Kinsey, Alfred C.
1894–1956

Alfred Charles Kinsey was a biologist who began the scientific study of human sexuality. Believing that turn-of-the-century sexologists and psychoanalysts such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud reflected a more Victorian morality than a scientific approach to issues of sexuality, Kinsey modified the methods of his subspecialty, insect taxonomy, to investigate the sexual practices, fantasies, and desires of his contemporaries. By interviewing thousands of people about their sex lives, Kinsey devised a picture of sexual practices and private beliefs that deviated widely from the moral, religious, and social prescriptions of sexual behavior in the mid-twentieth century. By exposing the wide range and variety of sexual desires and habits, Kinsey challenged notions of sexual "normalcy," which he saw as oppressive and unnatural. For Kinsey, sexuality ranged across a wide swath of individual variation. Sexual prohibitions, repressive attitudes, and ideas of sexual degeneracy came from cultural attitudes rather than being any condition of nature. Kinsey founded the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, later renamed the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

KINSEY'S EARLY LIFE

Kinsey was the eldest son of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles, both children of skilled laborers. Kinsey's father was a self-made man who, beginning as a shop assistant at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, rose to become a shop professor. Pay for shop assistants was not generous, so the Kinseys lived in genteel poverty in Hoboken, New Jersey, a crowded city with little access to open spaces or unsullied nature. As a child, Kinsey suffered from illnesses, caused partly by the Kinseys' cramped urban existence, and whose severity was exacerbated by a lack of adequate medical care. Kinsey suffered from rheumatic fever, typhoid fever, and rickets, which left him with enough of a curvature of the spine to prevent his being drafted during World War I.

The Kinseys were devout conservative Christians, Methodists whose lives were organized according to strict patriarchal prescription. Alfred Seguine Kinsey adhered to a belief in the sanctity of the Sabbath, the value of work, and the sinfulness of all matters sexual, which he would not discuss and which the children were not to know about. Kinsey was brought up in an atmosphere of repression, where his only outlet was nature. Even while young, Kinsey took every opportunity to spend time outdoors, participating in YMCA camps and taking long walks, gradually recovering from the debilitating effects of his childhood illnesses.

When Kinsey was a young teen, his father had improved his circumstances at Stevens and the family moved to the suburban town of South Orange with better schools and easier access to parkland. Kinsey studied the piano, joined the Boy Scouts, and became interested in biology, botany, and zoology at the behest of an influential high school biology teacher. Kinsey was a perfectionist who put all of his energies into his solitary projects. He became an accomplished classical pianist, but had no tolerance for popular music. He became an avid and skilled outdoorsman, hiking for miles on the weekends and developing knowledge and resilience that he would use later on his insect-collecting field trips.

Kinsey seems to have had little social life, but became an Eagle Scout and excelled in his academic endeavors. Class valedictorian, Kinsey had no choice but to attend Stevens Institute and follow in his father's footsteps, since his tuition at Stevens was free. After two years of a subpar performance, Kinsey finally resolved to oppose his father. He quit Stevens and applied to Bowdoin College in Maine, paying for his education with money he earned working as a camp counselor, winning scholarships, and finally working as a lab assistant for his biology professor at Bowdoin. Choosing to go to Bowdoin and receiving no support from his father destroyed what relationship there had been between father and son, a rift that continued for the rest of his father's life.

While at Bowdoin, Kinsey continued his intense interest in nature and the outdoors as well as his work with the YMCA. He was still shy socially and again excelled academically, graduating from Bowdoin magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. The professors with whom he had worked closely highly recommended him to Harvard Graduate School, so in 1916, Kinsey enrolled in graduate studies in biology at the Bussey Institute, working with entomologist William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937). Kinsey, who was attracted by Wheeler's thoroughness, undertook a classification study of gall wasps. He spent two years collecting and measuring thousands of specimens, writing a dissertation in which he refined and reclassified gall wasp species.

Kinsey earned his ScD in 1919 and in 1920 took a job as an assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He continued his collection and study of gall wasps, believing that if he could never acquire a large enough sample of wasp specimens, he might generate an accurate taxonomic picture of the species, which might also provide clues to how species develop. Kinsey also believed that if he had enough samples he would be able to show how various species of wasps had evolved, ultimately adding to theories of evolution. In the 1930s he published two books on the gall wasp. Throughout his career, however, Kinsey knew himself to be more a taxonomist and collector than a theoretician.

After a year at Indiana, Kinsey met and married Clara McMillen, an Indiana graduate student. The Kinseys had four children, but their first child died before he was five from complications of juvenile diabetes. Kinsey was an avid gardener, and in addition to his work on gall wasps, wrote a successful high school biology textbook that unified zoology and botany with biology and assumed the scientific truth of evolution. During his first ten years at Indiana, Kinsey did not distinguish himself as a teacher, but did establish a field methodology of zealous trips throughout the United States and Mexico with graduate assistants, collecting specimens of gall wasps and their galls, measuring and cataloguing them, and devising the taxonomy of their species.

