A half century ago, on Aug. 20, 1953, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956) published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the second volume in his pioneering research on human sexuality. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was released in 1948. What was considered shocking information then is old hat on today's TV screens. Less well known, perhaps, is Kinsey's Chicago's connection.
Kinsey's research showed that 37 percent of the male population had homosexual experience to the point of orgasm. He reported that 50 percent of American women had engaged in pre-marital sex and that 25 percent of married women had extra-marital affairs. He estimated that 13 percent had lesbian experience to the point of orgasm. He showed that male homosexuality was legally punishable in 48 states, lesbianism in 43, but rarely enforced. In the 1950s sensationalist reporting in the national media exploded like bombshells with repercussions from the U.S. Capitol to the nascent gay-rights movement. Lost in smoke was data that showed large percentages of self-acceptance (as many as 71 percent of the women with lesbian experience expressed no regret).
Kinsey, a research scholar at Indiana University, began his studies of human sexual behavior in the 1930s. Before that his special area as a zoologist was gall wasps; but at some point he decided that very little was known about sex and humans compared to the mass of data accumulated on other animals (and no doubt the research would be a lot more interesting). He began to accumulate erotic books, art, and photographs. In June of 1939 he came to Chicago and was introduced to a group of gay men who lived together in a Rush Street boarding house. Through them he met others at parties, bars, etc. He interviewed those that were willing and began to accumulate sexual histories. By December 1940 he had accumulated 1,700 such local histories and used the information gleaned to apply for study grants.
One of the subjects to give his case history to Kinsey was Samuel Morrison Steward (1909-1994). Steward taught literature at Loyola and De Paul Universities (not the University of Chicago as erroneously noted by James H. Jones in his 1997 biography of Kinsey). Concurrent with the publication of his autobiography in the early 1980s, Steward recounted his encounters with Kinsey in articles for The Advocate and Gay Sunshine. He noted hundreds of hours of conversations and interviews as well as an S-M session that Kinsey filmed. In addition, when Steward gave up teaching to become a tattoo artist on South State Street, Kinsey urged him to document his clientel. That record became Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street Corner Punks, 1950-1965 (1990). In the 1960s Steward wrote novels as Phil Andros centered on Chicago characters that the late activist/author John Preston said 'electrified' him at first reading. Here 'in front of me was fiction real to my own existence ... going to the bars I drank in, they walked the streets I cruised, and longed for the men I desired.'
The 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male over-night made Kinsey the most talked about man in America. He was on the cover of Time Magazine; Mae West offered to come up and see him sometime to compare notes. The Institute for Sex Research was founded as a buffer to protect both the privacy of Kinsey's interviews and to insulate Indiana University from potential negative fallout. The notoriety brought him more funding and he was able to secure the services of a librarian to catalog his growing collection of sexual materials and research data. That librarian would be Oak Park native Dr. Jeannette Howard Foster, PhD. Dr. Foster (1895-1981) had taken her advanced degrees at the University of Chicago and had taught literature classes there concurrent with her studies.
During her tenure with Kinsey, from 1948 to 1952, Dr. Foster catalogued some 50,000 items. She left at the time of the completion of his second volume Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and upon publication was credited in the acknowledgments along with Dr. Hazel Tolliver. Tolliver, Foster's partner during those years, was the translator of classical Greek and Latin erotic writings for the Institute. Both women had to give Kinsey detailed sexual histories as conditions of their employment. Dr. Foster would go on to write and self-publish Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historic and Quantitative Study (1956), now seen as 'the' seminal book for lesbian studies. In addition, Dr. Foster was also a professor of library science at a number of universities and served on the President's Advisory Committee on Education. She sponsored several students including Joe Gregg who would later serve as Acquistions Librarian at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and would be an early member and librarian of the Gerber/Hart Library.
In the 1960s and '70s when Chicago organizations began to lobby in Illinois for a gay-rights bill, the Kinsey statistics were included in almost all testimony, an important tool to pry votes from legislators who claimed they didn't have any homosexuals in their districts. Kinsey's statistics on homosexuals upheld the conclusions of earlier researchers Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) in England and Magnus Hirshfield (1869-1935) in Germany.
Despite many detractors and allegations that Kinsey was homosexual (Steward disputed that claim), he is still regarded as the premier sexual researcher and spearhead of the sexual revolution in America.
Copyright 2003 by Marie J. Kuda.
