome and unassuming. On the mailbox out front, the name of the resident family is printed in clear letters. K-I-N-S-E-Y. Kinsey.

This is the home of Dr. Alfred Kinsey himself, the one he and his wife Clara have lived in for almost 20 years now. If you were to stroll up to the front door and step inside, you would’ve been greeted by the comforting sound of classical music and the smell of baked goods.

In the kitchen, Clara Kinsey is making cookies. For twenty years, Clara – or “Mac” as her husband affectionately calls her – has been making cookies in this house. In the early days, when the kids were still young, the house had been a lively place, full of giggles and homework and backyard experiments. But now, it’s a bit quieter. The kids have been out of the house for years now, and with Alfred, or “Prok”, off promoting his book, the house on First Street has become a lonely place.

Later in life, she told an interviewer that after Prok became a sex researcher, she had to get used to “being alone a lot”. Not that she ever would have pressured him to stay at home. This was his calling, his life’s work, the thing that mattered to him more than anything in the world, possibly even her. The idea of begging him to spend more time with her, to abandon his research was beneath her. “I felt it was important work. And I just couldn’t do that to him”, she said.

The key was to stay busy. To live her own life. And when Prok was around, to help as much as she could, whenever she could.

Like, for example, baking these cookies.

Mac follows the recipe she knows by heart. She mixes the dough, cracks the eggs, pours in the sugar and butter and chocolate chips. She scoops the dough and arranges it on a baking sheet in row after row of neat little dollops. This will have to be a big batch, because tonight, the Kinseys have guests.

As she waits for the cookies to finish, Mac pours ice-cold milk into five or six glasses, arranging them on a tray. Before you can say ‘Good Housekeeping’, the timer dings, and the cookies are ready. She pries them loose from the sheet and arranges them on a plate.

Mac carries the tray of milk and cookies past the kitchen table, through the dining room, and up the stairs the second floor. This is no ordinary dinner party; this little treat is going all the way up to the attic. When she arrives at the door to the attic, she knocks, a voice tells her to come in, and Mac enters. She is greeted by a different kind of aroma, and a different kind of music.

The Kinsey attic is full of naked people, engaged in live acts of sex. As Mac places the tray of milk and cookies on a small table, the bed in the center of the room is shaking and rocking. And these are not strangers in her attic having sex; As Mac looks around the well-lit room, she recognizes every face.

In the corner of the room, perched next to a video camera, is her husband, Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Prok barely notices her enter with the tray of milk & cookies. His eyes are glued to the action on the bed. Next to Prok, operating the video camera, is a man named William Dellenback, the ISR’s official photographer. On the bed bathed in sweat and heaving with exertion, is Wardell Pomeroy, the handsome research assistant. Mr. Hollywood himself. Beneath him, is Agnes Gebhard, the wife of Paul Gebhard, Kinsey’s mustachioed research assistant.

Any other 1940s housewife would’ve dropped the milk and cookies and run down the stairs screaming. But for Mac, this kind of gathering was not shocking. It was just another Tuesday.

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The truth was, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his team at the ISR had been observing live sex acts in the name of science…for years. Going all the way back to his earliest visits to Chicago in ’38-’39. The main goal was to study physiological responses in real time; to observe sex as it was happening, in order to gain a better understanding of the process at work. After all, most people don’t take the time during sex to note the width of this or the diameter or that or how much of this comes out of that.

Nothing could replace Kinsey’s interviews; They were the gold standard upon which he had built his research, but they were only as perfect as the memory of the subject. By observing live sex as it happened, Kinsey hoped to gain new insights into why people did what they did and how they did it. The problem, Kinsey discovered, was finding people who were willing to get busy while a couple guys in a lab coats scribbled notes in the corner.

For that reason, Kinsey’s first volunteers for live demonstrations were sex workers. Prostitutes who accepted a few extra bucks to let Kinsey hide in the closet and observe what he could through the slits. But that presented problems too. Not just issues of privacy – the johns didn’t know there was a professor lurking in the room – but also issues of authenticity. Prostitutes, Kinsey noted ruefully, almost always faked their orgasms.

No, Kinsey needed volunteers willing to have authentic sex in a controlled, safe environment.

For that, he turned to the only people he believed he could fully trust, who actually understood what he was trying to do: His staff.

As it turns out, there is no “I” in team, but there is one in “I would like all of you to have sex with each other in the name of science.” Clyde Martin, Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhard, and all their wives were recruited into these live demonstrations, which took place in the privacy of Kinsey’s attic. Kinsey was certainly not the first boss to sleep with his employees, and he definitely would not be the last, but he was probably the first to commit to film in the name of science. By 1949, a video camera had been introduced into the equation. As Gathorne-Hardy writes: “Science meant observation, and observation required film.”

But it quickly became clear, that this wasn’t just about science. For Kinsey, this was also about pushing himself and his staff far beyond the limits of conventional sexual morality, out into a new, and frightening frontier. Most bosses just throw a pizza party, but to encourage team bonding, Kinsey went a step further. As Jones writes:

Within the inner circle of his senior staff members and their spouses, he endeavored to create his own sexual utopia, a scientific subculture whose members would not be bound by arbitrary and antiquated sexual taboos. […] Kinsey decreed that within the inner circle men could have sex with each other, wives would be swapped freely, and wives, too, would be free to embrace whichever sexual partners they liked.

In essence, wrote one historian, Kinsey’s team became “a group of interacting open marriages”

This went about as well as you’d imagine. Almost immediately, jealousies began to emerge, egos were bruised, and marriages were strained to their limit. Yes, the sexual politics of the Kinsey research team were as labyrinthine as an Ottoman harem. At one point, Clyde Martin’s wife fell in love with Paul Gebhard and his mustache. It caused such friction within the team that Kinsey had to step in and forbid them from seeing each other.

The chaos only intensified from there. Pomeroy had sex with Clyde’s wife. Gebhard had sex with Clara. Clyde had sex with Gebhard’s wife. And Kinsey? Well, Kinsey had sex with everybody. He argued, according to James Jones, that “because the Institute was investigating sex there should be no shame or guilt or repugnance attached to any sexual activity among senior staff members.”

The attitudes of the staff ranged from grudging compliance to outright delight. Paul Gebhard, for his part, enjoyed it all very much. He wasn’t willing to shave his mustache for the Institute, but he’d happily sample his coworkers’ wives. As he remembered: “I said to myself, ‘I’m an anthropologist, I must participate in the local customs.”

But not everyone on the research team was so happy with the rampant polyamory. Especially when it involved being filmed up in Kinsey’s attic.

Clyde Martin was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it all. As he remembered:

“I really wasn’t interested, the idea kind of offended me. I recall the one occasion that I participated in the filming, as I remember, I had a hell of a time getting an erection. I was such a failure nobody ever asked me again.”

Agnes Gebhard, Paul’s wife, also disliked participating in those attic video shoots. She felt “sickening pressure” to do it, saying “I felt like my husband’s career at the Institute depended on it.”

“I didn’t enjoy it,” admitted William Dellenback, the Institute’s photographer, “It was against my sense of propriety, I think.”

And if Clara Kinsey, Mac, had any reservations about it, she kept them to herself. As Gebhard remembered: “Mac so deeply believed in the research that Kinsey was doing, I swear if he’d asked her to cut her wrists, she probably would have. She idolized the man, even though she was quite free in saying he irritated her occasionally.”