Kinsey's relatively late development as a social sexual being seems to have resulted from the repressive character of his childhood. The outlets for his sublimated energies—nature hikes, the YMCA, and the boy scouts—presented homosocial opportunities for sexual knowledge. Kinsey also seems to have resented the moral narrowness of his upbringing, perhaps even as it had affected his personal development. His work with gall wasps convinced him that species types and taxonomies were full of wide individual variation. In fact, he began to believe that variation rather than compliance to type was the rule of nature. This observation became one of the bases for Kinsey's explorations of human sexuality. Individual variation as an observed truth of nature meant that individual variation rather than imposed typology was closer to the way life was organized.

KINSEY'S WORK ON SEXUALITY

Kinsey began applying his insights about variation to questions of human sexuality. Adapting the zeal and exacting care developed in his study of gall wasps, Kinsey began developing ways to gather data about human sexual behaviors. Biographers speculate that Kinsey's interest in the topic of sexuality came from his anger at his own repressive childhood as well as from his own possible bisexual predilections and early sexual difficulties in his marriage. As Indiana University changed from a longstanding conservative leadership to the forward-looking openness of its new young president, Herman B. Wells (1902–2000), opportunities arose for a more public discussion of sexuality, including free Wasserman tests (previously forbidden diagnostic tests for syphilis), and a new team-taught course on marriage.

In 1935, Kinsey, who had been avidly reading about sexuality, gave a paper to a faculty group in which he deplored the repression and ignorance around sexual matters that made young peoples' lives miserable. He advocated his theory of individual variation and recommended early marriage to encourage sexual health. He spearheaded the organization and trial run of a new course on marriage, taught by a series of lecturers from different departments but managed and led by himself. Although the course was a non-credit course limited to seniors, it soon became widely popular and Kinsey, previously never an inspiring teacher, found his niche.

As one aspect of the marriage course, Kinsey encouraged his young students to talk with him about any sexual issues or problems they were having. Kinsey was a sympathetic and encouraging listener, apparently helpful to his students. But he also used such counseling sessions as opportunities to develop a more scientific way to gather behavioral data about human sexual behavior. Kinsey did not use students' sexual histories without their permission, but he did hone his skill at getting people to confide their sexual secrets to him. During this time, Kinsey asked his friends and many of his own students to participate in a survey about sexual practices and attitudes. He learned how to design a series of questions that would elicit information on feelings and behaviors about which people might be ashamed. He learned to memorize the questions and to note the answers on a single page in a code that only he could decipher, so that he could maintain eye contact with his subject and continue to comfort and elicit information.

Kinsey treated his data on sexual feelings and behaviors much the same way he had treated his wasp specimens. He saw that humans were normally capable of a wide range of sexual feelings and behaviors, most of which were repressed by what he saw as the unscientific, unenlightened moralities of religion and lingering Victorian attitudes. He enlarged his group of interviewees from students and colleagues to the pool of urban dwellers in Chicago, including members of Chicago's gay community and often their families. Trying to discern both the prevalence of sexual behaviors and their causes, Kinsey wanted to talk to as many people as possible. Kinsey collected information about more than just sexual behavior. He also began collecting data about the male sexual anatomy, including penis size, as a part of his interviews. To enlarge his chain of contacts, Kinsey not only sent thank-you notes and progress reports, but asked cooperating subjects for the names of other possible participants.

Kinsey's interest in gay male culture had two effects. First, he was able to describe homosexuality as a normal sexual variation. Second, because approximately one-fifth of his early interviews were with homosexual males, such a quantity possibly skewed his sense of the relative prevalence of male homosexuality in the larger culture.

ESTABLISHING THE INSTITUTE FOR SEX RESEARCH

In 1940, Kinsey was forced to change his ways of gathering information. Pressures from faculty and disgruntled students led to his being removed from the marriage course. Although many students found his course valuable, for others the course clashed with religious and cultural beliefs. Looking for funding, Kinsey delivered his first paper on sexual research at a national conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he set out one of the basic assumptions of his research: rejecting, as biographer James Jones reports, the idea "that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two mutually exclusive phenomena emanating from fundamentally … different types of individuals" (1997, p. 425). In 1941 Kinsey managed to win a grant from the National Research Council for his work on sexuality. This grant was followed by another, larger grant from the Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS), a subcommittee of the National Research Council (NRC) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as Kinsey began to prepare his accumulating data for an early form of data processing.

