In early 1938, Kinsey was feeling restless. While fellow entomologists acknowledged that he had no peer in gall research, their numbers were few and their influence negligible. And since I.U. did not attract top-flight graduate students, nationally, the ambitious academic was still a relative nobody. Kinsey was relieved that the university’s longtime president William Bryan, whom he detested as a stodgy Victorian, had finally retired, but he harbored doubts about his thirty-five-year-old replacement, the former dean of I.U.’s Business School, Herman Wells. “Wells [is] not too long on scholarship,” Kinsey confided to Voris that March. “I am not yet certain that I want to fix my future here. If it comes out right in this shuffle, I.U. will be a good place to stay; if it is screwed up as soon things threaten to be, I shall be in the market for another job. Someplace where there is…a graduate program that allows a better ground for taxonomic…studies.” Kinsey ended up staying put, as a dream assignment suddenly came his way. That spring, I.U. students petitioned the new president to update the university’s ossified one-hour “hygiene” class, which, rather than educating students about sex, celebrated Victorian mystifications. Wells turned to Kinsey, who relished the chance to turn his hobby—combing through the sexological literature—into a scholarly sideline. Heading a committee of seven tenured professors, who hailed from a variety of disciplines including law, sociology, medicine, psychology, and history, Kinsey systematically designed a “Marriage Course,” which was first offered to I.U. seniors in June 1938.
“Marriage Course” was a euphemism for “Sex Course,” because any sex outside of marriage was then still considered socially taboo, if not criminal. In the late 1930s, all states had sodomy laws on the books, under which homosexuality as well as anal and oral sex—even between spouses—could be punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. Kinsey was taking his cue from the leading sex manual of the day, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique by the Dutch gynecologist Theodoor van de Velde. (While the 1930 American edition of this graphic how-to manual, which the Catholic Church immediately placed on its index of banned books, contained a note from the publisher limiting its sale to medical professionals, after World War II it would sell nearly half a million copies.) Citing experts on love from the Latin poet Ovid to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, van de Velde called marriage “sacred to the believing Christian.” “If there are varieties,” ran an aphorism from the French novelist Honoré de Balzac that summed up the Dutchman’s angle, “between one erotic occasion and another, a man can always enjoy happiness with one and the same woman.” Emphasizing physiology rather than psychology, van de Velde addressed his step-by-step guide to orgasmic bliss to “the husband who wants to be more than a blunderer.” In van de Velde, who insisted that the genitals be touched only with “perfectly clean hands,” Kinsey found a kindred spirit. The gynecologist who had helped him to perfect his own technique between the sheets would forever shape Kinsey’s thinking. A decade and a half later, in ads for the female volume placed in the New York Times, Kinsey included the following question, “Do you realize that many authorities believe that reading the book can strengthen the individual’s family life?” Like van de Velde, Kinsey would present himself as an ardent defender of marriage when offering his steamy suggestions, but privately he felt otherwise. He once described the rise of romantic love in the Renaissance as “the worst thing that ever happened to Western humanity.” For Kinsey, as for Dewey, Lindbergh, and other obsessives with runaway sexual impulses, purely monogamous relationships were akin to a prison sentence.
Of the twelve lectures in that initial version of “Kinsey’s course in connubial calisthenics,” as the I.U. students dubbed it, Prok delivered three. In the opener, he sketched his biological view of society, which obliterated nearly all distinctions between humans and infrahumans. Just as the French students would argue a generation later that “we are all German Jews,” this sexual revolutionary made his case that we are all insects. For Kinsey, sex alone was the glue that organized animal societies of all stripes. “The anthropoid [ape] family breaks up,” he insisted, “as soon as the sexual attraction wanes.” Identifying the breast as a sex organ, he also argued that mother love in humans was motivated by the “sexual response” elicited by “the feeding babe.” In other words, for Kinsey, women were interested in the welfare of their children largely because they saw them as a source of sexual gratification. (At the time, little was known about oxytocin, the so-called bonding hormone, but the very concept of nonsexual bonding would never register with him.) In the second lecture, using several slides of penises and vaginas, he covered everything students might want to know about human anatomy and physiology—and then some. Here, he leaned heavily on van de Velde’s manual, which had also broken down the sex act into its component parts with an analytic detachment, as if the issue at hand were how to rev up an automobile engine. “Intercourse,” Kinsey declared matter-of-factly, “consists of a series of physiological reactions which are as mechanical as the blinking of an eyelid.”
In his final lecture on individual variation, Kinsey put forth his unique take on human sexuality. “There are only three kinds of sexual abnormalities,” he maintained, “abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.” This bold statement encapsulates what would be both the upside and the downside of Kinsey’s oeuvre. As a crusader against conventional morality and punitive sex laws, Prok aimed to get both the church and the government out of the bedroom. And his twin tomes would ultimately help to convince most Americans that what consenting adults do behind closed doors is nobody else’s business; by the early 1960s, those age-old sodomy laws started tumbling down. However, the monomaniacal Kinsey would also go overboard, arguing that sexual perversions per se do not exist. For example, he would always insist that more sex—no matter what the consequences—is always better. He once defined a nymphomaniac “as someone who has more sex than you do.” Antipsychological to the core, Prok would attempt to normalize the behavior of sex addicts like himself. To Kinsey, the idea that anyone—but men in particular—might not be eager to rack up orgasms every which way was nearly unthinkable. “To most males,” he later noted in the female volume, “the desire for variety in sexual activity seems as reasonable as the desire for variety in the books that one reads.”