Whatever the staff’s feelings about the filming sessions, Kinsey was clear on one thing.

“The filming was a deep, dark secret,” remembered Gebhard, “Only the staff members and their spouses, and, of course, the [other] participants in the film knew this.” The Institute’s secretaries and clerical staff had no idea of what was going on.”

According to one historian, they filmed “about twenty homosexual couples, ten heterosexual couples, and approximately twenty-five men and women engaged in masturbation.”

“As a scientist,” writes Jones, “it was easy for Kinsey to justify filming sexual behavior. Politically, however, the risks were enormous. Public opinion would never have tolerated sexual filming, particularly of the kinds of behavior he preferred. However much he shouted “science,” the public would have answered “pornography.”

[…]“Decades later, of course, research scientists and clinicians would be able to observe and photograph human sexual behavior openly, with little opposition from the public. Researchers such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson of Washington University in St. Louis, would become famous for their groundbreaking work in this area. But the real pioneer was Kinsey. Over time, he developed a remarkable network of individuals who were willing to perform while others watched. In any of half a dozen cities, he could pick up the telephone, contact trusted confidants, and stage sex that evening.”

But as 1949 came to a close, Kinsey had bigger concerns than top-secret filming sessions and the byzantine sexual dynamics that accompanied them. His book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was being slammed by critics in the scientific community. After a honeymoon period of rosy reviews and softball coverage, the sentinels of academia had taken the time to actually dig into his statistics. And they found some troubling flaws in Kinsey’s methodology.

Kinsey, of course, knew that his book would court controversy. The religious leaders in the country would never tolerate a book that put forth such a brazen challenge to the traditional stance on sex.

A religious publication called the Catholic Mind bombarded The Kinsey Report with fire and brimstone, saying its author was “at war against purity, against morality, against the family!”

“Maurice Sheehy, of Washington’s Catholic University of America,” writes Jones “denounced Sexual Behavior in the Human Male as “the most antireligious book of our times,”, charging that it “has made the most devastating inroads on Christian morality in this century.”

“We all know that there is too much sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, and homosexuality in our country,”another writer said through clutched pearls, “What does it add to our knowledge to know the exact percentage in each of these three areas?”

One scandalized writer even compared Kinsey to Jack the Ripper.

These kinds of attacks, Kinsey had expected. After all, he had never been shy about attacking the religious institutions that had caused him and others so much pain as a boy.

“There is abundant reason for placing the break-down of our modern home at the door of the Christian Church,” he once said. Their rhetoric, he said, had engendered, “ignorance of sexual structure and physiology, of the technique fundamental in the normal course of sexual activities, and the prudish aversion to adequate participation in the one physiologic activity on which society is most dependent.”

->

But what Kinsey had not expected, were the attacks that came from within academia itself. These critiques primarily focused on the methods and data that formed the foundation of his book, so in essence, they were an attack on his reputation as a scientist.

The science of people’s junk, they said, was…well, junk science.

The first salvo of criticism took aim at the book’s misleading title: SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE. The phrasing of the title seems to imply a certain universality; that the conclusions within apply to all human males, everywhere. But that just wasn’t the case. As historian Gary Brett writes:

“Kinsey’s sample was virtually confined to white U.S. males, and even within that population those surveyed were “far from representative of the U.S. male population.” Only 15% of the general population had college educations, but 56% of Kinsey’s sample were men in college. The sample not only skewed young and white but also did not adequately represent Catholics or farmers.”

Kinsey’s answer to this charge was a grammatical loophole. “In” meant “within”, writes Gathorne-Hardy, “if he’d meant the whole male population he would have said “of”. But the precision of his prepositions was lost on the majority of Kinsey’s readers. They saw that title and assumed the book’s conclusions could be applied to every male on the planet.

The truth was, the Kinsey Report overrepresented some groups and underrepresented others. Furthermore, the critics argued, Kinsey’s interview method was fundamentally flawed, since it relied exclusively on volunteers. How did he know they weren’t lying or exaggerating or omitting certain things entirely?

One prominent statistician joked that Kinsey “would have been better advised to stick a pin in a telephone book and then interview the people whose names got pierced.”

Well, Kinsey had an answer for that too. It wasn’t perfect, he admitted, but for this kind of research, volunteers were the only option. As Jones writes:

“Random sampling, he insisted for the umpteenth time, was simply not feasible for sex research, as persons chosen at random often refused to be interviewed. Given this obstacle, he maintained, the next-best thing was the taxonomic approach—relying on huge samples to reveal the full range of individual variation in a population.”

Another critique leveled at Kinsey was less about statistics and more about tone.

A prominent cultural anthropologist from New York named Margaret Mead said: “Nowhere have I been able to find a single suggestion that sex is any fun, not anywhere in the book, not a suggestion,” Furthermore, the book did not give people any guidance as to what was healthy sexual behavior and what was not: “the book suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep.”

Kinsey, they charged, had stripped away all the things that made sex meaningful. The interpersonal connections, the emotional factors. “On every page I can find the word ‘penis’, wrote a psychiatrist named Lawrence Kubie, “but nowhere the word ‘love’.

This biologist from a second-rate Indiana university was out of his depth, out of his field, they said. Trespassing in intellectual territory in which he did not belong. He was, in the words of one critic, “trying to make an objective study about something about which we cannot be objective.”

But in a way, that was entirely Kinsey’s point. As one writer put it, “Humans are the only animals in the whole of evolution who like to pretend they are not animals.”

Sex, Kinsey maintained, was “entangled in a mass of taboos and repressions.” Only by stripping away all those cultural trappings, only by dropping the pretense that we are anything but highly-evolved mammals, could we understand, biologically, what sex really is.

These questions of normal vs abnormal, natural vs unnatural, love vs lust. These were distractions. Weapons in the hands of the church and politicians, telling us what to do, and when to do it, and who to do it with. As Gathorne-Hardy writes: “The law and convention, the prudes and the moralists, described a lot of activities as unnatural. Kinsey countered by demonstrating they occurred in ‘nature’, among animals, human being were animals, ergo, they were natural to us.”

“The only kinds of abnormal sex,” Kinsey said, “were those which caused harm.”

In fact, Kinsey countered, it was the law that was doing immense harm, right under their very noses. None of these armchair academics or coastal critics understood. They had not been out in the field. They had not seen what he had seen. Prior to publication, Kinsey’s quest for more interview subjects had taken him into the prisons and penitentiaries of America. And in many of those cells, he didn’t find rapists or monsters, he found people who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. As Jones writes:

“Dellenback, the Institute’s photographer, remembered Kinsey’s telling the story of a man who had had oral sex with his wife and gone to prison for it. It seems that the man’s mother-in-law hated him, and when she learned from her daughter what had happened, the old woman called the police. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for violating the state’s sodomy law.”

Another friend of Kinsey remembered a story of a man who had agreed to be castrated to avoid a prison sentence.

“Kinsey would tell you that story with his eyes suffused with the beginning of tears and … he turned pale with the horror of it. “He was so sorry for people that you felt that you’d never noticed human beings at all.”