In 1942, Kinsey began to lobby for funds to establish an institute for sex research at Indiana. Although his quantitative methods had impressed representatives from the CRPS, and they continued his funding, he began to focus his efforts on the Rockefeller Foundation itself. Increasingly, difficulties with the NRC—including changing board members, issues over the disposition of Kinsey's collection of interviews and library of resources on sexuality, and concerns about continued protection of confidentiality of participants' information—spurred Kinsey to establish a more formal institutional ground from which to conduct his research. Indiana University as well wished to retain Kinsey and his work, but also wished to have a buffer between his projects and the rest of the university. With funding from Rockefeller, Kinsey and Indiana University incorporated the Institute for Sex Research, a scientific organization dedicated to the study of human sexuality. The Institute housed all of Kinsey's interview notes, data, and his library of resource material. Through all of this Kinsey was regarded as a dispassionate, empirical scientist who gathered and interpreted data about human sexual behavior.

In 1948, Kinsey published his first book on sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, based on the data collected in his previous ten years of interviews. The book focused on variations in male sexual behavior, both in terms of individual males and in terms of male groups. Using data from 5,300 white males, Kinsey's book examined the various ways males achieved orgasm, documenting percentages of masturbation, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual intercourse, bestiality, and nocturnal emissions. It correlated these findings with data about age, marital status, religion, class background, and education.

Kinsey determined that males do not comprise separate populations of homosexual and heterosexual men, but rather that there is a continuity of gradations between the strictly homosexual and the strictly heterosexual into which most individuals fall. Kinsey devised his famous seven-point Kinsey Scale representing the range of variations, from those who are exclusively heterosexual to those who are exclusively homosexual and everyone in between.

In 1953 Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, also based on the compilation of data from some 5,940 interviews. The data he collected treated a number of topics, including masturbation, nudity, erogenous zones, orgasm, bisexuality, anal sex, oral sex, fantasy, foreplay, sadomasochism, and extramarital sexual activity. This second book represents increased sophistication in the ways Kinsey understood the material he had collected. While the first book assumes a male model for all sexuality, the second book acknowledges that women are also surprisingly sexually active and that the sexual behavior of both males and females is strongly affected by the sociocultural environment in which people live.

In both books, Kinsey argued that progress in the area of sexual happiness and success could only be achieved by an education about the facts of sexuality instead of tactics of moral repression. To Kinsey, sexual behavior was a matter of biology instead of a matter of conscience or the double standards of morality. He did not regard the range of practices and the fact of individual variation as itself evidence of degeneracy, but instead as evidence that human biology hosts a range of possible sexual responses, which were not in and of themselves wrong or immoral. Any problems with sexuality thus were caused by the artificial restraints on knowledge and practice imposed by moral strictures and unenlightened values.

Both of Kinsey's books were bestsellers and established Kinsey as a public figure. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sold more than 200,000 copies in two months. The book was reviewed in the New York Times, and there were features about him in Time, Life, and The New Yorker, among other magazines. He became a folk hero and a household name, his image recognized and his book often cited.

Such popularity could not help but rekindle cultural disagreements about morality and sexuality. Because Kinsey's books simultaneously challenged repressive understandings of sexuality and suggested a large gap between sexual desire and practice and public morality, both his findings and his methods threatened long habits of American existence, especially those dominated by religion. The clear and open way in which Kinsey spoke about sexual practices itself seemed nearly obscene to some, and his books, while popular, also catalyzed negative responses from those who policed morality—such as churches, legislators, and the press. On the one hand, his revelations about homosexuality eventually convinced the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. On the other, conservative religious groups saw Kinsey's work as the antithesis of science, and as representing precisely the strain of libertinism their efforts tried to contain. Others continue to criticize his research methods, suggesting that he had an insufficiently small sample, that his subjects represented only a small segment of American society, and that his interviews overemphasized such topics as homosexuality.

Eventually negative publicity would impinge on funding for the Institute, although in 1957 it won a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The American government impounded photographic materials imported for the Institute's collection, forcing a law suit (United States v. 31 Photographs) that was settled in the Institute's favor only after Kinsey's death, August 25, 1956. The Institute thrives at the beginning of the twenty-first century, continuing to pursue the scientific study of sexuality. Conservative critics continue to attack both Kinsey's approaches and his conclusions, particularly in relation to data collected on children. The battle Kinsey engaged between science and morality still lingers, as does the figure of Kinsey himself: the 2004 film Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon, presented again the currents and debates of his life.

Kinsey's work changed the way Americans thought about sexuality, even if they wished to retain a moral attitude. Even if Kinsey's interview samples were not entirely representative of a cross section of the American population, his work represented an important beginning in the study of a central phenomenon of human existence, long forbidden by the non-scientific pronouncements of moral authority. Although Kinsey himself had been rumored to engage in sexual experimentation, his insistence on a scientific basis for the study of sexual behavior made it possible to begin to reconsider the social problems caused by sexual repression, including birth control, marriage, and sexual variations in general. Thinking about sexuality as a field of scientific study instead of a realm of sin not only changed how sexuality is regarded, but also the place of sexuality in human existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. 2000. Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jones, James A. 1997. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life. New York: Norton.

Kinsey, Alfred C.; Wardell B. Pomeroy; and Clyde E. Martin. 1998. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Orig. pup. 1948.)

Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders.

                                                 Judith Roof