All of a sudden, the man who formerly had had trouble connecting with anyone found himself with legions of fans. I.U. students could not get enough of Kinsey. In the fall of 1938, enrollment in the noncredit class doubled to two hundred; two years later, it would be up to four hundred. “To me the behavior of the penis was already awe inspiring, now it seems even more wonderful,” noted an entranced I.U. coed on one of the many course evaluations that gave an emphatic thumbs-up to his use of slides. About a third of those attending “the course on legalized frigging,” as his former student Breland described it, met with Prok in his office for private conferences. No longer did Kinsey have to traipse around campsites to dredge up some research assistant whom he could instruct in the fine art of masturbation; now undergrads came to him in droves, begging for information about all his favorite topics, including homosexuality. After counseling these anxious and guilt-ridden I.U. students, he asked them to return the favor by filling out detailed questionnaires about their sex lives. Having devoured just about everything scholars had written about sex, Kinsey was surprised to discover that little was known about what people actually did in the bedroom. While he was not yet sure that he had found an entirely new line of work, his inquiring mind wanted some answers. By the end of 1938, he had collected his first sixty-two sex histories.
Over the next several months, Kinsey revised his research protocol, switching to face-to-face interviews. In contrast to his original paper-and-pencil instrument with its two hundred items covering the major sexual outlets, including animal contacts, the oral interview contained at least 300 items and up to 521. To record those orgasm frequencies, Kinsey invented his own secret code, which was a quirky combination of abbreviations a
nd mathematical signs. This shorthand allowed him to jot down the responses quickly on a single sheet divided into twenty-four squares and to ensure that the data would remain confidential. In Kinseyese, the same letter could refer to several different things. While M could mean “masturbation,” “mother,” “Methodist,” or “masochist,” S could signify “single” or “sadist.” Years later, when traveling with his staff, Kinsey would enjoy bantering in his own private language, saying, for example, “My history today liked Go better than Z, but Ag with an H really made him er” (My history today liked genital-oral contact better than that with animals, but anal-genital with a homosexual really turned him on). The man who could not connect in social settings proved remarkably adept as an interviewer. The quest for orgasm numbers brought out his often-hidden compassionate side. Sympathetic to the fears and concerns of his subjects, he rarely failed to establish rapport. He knew just when to slow down and when to push forward. If a subject grew up in a rural area or liked experimentation, he would be inclined to skip, “Have you ever had sex with an animal?” and jump right to “When was the first time you had sex with an animal?”
By the middle of 1939, having finalized his new mode of collecting data after first trying it out on his pliable wife (he would wait a bit before taking the sex histories of his three children), Kinsey was literally off and running. That June, he hit the road to widen his sample to include other types of subjects, namely, prostitutes and urban homosexuals, in whom he took an abiding interest. On July 8, he shared his excitement with Voris: “I have just come back from the trip to Chicago—that we talked of last Xmas—safe and sound—with 8 histories the like of which is in no published study. Again—wish I could summarize for you or show you the detailed histories.” Kinsey would go back to Chicago once a month for the rest of the year. By October, as he reported to Voris, he had compiled a total of 570 histories, 120 of which were H (homosexual). He was also proud to have interviewed 40 prostitutes—both male and female—who together had serviced some 12,000 clients. “You can figure the average,” he told Voris. “Several with 2000 and 3000 each.” Kinsey was getting his hands on all the factoids that he had ever dreamed of. At the end of each interview, he asked his subjects to take four penis measurements—size and circumference in both a flaccid and an erect state—and then mail in the results. To the procrastinators, he followed up with a polite and efficient reminder note (“Will you send us the measurements which we need to complete your history?”). These additional tidbits became a standard part of his inventory. A decade later, after giving his sex history, Glenway Wescott noted in his journal, “I had to measure my poor penis in its two states and both domains for Dr. K and…have got my sense of humor back.”
