The course liberated him, and he captivated students with his uninhibited anatomical discussion.Needless to say, as with everything Kinsey did, there was a personal subtext. As a bookish, sickly child, he had been traumatised by the sort of let’s-show-each-other-our-naughty-bits game which most children take in their stride. As a clean-cut, religious-minded teenager, he’d been made to feel horribly guilty about masturbating. He’d have gone on to collect every specimen on the planet if he could.Taxonomy continued to be the basis of his research when, having failed to take the world by storm with his book The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips, he gradually moved across to the study of humans.
His opportunity came when he volunteered to teach a “marriage course” at his university, in Indiana. Until then, he’d been a stiff, conventional man whose only known quirk was a habit of gardening in a loincloth. His specialism was the gall wasp, and what set him apart from other experts in the insect field was the sheer number of specimens he collected. His field trips were months’-long, dawn-to-midnight ordeals, horrendous for his helpers, masochistically enthralling for him His ambition was to collect 1.5 million samples. He personally examined 35,000 gall waps, and made 700,000 separate measurements.
At once, his contacts in New York came up with the goods, mustering a line of volunteers which stretched along the sidewalk and right round the block.NUMBERS were Kinsey’s special thing. For 20 years before he got into sex research, he had been a biologist. Now he could express it – and help other gay men to realise there was nothing abnormal about their desires. Kinsey was a skilful interviewer, and through his sympathy and desire to liberalise built up a huge network of underground contacts. On one occasion, for example, in order to determine whether men, upon orgasm, “squirt out” or merely “dribble” (a typically cranky and mechanistic Kinsey inquiry), he said that he needed to film 2,000 volunteers masturbating to climax, and would pay them two dollars each. It was largely thanks to his research that he was able to pursue them. Field trips to Chicago and New York put him in touch with a thriving gay subculture, in which he felt happy and at home As a young man, he’d been ashamed of his homosexuality.
Because she was a small, mousy, deeply devoted mother of three, some said that she co-operated primarily to please and hang on to him. It’s just as likely, though, that she was gratified by the attentions of the younger men he put her way, especially when sexual relations with “Prok” (as she called her husband) began to tail off.For Kinsey’s real sexual interests lay elsewhere, not only non-connubially, but with men. His own wife Clara set a stalwart example, enthusiastically bedding whomever he chose for her. Characteristically, he could be heard above the moans, pointing out the various signs of sexual arousal. It was in the same spirit that Kinsey imported collections of erotica for the library at his Institute for Sex Research, fighting battles with customs officers who considered the materials not knowledge but “filth”.Then there were the evenings when members of his research team and their wives would be invited round to his house.
These began as occasions for listening to classical music, but as time passed they turned into group sex sessions in his attic, some of them again recorded on film. Kinsey wasn’t much of a fun-lover (his face, when he had sex, looked unrelievedly grim), and he didn’t like members of his research team having extra-marital affairs, unless they had asked him for permission. But he regarded these sessions as experiments in the creation of a sexual utopia, with himself in charge of every move. He liked to film and watch others having sex, too – all in the name of scientific objectivity. A colleague invited along to one of these demonstrations later recalled Kinsey getting in so close to a couple making love that he “was virtually on top of the action, his head only inches removed from the couple’s genitals”.