Nor was this a distinctly American problem. Just 4 years after the publication of the Kinsey Report, the United Kingdom chemically castrated one of its own war heroes, the mathematician Alan Turing, who had famously cracked the Nazi’s Enigma code. It didn’t matter that he had saved countless lives; when it was discovered that he had engaged in homosexual acts, all those medals went out the window. Barely two years after his conviction and castration, Turing swallowed a lethal dose of cyanide in his own home. If that was what Western society did to war heroes, what would they do the rest of us, Kinsey wondered?

 [do you need this[

America’s prisons were filled with people whose only crime had been to stray outside the bounds of Christian sexual morality. Homosexuals and adulterers and fornicators and chronic masturbators. “While their behavior violated sexual taboos and offended the public’s sense of propriety,” writes Jones, “they did not inflict physical harm on others. Kinsey believed these offenses had no place on the criminal code books.”

But the law’s definition of deviancy was so wide and indiscriminate, that many functionally innocent people had been caught in its tangle, their lives irreparably damaged by archaic legal codes. It all weighed heavily on Kinsey. As Jones:

“Kinsey identified with the sex offenders he interviewed in jail. He felt their pain and sorrow as deeply as if it were his own. The man who enjoyed shocking people by declaring that 90 percent of all American males had broken the nation’s sex laws knew that he, too, was a sex offender. All Kinsey had to do was compare his history with those of many of the sex offenders he interviewed in prison. If they had been caught, who was to say that he would not be next? No, if Kinsey understood anything, it was that he, too, was jailable.”

But it is worth noting, not all of Kinsey’s interview subjects were misunderstood innocents. His quest for more data ended up taking him to some very dark places. And the darkest place of all, was the home of a man known only as Mr. X.

->

Mr. X’s real name, or perhaps alias, was Kenneth Greene, a sixty-something civil servant living on the east coast. Unlike many of Kinsey’s subjects, Mr. X was not in prison. But he should’ve been. In fact, if the law had ever gotten ahold him, had ever discovered the full extent of what he had done, he probably would’ve been serving several life sentences.

“In June 1944,” writes James Jones, “Kinsey and Pomeroy traveled some eighteen hundred miles to interview Mr. X, their longest trip ever to take a single history. “At the time we saw him,” wrote Pomeroy, “this man was sixty-three years old, quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing—a rather unobtrusive fellow.” Despite his unprepossessing appearance, it took a record seventeen hours to record Mr. X’s case history, which as Pomeroy put it, “astounded even us, who had heard everything.”

There was not even a word to describe Mr. X’s sexual experiences. Eventually, they settled on the term “omniphile”. “Omni” being the Latin word for “all”. “phile” being the Greek word for “love”. But the reality was far more sinister than that academic label. As Jones continues:

“Mr. X’s bizarre sexual behavior, it seems, was a family legacy. The product of a home poisoned by cross-generational incest, he had sex with his grandmother when he was still a young child, as well as with his father. In the years that followed, the boy had sexual relations with seventeen of the thirty-three relatives with whom he had contact. And this was just the beginning. After he reached adulthood, Mr. X was obsessed with sex, a walking id with polymorphous erotic tastes. By the time Dickinson brought him to Kinsey’s attention, wrote Pomeroy, “This man had had homosexual relations with 600 preadolescent males, heterosexual relations with 200 preadolescent females, intercourse with countless adults of both sexes, with animals of many species, and besides had employed elaborate techniques of masturbation.”

The scope of the abuse, the reach of the hurt, was beyond imagination; but like a moral car crash, Kinsey could not look away. He was fascinated, transfixed by a specimen so rare in its repugnance, so unique in its absence of ethics, it was like discovering a new species.

One of Kinsey’s assistants had that very same thought, remarking that for Kinsey, this was “like finding the gall wasp which would establish not a new species but a new genus. Mr. X was way off the line, way off the scale, beyond anything else that [Kinsey] knew about.”

What Kinsey should have done, was walk right out of that room and report the man to the police. But that is not what he did. According to one historian:

“Science would have been better served had Kinsey not allowed his lust for data to obscure his judgment. Viewed from any angle, his relationship with Mr. X was a cautionary tale. Whatever the putative value to science of Mr. X’s experiences, the fact remains that he was a predatory pedophile. Betraying a huge moral blind spot, Kinsey took the records of Mr. X’s criminal acts and transformed them into scientific data.”

Chapter 5 of the finished book, “Early Sexual Growth and Activity,” offered a finely graded discussion of preadolescent male sexuality, and much of this chapter was based on materials Mr. X had provided.

“The question arises, “writes Gathorne-Hardy, “should Kinsey have done this?”

For members of Kinsey’s own research team, the answer was “no”. As one told Kinsey directly: “I don’t think that belongs in this book.”

Critics and historians tend to agree, as one wrote decades after Kinsey’s death: “Looking to sexual molesters for information on childhood sexuality is like drawing conclusions on the sexuality of adult females from the testimony of rapists.”

But if Kinsey had any crisis of conscience about including data like this, it was undetectable. Dealing with someone like Mr. X as a necessary sacrifice for the greater scientific good. As Jones continues:

Convinced that cold, hard facts alone would persuade the public to develop more tolerant sexual attitudes, Kinsey was determined to provide those data. And if that meant trafficking with someone like Mr. X, then so be it. The end justified the means. As Pomeroy put it, Kinsey “would have done business with the devil himself if it would have furthered the research.”

Kinsey interviewed Mr. X in 1944. Six years later, in 1950, that morbid thrill of discovery had given way to an intense and all-consuming anger.

After all the work, all the miles, all the moral compromises he had made to compile the most detailed report on sexual behavior in the history of the world, he was under attack from the people who should’ve been supporting him: other scientists.

He had expected the priest and prudes to attack him, but to come under scrutiny from his own community? How dare they? Who did they think they were? These haters, Kinsey surmised, were emitting what one historian called a “iridescent green glow”. They were just jealous. Jealous of his book’s success, jealous of his place in history. Rather than support him, than help him, than offer their support and encouragement, they were trying to tear him down. Maybe he was right after all, Kinsey thought, maybe we are all just animals, fucking and fighting over scraps of turf.

But for now, Kinsey had to put all that aside. He had to look forward, to focus on what came next. “Most Americans,” Jones writes, “could hardly have cared less what academics thought. They wanted to hear what Kinsey had found about American women.”

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had surpassed all expectations, making mountains of cash in the process. Kinsey didn’t take a dime for himself, instead funneling all that money back into the ISR, back into the research. The Institute would need every single penny, because it was time to start writing the sequel to the Male Volume:

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

But while Kinsey may have been able to plow forward and ignore the critics, his financial backers were not so confident. In smoke-filled rooms and austere offices, phone calls were being exchanged. Kinsey didn’t know it yet, but his benefactors were beginning to have second thought about the entire project.

His funding, and by extension his crusade, was hanging by a thread.

----- -----MUSIC BREAK-- ------- ----- (19 pages)

It’s April 4^th, 1951.

We’re in a small conference room in Princeton, New Jersey.

There’s nothing particularly special about this conference room, being of course, a conference room. It has all the trappings one might expect. A long wooden table. Squeaky, uncomfortable chairs. A pitcher of water in the center in case anyone gets sudden case of boredom-induced dehydration.

But despite its drab, pedestrian appearance, this room is very important. At least for a couple of hours. Because today, it is hosting an event that only happens once a year. An event that involves some of the most powerful people in the United States, if not the world.

