Wardell B. Pomeroy, a psychologist who helped Alfred Kinsey rechart the sexual landscape of America, died Sept. 6 at a retirement community in Bloomington, Ind. He was 87.
Mr. Pomeroy was a clinical psychologist at an Indiana reformatory in 1941, working on his master’s degree, when he became acquainted with Kinsey, a biology professor at Indiana University who had just begun the sex survey that was to make him a household name. Kinsey was lecturing a group of social workers about sex and prisons, and Mr. Pomeroy, impressed, approached him afterward to talk.
Eventually, Kinsey offered him a job as an interviewer, the start of a 20-year relationship in which he became one of Kinsey’s closest associates.
Over the years, Mr. Pomeroy quizzed some 8,000 people about their sex lives, using point-blank queries that conveyed no hint of judging.
Mr. Pomeroy was a co-author of some of the most important works published by the Institute for Sex Research, better known as the Kinsey Institute. These included “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948 and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953, dense scholarly works that nevertheless became best sellers that helped revolutionize Americans’ attitudes toward sexuality.
“If this project had been undertaken in Europe or Asia,” he wrote in 1972, “it might never have attracted any attention or even succeeded, but in America we like to count things.”
Mr. Pomeroy remained at the institute for seven years after Kinsey died in 1956. But in 1963, at odds with the direction it was taking, he left. He and his wife moved to New York, where Mr. Pomeroy began a marriage counseling practice and continued to write. He later moved to San Francisco.
He is survived by Martha, his wife of 64 years; two sons and a daughter.
