"He truly brought fire and light to the world," Samuel Steward wrote about Alfred Kinsey, scientist and sex researcher. "He was our Stonewall."
Our Stonewall. Those are pretty strong words. But it doesn't surprise me that Steward, who lived in Chicago from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s, would make such a claim. Though it isn't common knowledge, Chicago played a vital role in Kinsey's research, particularly in forming his ideas about homosexuality.
The heart and soul of Kinsey's research was the face-to-face interview. Kinsey didn't collect data through anonymous mail surveys or telephone polling. Instead, he sat each one of his thousands of subjects down and, with pencil and paper in hand, asked lots of questions.
By all accounts Kinsey was a consummate interviewer. He didn't betray disapproval or surprise. He never suggested there was anything wrong or inadequate about the sex life of the person speaking to him. The result was that his subjects opened up. They talked freely about their intimate lives to a person they barely knew.
Albert Deutsch, a science journalist who profiled Kinsey in a major magazine, described his own experience: "As part of my research I subjected myself to an interview by Professor Kinsey, answering 325 questions on my sex history in one hour and fifteen minutes. I am as inhibited as the next fellow about sexual matters, but to my great surprise I experienced no embarrassment in giving intimate details of my personal life to this amazingly skillful interviewer."
Kinsey's skill was all to the good, but it begged a certain question. How was he going to find gay men and get them to talk about their sexual histories? True, in the largest cities, there was a gay world where men who wanted sex and intimacy with other men could find one another. But it wasn't announced with rainbow flags and gay posters. You had to search hard for it. And members of the gay tribe did everything they could to keep those places invisible to outsiders.
Gay men observed a code of silence to protect themselves. They built a wall of separation between their gay social lives and the rest of society. As one Chicago gay man explained to Kinsey: "I am always afraid I will give myself away every time I speak or move ... I keep to myself for fear they will find out."
At the beginning of 1939, Kinsey was still in the exploratory stages of his research. He had done fewer than a hundred interviews, most of them in Bloomington, Ind., where he taught. Even at this early point, he noticed homosexual experience surfacing in a number of histories, and this piqued his curiosity.
One of his informants had ties to a group of gay men in Chicago who lived in "Towertown," the near north neighborhood east of Michigan Avenue and south of Chicago Avenue. In the late 1930s Towertown still had something of a bohemian reputation. Men and women just starting out on their own filled its inexpensive rooming houses. It was filled with rooming houses where men and women just starting out might live cheaply. Kinsey's contact promised to introduce him to a group of friends who lived in one of these rooming houses on Rush Street. In June 1939, Kinsey set out for a long weekend trip to the big city.
Staying at a hotel at Harrison and Michigan, Kinsey made his way up to Rush Street. This first trip was hard work. He needed to win the confidence of men who, understandably, were hesitant to talk to this stranger. "It took us five days to get the first three histories out of the city," he wrote afterward. But, by the end of his stay, he had their trust. Writing to the man who had set up the meetings, he described the group of Chicago friends as "nice boys ... all of them most cooperative in helping me." Not only did he get his first interviews, but his subjects promised to introduce him to wider circles of acquaintances if he came back.
And return to Chicago he did. Kinsey made at least half a dozen trips before the end of 1939. As his networks expanded, he found himself conducting as many as seven interviews a day. Soon he had contacts in at least half a dozen parts of town. Wanting a broad range of experience, he consciously sought subjects "in all classes, from the most cultured ... to the poorest type of professional street solicitor." The result, he wrote to a friend, was a "scientific gold mine."
Kinsey left us some tantalizing descriptions of these hidden social worlds. "Have been to Hallowe'en parties, taverns, clubs, etc., which would be unbelievable if realized by the rest of the world," he wrote to one of his confidantes. "I have had to do more drinking in single weekends than I thought I would ever do in a lifetime." Kinsey's excitement about what he was learning is palpable. "Why has no one cracked this before," he wondered. Based on the extensive and wide-ranging contacts he was making, he estimated that "there are at least 300,000 involved in Chicago alone."
Kinsey's manner must have been as impressive as his colleagues and biographers have claimed, because the participants in Chicago's gay world seemed to welcome him without reservation. "Always they have been most considerate and cooperative, decent, understanding, and cordial in their reception" is how he described his interview subjects. Many of the gay men he met with in Chicago "were bubbling over to tell us everything they could." They "poured out their lives to us."
Several of them began correspondences with him. "You have a strange, poetic, and warmly human quality," a Northwestern student wrote him, "that enables you to cross all sorts of barriers and talk directly to another's heart and soul." Interview subjects began sharing with him their diaries and photo collections, all of which gave Kinsey an even richer picture of gay life. And Kinsey wrote back words of support to his informants, especially if he sensed that they were in conflict about their sexuality. "There is no form of outlet which I will admit as abnormal," he told one of them. "There is no right or wrong biologically."
Plunging into this gay world, as Kinsey did in Chicago in 1939, aroused in this supposedly dispassionate scientist an almost crusading determination to use his findings to bring change to society. "We can get folk to thinking straighter on these matters," he wrote one of his Chicago subjects. "The world's thinking can be made more tolerant only if the facts are known." He thanked his subjects for their time and their help. "You are contributing mightily by accepting me in your circle, and introducing me to others ... It is for them and the rest of you, not for me alone, that it is worthwhile." He assured them that "we can make public opinion more sensible."
When these young gay men on the streets of Chicago exposed their lives to Kinsey in 1939, the possibility of a more sensible public opinion must have seemed remote. Yet, when Kinsey's book on men was finally published, all those interviews did add up to something important. Enough to make one informant, several decades later, refer back to Kinsey's study as "our Stonewall."
Copyright 2009 John D'Emilio