Today is the annual board meeting of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Around the table, 16 chairs have been arranged, one for each of the trustees. Today’s venerable guest list includes titans of industry, education, and medicine, a former senator, and not one, but two future Secretaries of State. Needless to say, that’s a lot of power crammed into 16 uncomfortable chairs.

But their purpose here is not political, their agenda is not nefarious. The Rockefeller Foundation is, and was, first and foremost, a philanthropic organization. A non-profit entity dedicated to, in its own words, “promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world. It seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact that promotes the well-being of humanity by identifying and accelerating breakthrough solutions, ideas and conversations.”

That’s an elaborate way of saying “we raise money for important causes”. How much money? Well, the Rockefeller Foundation wasn’t stuffing a few bills in the collection basket. They were generating tens of millions of dollars. And the most considerable chunk of that change, was earmarked for public health projects. Virus research in India, Sanitation in Venezuela, Psychoanalysis in Chicago. The list went on and on.

Whether you’re a family of four or a global organization, building a budget is no easy task. And that’s why once a year, every year, the Rockefeller trustees gathered in a room for an annual meeting to approve or deny grants to certain organizations and research projects. Naturally, when that much money is flying around, emotions can run high. Things get tense. Egos clash as the pennies get pinched. But today’s meeting was going to be particularly contentious.

As the opening remarks were made, one name was burning in the front of everyone’s mind:

Alfred Kinsey.

“Few board meetings in the foundation’s history, writes James Jones, “had generated debates that could match the heat and the venom of what followed.”

->

Back in Part 2 of this series, we briefly discussed how Kinsey was able to secure funding from the National Research Council in 1942, by hosting its representative, Robert Yerkes in Bloomington. Over the course of several days, Kinsey had dazzled Yerkes with his methodology and theories; he’d even managed to take Yerkes sexual history. Of the 12,000 interviews that had informed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Yerkes was one of the first.

But at the end of the day, Yerkes was just a middle man. He didn’t write the checks. In fact, the National Research Council didn’t even write the checks. In truth, almost every dime Kinsey and his Institute ever received originated at Rockefeller Foundation headquarters in New York City, underwritten and approved by the 16 men in this conference room.

By the mid 1940s, over half of its budget for medical sciences was going to Kinsey and his team out in Indiana (fact check $40,000)

In the beginning, Kinsey and his project had seemed like a dream come true. Finally, a real pioneer, with something real to contribute. But as time went on, members of the board regarded the eccentric professor with a growing sense of unease. Before long, they were calling Kinsey their “problem child.”

The problem, in their eyes, was publicity. Specifically, too much of it. Knowing that funding from a world-famous and universally respected outfit like Rockefeller gave him instant credibility, Kinsey flashed those credentials with glee. The truth was, we wouldn’t shut up about it. He even asked the one of the board’s trustees, Alan Gregg, to write the preface for his book.

This made other members of the board…. uncomfortable. Kinsey’s research was important and valuable to be sure….but it was also controversial. It attracted a lot of attention and political heat. Kinsey, they claimed, lacked discretion. Why couldn’t he just research sexual behavior…quietly? Well, as we have seen, ‘quietly’ was not Kinsey’s style. By the late 40’s, Kinsey was name-dropping the Foundation at every dinner party and press conference east of the Mississippi.

And when Sexual Behavior of the Human Male was published in 1948, the heat got even hotter. As Jones writes:

In Kinsey, they thought they had found a metric-minded, Baconian scientist. They saw him as an instrument, a collecting machine who would compile the data others would use to develop social policies and programs designed to control human sexual behavior. Instead, they had been co-opted by a genuine revolutionary, a man who intended to use science to attack Victorian morality and to promote an ethic of tolerance.

As the April meeting was called to order, the Board found itself divided into two distinct factions. Those who wanted to continue funding Kinsey, and those who did not. Impassioned arguments were made for both sides. 

The Pro-Kinsey faction, writes Jones, “insisted that no project before the board had greater social relevance than Kinsey’s research. His work had brought the light of science to a field that had stood for centuries in the darkness of taboo, and it had done so at a moment in history when the nation badly needed hard data with which to reevaluate its legal, moral, and educational approaches to human sexuality.”

The Anti-Kinsey faction was motivated by fears that the intensifying attacks on Kinsey’s statistics, samples, and methodology would damage the reputation of the Foundation. It didn’t matter that a recent review of Kinsey’s data by the American Statistical Association had given him a favorable verdict. It didn’t’ matter that Kinsey’s book had sold over a quarter of a million copies and pushed arcane scientific topics into the public square. It didn’t matter that in just a decade, he had contributed more data to the field of sex research than anyone in the last 100 years.

What mattered was that he was talking too loudly about sex. Speaking too boldly. He was pissing people off. Important people. None other than J Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, had found the book disgusting. The file at FBI headquarters was getting thicker and thicker. Kinsey had a target on his back, and the Rockefeller board didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire.

And besides, it was all so…distasteful. Viewed through the cobwebbed prism of Protestant morality, Kinsey’s research held no value at all. It was crass, it was graphic, it wasn’t the Christian thing to do. As one Pro-Kinsey board membered recalled:

“I think it was the old attitude. You see, most of the trustees were men, oh, [in their] late fifties or sixties, and it was the old attitude about sex. Sex was sort of taboo. It was just something that shouldn’t be published, something that shouldn’t be discussed, something the foundation shouldn’t have anything to do with.”

In the end, after a bit of shouting and table-thumping, it came down to a vote. A simple majority vote would decide whether Kinsey’s project was allowed to continue. Or at least, allowed to continue with money from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The votes were cast and counted.  The entire room waited in a strained silence. After what seemed like an eternity, the tally was read. The final vote was 9 to 7…..in favor of Kinsey.

And so, the Anti-Kinsey faction shuffled their papers, straightened their ties, and stormed out of the paltry conference room in a backdraft of scotch fumes and $300 cologne. Kinsey and the ISR had been saved…for now. But this was not over.

700 miles away in Bloomington, Indiana…Alfred Kinsey had no idea just how close he’d come to the chopping block. But, to be fair, he had other concerns weighing on his mind.

Kinsey was troubled by matters of the heart. Specifically, his heart.

Every preacher in America believed that Kinsey was a sick; and the truth was, they were right. Alfred Kinsey was a very, very sick man. For decades his heart had been slowly, and surely rotting away. A long-gestating heart disease was finally catching up with him.

In 1951, Kinsey was in his late 50s, but he still had memories of a sickly, miserable, guilt-ridden childhood. For the first ten years of his life, his body had been ravaged by a sampler’s platter of disease. Rickets, curvature of the spine, and typhoid fever kept the little boy confined to his bed, all day and every day. But it was a case of rheumatic fever that turned his heart into a block of Swiss cheese, scarring its valves and constricting its blood flow. Little Alfred, the doctors told his austere, Puritanical father, was unlikely to live past the age of 21.

But Alfred Kinsey ended up proving the doctors wrong. He grew up into a strong, virile young man who adored hiking and the outdoors. The farther he pushed himself, the more miles he clocked, the more gall wasps he found, the further he was able to distance himself from those doctors and their fatal predictions. But that looming sense of mortality was always nipping at his heels. Inside his chest cavity, decade after decade, hike after hike, his heart continued to weaken.

