Personality, Dec. 15, 1952

THE name of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a household word. To those who do not know him, it stands for sex with a capital S, with special emphasis on sexual aberrations. To those who do know him, it stands for a quiet, 58-year-old academician who takes the same kind of interest in sex as he does in gall wasps.

About gall wasps, Dr. Kinsey knows just about all there is to know. About sex, he probably knows more than any other man alive, and he has built up one of the greatest collections of erotica ever assembled. Yet he is an almost monotonously normal human being.

While he was still a boy, Kinsey wrote his first published paper, based on his observation of what various birds did in the rain. Some birds, he noted, sang, some shut up, some flew for shelter, some danced in the sky. This early ornithology foreshadowed the two main drives of his life—love of nature and passion for explicit details.

While he was still at Harvard, he began his enormously erudite, monumental work on the gall wasp, a tiny insect of which some 3,000 species exist. Kinsey traveled 80,000 miles collecting gall wasps, and he measured, catalogued and preserved 3,500,000 specimens to demonstrate their individual variations. Under a microscope, he took and recorded 28 different measurements on each wasp.

Kinsey joined the staff of Indiana University, where he still works, in 1920, and rose slowly in the academic hierarchy. He might still be an obscure professor of zoology had not twelve teachers, of whom he was one, joined together in the ’30s to give a “Marriage Course.” Students asked Kinsey about sex, and he was shocked to discover how little was known scientifically about the sexual behavior of human beings. Before this, he seems to have had no particular interest in the subject. But once he got started, it was the gall wasp all over again. When he began his research, some of his scientific colleagues (and their wives) cut him dead, and the period of semi-ostracism left him somewhat touchy and thin-skinned.

Kinsey is a solidly built man with greying, buff-colored hair in a short pompadour, eyes that vary between blue and hazel, and a sensitive, rather tense mouth above a hard jaw. His wife, whom he calls “Mac,” was a graduate student of chemistry, and has been a great help. Being scientifically trained, she raised no objection at all when he started his work on sex, and sometimes she helps him in the office typing confidential documents. She teaches classes in swimming, runs the local Girl Scout camp, and loves the great outdoors.

A STRANGER joining the Kinseys and staff on one of their picnics would never suspect that these nice, comfortable faculty folks were engaged in studies any more stimulating than the use of the comma in Chaucer. Visitors are exposed to the same paradox in Kinsey’s plant, which is called the Institute of Sex Research, Inc. The atmosphere is one of surgical asepsis, and each room is as clean and functional as the inside of a clock. Doors are heavy, made of a three-ply, soundproof material, and they have substantial locks. Kinsey carries numerous keys, and his progress from room to room, cabinet to cabinet, or file to file, is slow, because each has to be unlocked carefully. In Kinsey’s own office, no single piece of paper is ever in evidence unless he is working on it. But the material he may be inspecting or cataloguing would stand an ordinary layman’s hair on end —elaborate, erotic instruments and devices from Japan, wildly obscene picture books, Austrian etchings and plaster models that would make a call girl blush.

Kinsey and his men have taken 16,500 case histories so far. The core of the work is interviewing. The records are preserved on 400,000 punched I.B.M. cards, which are guarded like the gold at Fort Knox. All the recording is done in a code Kinsey invented, which is so abstruse that a professional cryptographer was unable to break it. The code has never been written down and takes about a year to memorize; Kinsey and his three chief associates are the only people alive who know it.

THE conduct of an interview is, understandably, a ticklish business. After years in which he never smoked or drank, Kinsey deliberately took up tobacco and alcohol in a gingerly fashion, because he thought that if he smoked and drank moderately with people whose sexual histories he was exploring, it would produce a better rapport. The system seems to work. Nobody who has given his case history to Kinsey is likely to forget the experience. His own family has contributed; he took his daughter Joan’s sex history when she was in high school, and after she married, her husband offered his to his father-in-law. The questioning may take from 1½ to 3½ hours, and penetrates every aspect of the subject’s sexual life, including details that seem utterly outlandish even to highly sophisticated people.

Once, in Peoria,. Kinsey was interviewing a 350-lb. Negro prostitute. “Suh,” she told him, “you makes me ‘member things I never even knew happened to me!”

The reaction to Kinsey’s gall-wasp approach to sex has been mixed, to say the least. His statistic-crammed, 804-page book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (TIME, Jan. 5, 1948), was published by a medical publishing house (W. B. Saunders Co.) and cost $6.50, but it shot up on the bestseller list with the aid of free publicity and loud denunciations. The weightiest denunciations came from religious and moral leaders, who pointed out that Kinsey’s examination of men’s sex life altogether denied the existence of any moral factor whatever in sexual relations:

Kinsey regarded man merely as an animal of extremely versatile sexuality, whose sexual aberrations were not aberrations at all because there was no sexual norm—much less morality or responsibility. It was all very well, they said, to catalogue behavior in the interests of science, but to make the catalogue available to the lay public was to undermine the individual’s sense of right & wrong. Other Kinsey critics challenged the soundness of his sampling methods. Last summer the National Research Council (which supplies a slice of Kinsey’s research funds) completed an investigation of this charge and found no reason to withdraw its support.

KINSEY’S house in Bloomington, Ind., in which he and his wife have lived for 25 years and in which their three children grew up, is a red brick structure designed by himself on a green, sunny street a few blocks from the campus. There are 170 different kinds of trees and shrubs on the 22-acre property, most of which Kinsey planted himself. Kinsey gets to his Institute at about 9 in the morning, seven days a week, and works (with a brief lunch period) till about 6. He goes home for dinner, plays some music, pokes around in the garden, and returns to the Institute at 7:30, working there till 11 or midnight. On Sunday evening, which is devoted to music, he does not go back to the office, and exactly once a year, on Christmas, he takes the whole day off. He has not had a vacation in 13 years.

Though Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sold 275,000 copies, and would have earned him a considerable fortune, he has never taken a cent of royalties. All the proceeds are plowed back into the research, and this will be the procedure with future books.

Eight or nine Kinsey books are planned in all—the next one to deal with the sexual behavior of women. Awaited expectantly for at least a year, it has been delayed, partly because women’s sex habits proved far harder to tabulate than men’s. “It’s double the work,” says Dr. Kinsey.