I don't often receive e-mails from editors at Playboy. But, last fall, one of them alerted me to a feature set to appear in January 2009. To celebrate fifty-five years of publishing, the magazine had prepared a list of "The 55 Most Important People in Sex" from the past 55 years. Some of the people on the list—like Howard Stern, Bo Derek, Farrah Fawcett and Frank Sinatra—probably would not have made my list of top history makers. But, as to Alfred Kinsey, the man Playboy put on top, I couldn't agree more.
Kinsey helped make a sexual revolution. It's fair to call his two books on human sexual behavior the most influential works on sex written by an American in the twentieth century. And, as his biographers have pointed out, Chicago played a key role in his groundbreaking research.
Kinsey hardly seemed destined to be a sexual revolutionary. Born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and trained as a zoologist, he made his professional reputation through studying the gall wasp. As a taxonomist, a scientist whose work involves the patient accumulation and classification of lots of specimens, Kinsey reportedly collected over 150,000 wasps. I can't imagine anything more tedious.
In the late-1930s, Kinsey and some colleagues at Indiana University began teaching a course on marriage and the family. Undergraduates flocked to it, and they brought lots of questions and concerns about sex. Kinsey was shocked to encounter the fear and confusion that many felt about sexual matters. But he was even more upset to realize that science did not have the kind of rock-solid evidence he needed in order to answer their questions with confidence.
So Kinsey began doing what any self-respecting taxonomist would. In 1938, he started collecting specimens, though in this project his specimens were the sexual life histories of men and women. Over the next decade, Kinsey and a small team of researchers trained by him interviewed 18,000 subjects. No one had ever probed so deeply about such intimate topics with so many people. The interviews covered every aspect of an individual's sexual experiences. Based on this research, Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. The companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, appeared five years later.
This was long before the tell-all, show-all, reality television times that we live in. Kinsey knew that if work on so sensitive a topic was to have any influence, he had to adopt the neutral stance of the scientist rather than the passionate tone of the crusader. "I am a fact finder," he insisted to the press again and again. Kinsey claimed simply to be describing what was. He left the moralizing and the sensationalism to others.
Sure enough, these two massive books ( the male study clocked in at 804 pages; the female at 842 ) are dry as a stale piece of bread. I'd wager that no one ever got aroused reading the Kinsey studies. For instance, pages 488 and 489 of the male study contain information about petting to climax, masturbation, intercourse with prostitutes, and extra-marital intercourse with companions. But it's all in the form of charts and graphs. There are no visuals and no thrilling descriptions.
One of the great jokes among used book dealers in the decades after Kinsey's studies were published is that there were more unread copies of it on their shelves than of any book other than the Bible. The publisher originally commissioned a print run of only 5,000 copies for the male study. But advance publicity in the press was so great that, soon, lots more were rolling off the presses. Each study eventually sold a quarter million copies, and each spent several months on the New York Times best seller list. College professors generally only dream of such sales figures.
Perhaps it's true that few buyers ever slogged their way through all those pages. But the press seized upon Kinsey's findings, and Kinsey quickly became something of a celebrity. Time put him on its cover. Newsweek called the male study "the season's most sensational best seller." Harper's, a middle-brow monthly, described the findings as "explosive." Again and again, reviewers commented on how Kinsey had managed to shatter American society's certainties about sex. Long-held beliefs, said one, "are revealed as myths and delusions."
What did Kinsey find that warranted such descriptions? Remember that, in this period, public norms insisted that, while sexual expression was good and healthy, it belonged only in marriage. Sure, some young men and women on the road to marriage might get too eager, too soon, and go "all the way." But basically the consensus was that the proper place for sex was within the marital relationship. Notice that there was no room in this consensus for lesbians, gay men, or bisexuals.
Kinsey's findings exposed the huge gap between these norms and actual behavior. Based on his interviews, he discovered that the overwhelming majority of males had found a regular sexual outlet while they were still in their teens. Half of America's husbands had cheated on their wives; half of American wives weren't virgins when they got married. Kinsey claimed that 95% of American males had broken the law at least once on the way to an orgasm. Applying his findings just to the state where Kinsey lived, Newsweek estimated that the good people of Indiana broke its various sex laws 90 million times a year!
A few commentators looked at findings like these and expressed outrage. The president of Princeton compared Kinsey's work to that of "small boys writing dirty words on fences." The head of Union Theological Seminary in New York thought Kinsey's studies revealed a "degradation in American morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman era."
But, for the most part, journalists, academics, scientists, and many others applauded what Kinsey's research uncovered. He wrote about sex, said The Nation, "freed from intolerance, superstition, frivolity, and morbidity." With the overwhelming majority of Americans living outside the nation's sex laws, it seemed obvious to many Kinsey readers that the laws needed changing. As the reviewer in Science declared, "abnormal and delinquent sexual behavior now seems ... rather normal." Kinsey was a voice—a powerful voice—for tolerance and acceptance of sexual diversity and difference.
Nowhere was this clearer than in his findings on homosexual behavior. At the time he wrote, the going assumption was that homosexuality was extremely rare. Depending on your outlook, it was either the act of a sinner or the unfortunate outcome of a dysfunctional family.
Kinsey's figures shattered the common wisdom. He claimed that 37% of American men had at least one overt homosexual experience to orgasm; that 4% were exclusively homosexual; and that one in ten was predominantly homosexual for at least a three-year period. While the comparable figures for women were lower, they were still much greater than the common wisdom allowed.
Kinsey himself, as he wrote, was "totally unprepared" for such high figures. But homosexual activity, he concluded, "is an expression of capacities that are basic in the human." Repeated analyses of the data showed that "homosexual histories are to be found in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and on farms." One can almost hear in these findings the gay liberation slogan "we are everywhere."
Kinsey's "one-in-10" figure stuck. For decades, it was repeated endlessly by journalists and popular writers. It was also taken up by the first generation of gay and lesbian activists. It provided comfort to large numbers of men and women who had wondered if, perhaps, they were the only one who felt this way. It became one of the key weapons in the early arsenal of gay liberation. If gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were that large a group, then surely homophobic laws and public policies made no sense.
Kinsey's importance to the history of sexuality—and to gay, lesbian, and bisexual history in particular—can't be overstated. His studies mark the beginnings of a new era. And, unbeknown even to many of the people who are familiar with Kinsey, gay men in Chicago were critical to his research. His interviews here in 1939 and 1940 may very well have marked the tipping point in his project, the "eureka" moment when he knew he could do this research successfully. More on Kinsey in Chicago next time.
Copyright 2009 John D'Emilio