“The idea that he would die young, not surprisingly, made a deep impression on Kinsey” writes John Gathorne-Hardy, “It is one of the reasons he flung himself with such furious intensity into anything, however trivial, that he later undertook.”

By 1951, Kinsey was working 90 hours a week. As much as he hated his father, he had inherited his old man’s relentless Protestant work ethic. There was so much to do, and so little time to do it. Kinsey knew he was living on borrowed time. The resulting compulsion to work as hard as he possibly could bordered on self-destructive.

Clyde Martin, Kinsey’s research assistant and great unrequited love, couldn’t help but look on his visionary mentor with a mix of pity and admiration: “I think he was a man of tremendous conviction to the point of harming himself.”

Another colleague agreed, saying: “I don’t think it was clear whether he ran his research or his research ran him.”

“No crisis of confidence weakened his will, no dearth of inspiration clouded his vision, no breakdown of discipline vitiated his work ethic, and no waning of zeal obscured his mission,” wrote one historian, “Kinsey was not ruined by success. His problem was time. There simply were not enough hours in the day (or night) for him to say grace over everything on his plate.”

When Kinsey went to see a doctor for his annual check-up, the physician pulled the stethoscope away from his chest and told him gravely that his heart sounded like “a concrete mixer.”

Kinsey’s clock was ticking. And there was still so much to do.

While the Rockefeller Board was debating the survival of Kinsey’s project, the good professor was elbow deep in typewriter ink. Progress on the sequel to his bestselling book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was moving at a blistering pace. But a book on the sexual habits of American women presented unique problems. For Kinsey, the biggest hurdle to understanding what made women tick was his own preconceptions.

“Kinsey’s attitudes toward women reflected the cultural values of his youth,” writes Jones, “He saw women as largely uninterested in sex, morally pure, and devoted to reforming men. Paul Gebhard later remarked that, “basically, he had rather a Victorian image of female sexuality.” He elaborated that “he had the feeling that females were essentially receptive, passive individuals; and the males were the ones who were sexually active and aggressive.” In Gebhard’s judgment, there was no gainsaying that Kinsey was “a bit of a misogynist in that sense.”

Kinsey had always had a better grip on male genitalia, so to speak, according to one historian, but as he interviewed more and more women, took more and more histories, an elaborate and complex world began to open up. With every interview, Kinsey’s stereotypical image of women began to melt away. American women were just as sexually active and experimental as American men. His interviews revealed that:

“62 percent of the women in his sample had masturbated; 66 percent had had nocturnal sex dreams; 90 percent had petted; nearly 50 percent had had premarital intercourse; 26 percent had had extramarital intercourse; 13 percent had had at least one homosexual contact that resulted in an orgasm.”

Not only that, conventional understanding of female sexual response was so far off the mark it was laughable. Even today, you’ll hear jokes about men not being able to find the clitoris. Well, in the late 1940s and 50s, most American men didn’t even know it existed. Women who couldn’t orgasm during sex were said to suffer from “frigidity”. They were too cold and dead inside, broken in some way, to enjoy the efforts of their partner. But Kinsey’s data revealed a startling and emasculating truth. Most men just weren’t touching their wives and girlfriends correctly. As Jones writes:

“He baldly stated that a large amount of women’s sexual activity, especially coitus, remained anorgasmic. By contrast, most men preferred coitus above other outlets, almost always proceeding to orgasm. Hence, coitus was a feasible proxy only for men’s arousal rates, while women routinely endured intercourse without orgasm.”

Just like gall wasps and American men, the variation in the female population was absolutely enormous. Infinite and kaleidoscopic. Jones continues:

“A small minority of women went their entire lives without experiencing a single orgasm, and relatively large numbers of women did not have orgasms every time they had intercourse or engaged in other forms of sexual behavior. Nor was the intensity of their orgasms at all comparable. For some women the sensation was extremely mild, while other women had orgasms strong enough to make them faint, with most women falling somewhere between these poles.”

One 35-year-old woman from the Midwest wrote to Kinsey, vividly illuminating the outer margins of what was possible.

“I have an outlet (that means orgasm) of approximately 130 a month. I know of at least 6 women whose husbands could only partially satisfy them. These 6 women and myself have made penises for ourselves out of spun rubber and an inner core of hard rubber. One woman said she never knew anything could be so wonderful. I’m afraid you won’t believe me but she ‘came’ over 100 times in one evening. So don’t blame it on the woman for low output! What man could stay hard that long? I’ll also have you know that I am in the best of health, I don’t jump every time the phone rings nor scream at other noises. I consider myself a well-oriented person.”

Kinsey placed the letter on his desk and took a deep breath. His heart was pounding, but these days, it was always pounding. He didn’t think anything would be able to top his first book. But my god, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was going to blow the roof off America.

All he had to do was stay alive long enough to finish it.

---- ---- MUSIC BREAK ----- ------- -----

Audio: [BILLY GRAHAM, Hour of Decision / Sept 13 1953]

[“During the past few weeks, almost every magazine and newspaper have carried reviews of Kinsey’s newest book. His findings are being discussed wherever people congregate. He has used over 800 pages to give the most intimate details of the private lives of 5,940 women. It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America.

None of the sordid details are spared. Young people are encouraged to have premarital experiences. The moral laws governing marriage have been scorned and immorality advocated. After reading this book, happily married husbands and wives are going to start suspecting each other when they read that 1 out of every 4 wives is unfaithful to her husband.

But Dr. Kinsey’s report gives itself away when it says that 7 out of 10 women who had premarital affairs said that they had no regrets. This is an indication that Dr Kinsey’s report is completely lopsided and unscientific. He certainly could not have interviewed any of the millions of born-again Christian women in this country, who put the highest price on virtue, decency and modesty. I do not know any Christian woman who would submit themselves to such a probing analysis. Thank god we still have millions of American women who know how to blush.”]

That is the famous American televangelist Billy Graham testing the limits of his microphone in a radio sermon delivered on September 13^th, 1953. It had only been a few weeks since Kinsey’s second book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, hit the stands, and that was plenty of time for the Southern Baptist Minister to digest the horrors within.

Graham went on to call Kinsey’s report a “indictment against American womanhood” compiled by “secret agents”. His listeners could hear the unmistakable anger and moral panic in his voice continue to soar throughout the sermon.

Audio: [BILLY GRAHAM, Hour of Decision / Sept 13 1953]

[“This book is going to teach young people how to do it, and how to get away with it. It’s going to teach young people that if so many other people are doing it, then it must not be so wrong.  It is going to teach our young people moral perversions that they have never even heard of before. […] but the thing that disturbs me MOST, is that the American people have so calloused to these things that we are not already appalled to what is happening.”]

Yes, ‘ol Baby Billy was hopping mad. And he was not alone in his indignation. A week after the Female Volume was released, a Congressman from New York demanded that the Post Office ban it from circulation. Just as they had decried Kinsey’s Male Volume five years earlier in 1948, religious leaders, traditionalists and conservative publications howled in outrage at the audacity of Kinsey and his research.

But for all their fire and brimstone, they could not stop Kinsey’s findings from finding their way into the eyes and ears of millions of Americans. The ‘conspiracy of silence’ around sex had been shattered forever.

“The coverage,” writes James Jones, “was surpassed only by the death of a president in power or war, it was unprecedented for a book then and has never been repeated since.”