Kinsey’s grueling schedule did not allow him a second to reflect or feel—which was, of course, just the way he wanted it. In the summer of 1939, in addition to administering the Marriage Course and collecting his sex histories, he was still doing what he was hired to do: study insects and teach biology—his two classes met for five hours a day. “This has been,” he wrote Voris that July, “the busiest six months that I have ever spent. I have measured some thousands of bugs.” And his personal life was becoming more chaotic than ever, as he no longer made any attempt to curb his voracious sexual appetite. During his Chicago sojourns, the exhilarated scholar began to participate as well as observe. That was when he started visiting “tea rooms.” In 1939, back in Bloomington, he also initiated an affair with Clyde Martin, the handsome I.U. undergrad whom he had hired that spring to crunch his rapidly expanding mass of orgasm numbers. Having taken Martin’s history, Kinsey knew that this shy, lonely scholarship student, less than half his age, was not averse to gay sex. Martin, as Gebhard has stated, was to become the third and final love of his life. But Martin, like Voris, was not as enamored of Kinsey. Perhaps to get his boss to simmer down, Martin asked for permission to sleep with Mac. Kinsey agreed to serve as the go-between, and soon Martin and Mac were also having regular trysts in Kinsey’s own bedroom. Boss and employee continued to have sex for a couple more years. After Martin squirmed out of the sexual liaison, the bullying did not end. “Martin was really servile,” another staff member recalled, “and Kinsey demanded that he be.” The complex relationship between Kinsey and Martin—who married his wife, Alice, in Kinsey’s garden in 1942 and mined the sex data until he left the Kinsey Institute in 1960—was the impetus for T. C. Boyle’s moving roman à clef, The Inner Circle. When I asked Boyle what motivated him to write about the Kinsey-Martin dyad—while Kinsey appears under his own name, the assistant is called John Milk—the author responded, “While Kinsey had a progressive agenda, he also had an overweening ego. What attracts me to such a guru is how he can make use of and drain his subordinates.”
With the sex research becoming all-consuming, Kinsey was forced to prioritize. He wrote Voris on March 29, 1940, “I am going to have to make some drastic reorganization of the gall wasp work in order to concentrate on the study of the [sex] material we now have.” For this order aficionado, reorganization was a euphemism for “abandonment.” As a bugologist, he was more or less done. That fall, Kinsey also said good-bye to the Marriage Course. Despite its popularity, “the smut session,” as the stodgy dean of I.U.’s School of Medicine called it, never was without opponents. Chief among them was Dr. Thurman Rice, a key member of Indiana’s Board of Health. A few weeks after meeting with Kinsey on campus in 1939, Rice wrote to express his concern that a particular slide depicting coitus was too graphic, “I have been married for nearly thirty years, and have given the subject real objective study. The picture is too good.” A year later, Rice was joined by a chorus of other voices, including several profs at the med school and a local interdenominational association of preachers, who pressured Wells to either dump Kinsey or modify the course. The fair-minded I.U. president, who had declared at his inauguration a couple of years earlier that “authority must be derived from reason,” liked and respected Kinsey and was emerging as a steadfast supporter of his controversial work. (Rumors have persisted that the lifelong bachelor, who had a penchant for hiring handsome undergrads as houseboys, may have been gay, but no evidence of his sexual orientation has ever been found.) Wells offered his trusted friend a choice between the course or the research. While Kinsey was outraged by his detractors—comparing himself to Galileo, he felt the unenlightened were branding him a heretic—he did not mind having more time to do what he loved above all. After a visit during this transitional phase of Kinsey’s career, Edgar Anderson could tell that Kinsey was “settling down into…[his] real life work.” The friend who knew him the longest wrote, “One would never have believed that all sides of you could have found a project big enough to need them all.” Anderson identified a handful of Kinseys who would work together to produce the groundbreaking sex reports—“the Scotch Presbyterian reformer,” “the scientific fanatic with his zeal for masses of neat data in orderly boxes and drawers,” “the monographer,” “the naturalist,” and “the camp counselor.” And Anderson did not even know about the secret sex maniac who was driving the ship.
In the fall of 1940, the forty-six-year-old biologist forged ahead by turning back the clock nearly a quarter century. “Get a million [gall wasps] Kinsey” was now “Get 10,000 [sex histories] Kinsey” (a figure that he repeatedly upped as the decade wore on). “For more than twenty years,” he wrote then to a friend, “I have worked on individual variations in the population of insects.… The unearthing of the facts in Human Sexual Behavior proves a much more difficult and much more dangerous undertaking; but the very difficulty is one of the things that leads me on.” Once again, Kinsey would scour “the length of the continent in the most remote desert and mountainous areas” to find his prey. In 1941, working up to fourteen hours a day, he spent 106 days on the road and took forty trips to penal institutions. His persistence soon attracted the attention of donors. That year, he received his first grant of $1,600 from the National Research Council’s Committee f
or Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS), which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The following year, he got $7,500. In December 1942, the top three CRPS scientists came to Bloomington. Over the next decade, these site visits would emerge as a key element in Kinsey’s ongoing PR campaign. He would have little trouble wowing academics (and later journalists) by showing them the nuts and bolts of the research, such as his interview techniques, his coded records, and his orderly files. And to give his visitors a firsthand feel for the project (as well as to gain control over them by learning their secrets), this voyeur would routinely take their sex histories. During these nonstop charm offensives, Kinsey would remain glued to his guests for as many as fifteen hours a day—he would sometimes even follow them into the bathroom. After meeting with Kinsey, the three scientific heavyweights all left with a “very favorable” impression of his survey, though one, a world-famous endocrinologist, could not help but notice that their host was a tad unbalanced: “[Kinsey] thought about his work every waking hour…[he was] the most intense person I ever knew outside of an institution for psychiatry. He was absolutely wound up.” But Kinsey achieved his goal. In 1943, his grant was bumped up to $23,000, and by 1947 it would reach $40,000.
America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Page 19