The proof of that apparent victory was splashed in full color across the pages of Time Magazine, which gave Dr. Alfred Kinsey a feature cover story in August of 1953. As Jones writes:

“Kinsey’s crowning moment came on August 24, 1953, when his face appeared on the cover of Time magazine. A flattering likeness by the artist Artzybasheff, the portrait was suffused with symbols. Birds fluttered overhead; a solitary bee hovered above beautiful pink roses with sharp thorns; and a somber-faced Kinsey, wearing a bow tie (imprinted with the mirror of Venus, the symbol for the female), peered resolutely out into space. Appropriately, his lips were tightly sealed and his eyes looked faintly sad, like a man who had seen too much.”

In his 15 years of research, Kinsey had seen a lot. He and his team had amassed roughly 18,000 interviews. They had traveled across the country, meticulously cataloguing, contrasting and cross-examined multitudes of men and women who told their stories and revealed their inner lives with heart-wrenching candor. And it wasn’t always pretty.

“Sexual histories,” Kinsey wrote, “often involve a record of things that have hurt, of frustrations, of pain, of unsatisfied longing, of disappointments, of desperately tragic situations, and of complete catastrophe. The interviewer must, for a while, share these feelings even though he might not be altogether neutral.”

And as he distilled all this raw data down to a series of coherent conclusions, Kinsey worked himself like a man possessed.

“Ever the perfectionist,” writes Jones, “he refused to settle for anything less than his best effort. Kinsey read passages out loud while he wrote, trying to decide whether the cadence and rhythm of his language was pleasing to the ear. He devoted even greater care to the clarity of his expression. Struggling to find the right words, he wrote and rewrote, polishing his prose until it captured his exact meaning.”

Originally, Kinsey had wanted to complete the Female Volume in 2-3 years. It ended up taking him five. But when the book finally dropped, it appeared to be worth the wait. No scientific text had ever engaged with female sexuality like this before. According to one historian:

“That he had accorded women the same treatment as men was extraordinary, since it implied that female sexuality should be given parity with male sexuality. But Kinsey had done much, much more. Throughout the female volume, he depicted women as sexual beings; he resolutely separated sex from procreation; he documented the full range of female sexual outlets; he celebrated masturbation as the behavior most likely to result in orgasm, thereby deflating the importance of the penis to female sexual pleasure; he showed great concern for the stability of marriage; and he consistently depicted marriage as a partnership of equals that required sexual satisfaction for both parties.”

And instead of relaxing, instead of lounging on his laurels, Kinsey chose to spend his time answering letters. Once again, his mail box was flooded with correspondence. Ordinary people congratulating him, praising him, but most of all – thanking him.

“I want to thank you for the wonderful work that you are doing in teaching men and women the facts, the truth, about sex, “wrote one California grandmother, “It is the most important work, the most curative, the most constructive, the most godly, that can be done on earth.”

“I have just finished the book,” another woman wrote, “To me it is the book of the century and of my life. I feel that ultimately it will do more toward improving relationships between the sexes than any other work to date. I love you and your coworkers. Your courage in stating what you find, rather than what supports the age-old myths is the mark of true greatness.”

“Were it in my power,” said another, “your book would become a required text in every high school in the nation. […]“Perhaps you’ve ‘broken the ice’ and by the time my six year old son has found my daughter-in-law she will have a much happier time of all-around living.”

But it wasn’t all praise and gratitude. Just like before, Kinsey received endless questions from desperate, confused people, begging for help.

“Kinsey received numerous letters from women who decried their ignorance of birth control techniques,” wrote one historian, “admitting they had often been left paralyzed with fear of unwanted pregnancies. These and other complaints from distressed women poured into Bloomington with each day’s mail. Yet, whatever their problems, a common thread ran through their letters. Almost without exception, the women who wrote to Kinsey spoke of their ignorance of sexual matters and of keeping their pain secret.”

Many of the women described failed romances and marriages, tragedies they blamed in many instances on their disastrous sex lives. Some spoke candidly of their total absence of sex education in childhood and of their lack of preparation for conjugal relations.”

Whatever the question, whatever the anxiety, Kinsey responded to each and every letter. It was a chore that could’ve easily been delegated to a secretary or a staff member, but the Doctor insisted on answering as many people as he could. Through it all, his health continued to falter. Even when he could barely pick himself up from a chair, he refused to put down his pen.

But the research team at the ISR hardly had time to celebrate before their high spirits were punctured. A swift and furious backlash was materializing in the press. Like white blood cells activated against an infection, publications around the country attacked the book en masse. By unveiling the sexual lives of women, they said, Kinsey had crossed a line. This time, he had gone too far. According to one historian:

“In the ultra-conformist late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans had little tolerance for challenges to cultural orthodoxy. Much of the public’s concern centered on threats to the image of women, to the traditional family, and to prevailing gender roles. For all the talk about wanting openness about sex, many Americans found it disconcerting to learn that their growing anxiety about declining female morality had some basis in fact. Americans placed a premium on home and family. Many did not want to hear that the percentage of women who engaged in premarital and extramarital sex had increased since 1910. If anything, they were distinctly hostile to Kinsey’s portrait of female sexuality. They preferred to deal with him by ignoring or denying his message.”

But Kinsey wasn’t just swimming against a tide of traditionalism. The good doctor had never been a student of global geopolitics, but he was well aware that he was releasing his book into one of the most contentious political eras imaginable. The early 1950s marked the height of the second Red Scare. Of all the years, 1953 was probably the worst year to release something radically counter-cultural, when fears about the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism were at an all-time high.

“The Cold War context,” wrote one historian, “proved hostile to the 1953 female volume.”

->

“Cold War domestic politics denounced relativism and behaviorism, and zealots dubbed as “un-American” research and scholarship urging “realism” about diverse mores and practices in the population at large. Instead, critics insisted on conformity to desirable norms, theories, and dogmas, enforced by whatever means necessary. McCarthyites denounced sex research as unpatriotic from the floor of Congress, charging that it undermined the American family and, thereby, national greatness.”

Through this lens, Kinsey’s book was seen not as a serious scientific treatise, but a bundle of scandalous propaganda, intended to confuse, distract and undermine American women in this pivotal moment of global struggle.

McCarthyite critics lashed the Female Volume with a red whip, calling it, among other things, “a deep, dark, Communist plot to overthrow and destroy the American home.”

Another accused Kinsey of “aiding the Communist’s aim to weaken and destroy the youth of your country.”

Moscow must be loving this, another critic sneered, “Such things must please the Communists tremendously. They would like nothing better than to wreck the morals of the American people.”

“Under the pretext of making a great contribution to scientific research,” said one US Congressman, “Kinsey is hurling the insult of the century against our mothers, wives, daughters and sisters.”

Back in Bloomington, at the ISR, Dr. Kinsey tried to control his anger. It was 1948 all over again. He had expected attacks, he had expected pearl-clutching, but he had not expected for his work to be called un-American. A friend tried to console him:

“Well, this is not the first time in the history of the world that scientific research has been accused by a hierarchy of being in league with the devil.”

Kinsey could also take comfort in the opinion of the majority of Americans. Whatever was being said in the newspapers and Capitol Hill, a poll conducted by George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion found that 75% of Americans believed that it was “a good thing, rather than a bad thing, to have the information in the Female Volume available”. The Male Volume had scored even higher, with upwards of 80% of Americans believing it was a good thing.

But then, as now, public opinion and scientific fact are not always a convincing combination in Washington D.C.

By 1954, the accusations against Kinsey and his research had metastasized into a full-scale Congressional Committee. This Committee, led by Congressmen B. Carroll Reece, believed, in the words of one historian, that “sex research a threat to the American family, leaving the nation ripe for Communist takeover.” But rather than go after Kinsey himself, they took aim at something much more important: his money. The principal target of the 1954 Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations… was Kinsey’s key benefactor:

The Rockefeller Foundation.

It had been three years since the big vote in Princeton that had saved Kinsey’s funding. But time had done nothing to soothe the reservations of the Board Members that had voted against him. In fact, their ranks had only continued to swell.

By 1954, the board had decided that it simply could not afford to be associated with Kinsey and his research anymore. With an angry mob of Congressmen threatening their tax-exempt status over their association with sex research, the Foundation quickly distanced itself from the notorious problem child. When a request for the ISR’s normal $80,000 in annual funding was filed, it was flatly rejected.

In the estimation of some historians, Kinsey had sort of done this to himself. By publicizing his close association with the Foundation and playing up their support to further legitimize himself, he had made “a crucial tactical error”. Such a public partnership for a tax-exempt non-profit organization was “highly fragile to any blowback.” And so, when the Foundation saw an opportunity to cut ties and save itself from humiliation on Capitol Hill, they took it without hesitation.

But this was nothing personal, the Chairman of the Rockefeller Board, Dean Rusk, was quick to assert. He didn’t have any moral axe to grind about Kinsey’s research. Far from it: “I myself did not have any reservations about work in that field. I thought it was an important field. I thought Kinsey had done some important exploratory work and some pioneering work.”

No, at the end of the day, this was just business. After all, Kinsey had enjoyed lavish funding from the Foundation for 13 years; they had indulged every request, supported every staffing decision, bankrolled every cross-country trip. All good things must come to an end. Particularly when those good things are bad for our reputation.

From now on, Alfred Kinsey was on his own.

----- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s August 14^th, 1956.

We’re in a car, zipping down a public road and kicking up dust outside of West Lafayette, Indiana. Driving the car, clutching the wheel with fragile, varicose fingers, is Clara Kinsey.

It’s a bad day for a road trip. It’s summer in Indiana, when temperatures routinely approach 105 degrees, and today it’s turning the car into a sweat lodge on wheels. To make matters worse, Mac’s eyes are not what they used to be. At 58 years old, she has to squint to read the road signs as they flash by, careful not to miss a turn or take a wrong exit. But every once in a while, she steals an anxious glance over at the passenger seat.

Her husband, Alfred Kinsey, is staring out the window, looking vacant, looking sad, looking tired. But Prok was so much more than tired. He was dying. In fact, he had less than two weeks to live.

It had been almost three years since the Rockefeller Foundation had pulled their funding from the Institute of Sex Research. And those three years had been very, very hard on Alfred Kinsey.

His first instinct had been to appeal their decision, to summon every ounce of charm and charisma he possessed to sway them back to his side. But that well had run dry a long time ago. Kinsey was not the same man who had dazzled Robert Yerkes in 1942. That was 15 years, two books, and several minor heart attacks ago.

But like a hooked fish who doesn’t know it’s dead yet, Kinsey thrashed and raged against his circumstances. He journeyed to New York and Chicago and Indianapolis and Texas in search of new donors. New money that could fill the vacuum the Rockefeller Foundation had left.

“If you find any Texas oilman who would like to contribute to the support of such research,” he told a friend, “let me know and I would go anywhere in the U.S. to discuss it with him.”

But time and time again, he left emptyhanded. Kinsey hated begging for money. Hated begging for anything. It offended some deep-rooted sense of self-reliance in him. If only the old man, Alfred Senior could see him now, asking for money he didn’t have. In whatever hell he was rotting in, his father must’ve been cackling. Every appeal felt fake, weak, self-conscious. As a result, his pitches to new donors came off half-hearted and unconvincing. No new funds materialized.

To make matters worse, Prok’s health was rapidly deteriorating.

His heart, perforated from a childhood disease and buckling under the weight of a superhuman work schedule, began to shut down. “His heart was dangerously enlarged,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “his pulse wildly erratic.” Kinsey’s coworkers and colleagues became terrified that they would walk into his office and find him dead, face down on a pile of unanswered mail.

“Please slow down,” one colleague pleaded, “You’ll contribute more in the long run by living longer.”

Another told him angrily: “If you want to commit suicide, I suppose that’s your business, but I believe you should give some consideration to your family and to your research colleagues and to this Institute.”

But Kinsey would not – could not – stop working.

“He treated his heart like a recalcitrant employee,” write Gathorne-Hardy, “He would force it to behave. He would collapse, recover, then work as hard as ever until he collapsed again.”

Most tragically of all, Kinsey’s mental abilities seemed to be slipping. As Paul Gebhard remembered: “The last thing I would have ever discussed with him was whether or not there was any intellectual deterioration. This would have outraged him completely. But I felt that there was.”

Wardell Pomeroy could never forget Kinsey’s suicidal stubbornness, the battle with his own body. As he recalled years later: “To Kinsey, his body was the enemy, preventing him from doing everything he wanted to do,” He began many sentences with the complaint “ ‘My heart won’t let me do this.”

The President of Indiana University, Herman Wells, remembered a conversation he had with Clara in 1956. “Mrs. Kinsey said to me, You’ve got to help me stop him. I said, I can’t stop him, but he’s got to stop himself, otherwise he’ll kill himself. Mrs. Kinsey said, “That’s what he’s doing.”

As the months dragged on and Kinsey’s health continued to nosedive, a sense of inevitability hung over the ISR. “There is tragedy here,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “as the vast parabola of Kinsey’s heroic endeavor now plunged inexorably towards death.”

->

But on August 14^th, 1956, Kinsey got a sudden, rare burst of energy. He had been invited to speak at Purdue University in a meeting of the National Deans Association. The speaking engagement was 100 miles away, but Kinsey insisted on attending. He could not drive himself, he reluctantly admitted, so someone would need to take him there. Everyone refused. The staff, the assistants, everyone said ‘absolutely not’. Kinsey said, fine. I’ll take the train or the bus if I have to. I’ll walk. But I am going.

In the end, only one person relented. Mac grabbed her handbag, helped her husband into the passenger seat, and set out towards Perdue.

As they approached their destination, she glanced over at her husband. He looked like he was on the verge of death; breathing heavily, blue in complexion, struggling to regulate his heartbeat. Like a fuel gauge rattling at empty, her husband was running on fumes. But somewhere underneath the infirmity and the bristly gray hair and the tired, drooping eyes, she saw a flash of the same young man she’d clocked;/first seen on campus 36 years ago.

The golden-curled Professor with a lean body and an easy smile. The man who would rather make his own campfire than wait on someone else. The scholar who knew everything about gall wasps but nothing about a woman’s body. The husband who taught himself how to please her, who taught others how to accept themselves, who taught an entire country to confront their bigotries and reexamine their superstitions.

Yet also, the husband who had strayed, who had suddenly developed an attraction for men halfway through their marriage. Who had dragged her into polyamory, pressured his staff, and exploited their respect and affection for him. The husband who secretly filmed sex in the attic and used questionable data from questionable people.

From every angle, a new facet of this complicated person seemed to catch the Indiana sunlight. In the end, this was a man who would rather die than give up on his life’s work. A doctor who would never stop answering letters from people who needed his help, even if it killed him.

And two weeks later, it did.

In the last week of August, writes James Jones, “Kinsey entered the Bloomington hospital. He was suffering from pneumonia, which in turn aggravated his heart condition. Not long before entering the hospital, Kinsey had fallen in his garden. The damage was not serious, only a slight bruise on his leg. Still, it was that bruise that produced the embolism that finally killed him. Kinsey died on Sunday, August 25, 1956, at 8:00 A.M. He was sixty-two years old.”

Just as Kinsey’s work had ignited a media firestorm, so too did his death.

This was a “great loss to the world of science”, wrote the Indianapolis News.

“He was,” reflected the New York Times, “first, last, and always a scientist.”

Even Kinsey’s most vehement detractors could not withhold their grudging respect for him in death. An Indiana Catholic publication wrote:

“Few could disagree more strongly than we with Dr. Kinsey’s views or deplore more deeply the evil influence such views could have on individuals and society. Yet one cannot deny that Dr. Kinsey’s unremitting efforts, his patient, endless search, his disregard for criticisms and ridicule, and his disinterest in financial gain should merit him high marks as a devoted scholar. While we have hurled our share of brick-bats at some of Dr. Kinsey’s ideas when he was living, and still hold these ideas to be poisonously wrong, we must admit that we would welcome on our side many more scholars with something of Kinsey’s devotion to knowledge and learning.”

If he had been able to read those words, it would’ve been cold comfort. Kinsey, writes Gathorne-Hardy, died a “bitter man.”

As he gasped his last breath, he believed that he had failed. That his entire life’s work had amounted to little more than a few boxes of gall wasps and a pile of sentimental letters. He died knowing that his cherished Institute of Sex Research would wither into underfunded obscurity. His father had won. The Church had won. Every critic and bigot and McCarthyist had won.

But that is not what happened.

In the years following Kinsey’s death, Paul Gebhard – who still refused to shave his mustache – was named the new director of the Institute for Sex Research. He applied for, and secured, government funding for the Institute. “By 1972,” writes Gathorne-Hardy, “six complete books using Kinsey’s data had appeared and over fifty articles and studies in professional journals.”

Gebhard was no Kinsey, but he saved the Institute from oblivion. And until the end of his days, Paul Gebhard remembered the very last words Kinsey said to him:

“Don’t do anything until I get back.”

Clara – Mac – never did reveal what Kinsey’s last words to her were. But according to James Jones, she “bore her husband’s death with dignity and grace. Friends who attended the memorial service recall her strength and composure. But, in a sense, Kinsey had been preparing Clara for his death for many years. Left alone for so much of the time, she had been forced to follow her own advice to the other Institute wives. Over time, Clara had made a life for herself, one that revolved around Kinsey, yet was not totally dependent upon him. No, Clara was far from devastated by her husband’s death. If anything, her sorrow had to be mitigated by relief, for she had borne a great burden and was suddenly free. Clara enjoyed a long life. She died in 1982, outlasting her husband by twenty-six years.”

Ironically, for a man who spent most of his life counting and collecting, Kinsey’s legacy is difficult to quantify. His actual output is probably the best place to start.

“The publication of Alfred Kinsey’s studies of male and female sexual behavior, in 1948 and 1953 respectively, propelled sex into the public eye in a way unlike any previous book or event had done,” write historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, “Whether bought, read, debated, or attacked, the Kinsey reports stimulated a nationwide examination of America’s sexual habits and values.”

It was an examination that was long overdue.

“Confronted by a nation awash in what Dickinson had called “hush and pretend,” Kinsey pleaded for an end to hypocrisy and for a new ethic of tolerance, “writes James Jones, “What people did in the privacy of their bedrooms was their own business and should not be subjected to social or legal sanctions. […] More than any other figure of his day, he set Americans to thinking about how much authority society should exercise over intimate matters.”

At the time, Kinsey’s work was understood as a considerable ripple in the culture, if not a mild splash; Only in later decades, during the Sexual Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, and Feminist Movements, did it become clear just how impactful Kinsey had been. His work was the first deep breath before a plunge into a greater paradigm shift. As Gathorne Hardy writes:

“It was on this cusp, on this tension point, one perhaps not fully appreciated, that Kinsey stood. It now becomes much easier to understand why he provoked such anger. It came from the older generations, the majority, who were frightened by the continued threats generated by the Cold War, and almost equally tense about the profound cultural revolution they could sense, or see, taking place all around them.”

As one colleague remembered: “The times were changing anyway, but I think he helped to change the times.”

Over the course of 15 years, Kinsey and his team collected 18,000 interviews, yielding a bedrock of vital scientific and statistical data.

“Despite his preoccupation with marginal groups,” writes Jones, “Kinsey compiled an unprecedented volume of data on people who engaged in the more garden variety forms of behavior, the kinds that turn up in most people’s sexual histories. Both from private experience and from thousands of interviews, he knew that virtually everyone falls short of the rigid sexual code demanded by middle-class morality. And better than anyone else of his day, Kinsey understood that most Americans felt compelled to hide things about their sex lives.”

[…] If subsequent researchers managed to do the job better than Kinsey, their debt to him was nevertheless great. He was a pioneer, an explorer who blazed the trail for those who followed. It was he who convinced most Americans that human sexual behavior could and should be studied scientifically and, just as important, that scientific data should help inform discussions of social policy. More than any other investigator, Kinsey made sex research respectable.”

But Kinsey’s real triumph was a personal one, suggests James Jones:

“His great accomplishment was to take his pain and suffering and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform, a secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality.”

“Had he lived a few more decades, he would have found much to celebrate and much to abhor. As an apostle of sexual liberation, he would have applauded the sexual freedom of the 1960s; the addition of candid sex education courses to the curricula of many high schools and colleges; the pill; and Roe v. Wade. In particular, he would have been warmed by the successes of the gay liberation movement. Still, much that has happened in the decades since his death would have left Kinsey dismayed. He would have opposed the prolife movement because he supported the right of women to control their fertility. Nor is it difficult to imagine Kinsey weeping over the moral majority’s gay bashing in the 1980s and 1990s, just as he was sickened by the sexual witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. As for HIV, Kinsey’s public response would have been enlightened and humane. He would have advocated more funds for research, he would demanded explicit sex education for young people and adults alike, and he would have told anyone who would listen to practice safe sex. Privately, however, AIDS might have been enough to restore his faith in a mean-spirited, vengeful God.”

It's hard to know for sure what Kinsey would’ve thought or done or preached if he’d lived. It’s hard to know what he really wanted, or hoped for, as complex and guarded a man as he was. Despite his time in the public eye, barely any recordings or video footage exist of the doctor. Outside his attic, he was notoriously camera shy. But he did give one public glimpse into his motivations, one little flash where the scientific veil slipped for just a moment.

In 1948, a journalist asked him what the message of his first book was. Kinsey thought for a moment, and then answered:

‘If I had any ulterior motive in making this study, it was the hope that it might make people more tolerant.’

This has been Conflicted.

Thanks for listening.

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