If you didn’t know what to look for, you’d miss it.
In the spring and summer, it’s partially obscured by Indiana University’s maple and oak trees, and in winter, its naked Collegiate Gothic design blends in with other limestone campus structures.
It’s not intentionally hidden (no departments on the IU campus have outdoor placards), but its sign in Morrison Hall’s elevator occasionally goes missing. When it’s there, it reads: The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
Film director Bill Condon’s movie “Kinsey,” based on the life of the institute’s founder, sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, might bring more souvenir hunters out of the woodwork. It certainly has stirred up renewed interest in the institute — not all of it welcome and not all of it positive.
“It can take up our attention and get us side-tracked on things that really aren’t relevant for today’s Kinsey,” says Julia R. Heiman, the institute’s director since June. “[This is] a very unique place.”
Known on campus as “the Kinsey,” the institute operates today much as it did when its founder and his researchers published “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (1948) and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” (1953), books that shocked the American mainstream with their frank charting of human carnality.
Based on thousands of confidential interviews with individuals about their sexual histories, Kinsey’s research was championed by some as groundbreaking scientific work essential to understanding the human animal. Critics considered the study of sexuality just plain obscene.
“People have a lot of opinions whether or not people should study sexuality. They always have,” says Heiman, who is the institute’s sixth director.
Indeed, nowadays, the Kinsey focuses less on gathering sexual histories and more on answering specific social questions and documenting sexual practices in a world made more complex by HIV, the mainstreaming of porn and a former presidential candidate doing commercials for Viagra.
While the university supports the Kinsey Institute as a part of its broad research and teaching program, the Kinsey — like any research institution — depends on funding from both federal and private sources for its projects.
“There isn’t anything like this [institute] in the country,” Heiman says. “But this place has a certain history, and it’s vulnerable because of that history.”
The history Heiman talks about includes a litany of attacks over the nature of its work. Some were directly tied to Kinsey himself, a controversial figure whom opponents charged with encouraging degeneracy and skewing numbers to justify his own bisexuality. (Kinsey, married for 35 years and the father of four children, never publicly declared his sexual identity, but biographers either described him as bisexual or homosexual.)
A zoology professor at Indiana University, Kinsey began teaching a class on marriage in 1938. In preparing the course, he found little scientific data on human sexual behavior, so he began collecting his own, along with art and other erotica.
Privacy protected
Kinsey and his staff promised absolute confidentiality to people who participated in their sexual research. To help protect that privacy, Kinsey and Indiana University established the Institute for Sex Research in 1947 on the IU campus.
Sexuality research continued. The data collected, along with the institute’s vast collection of erotica, were kept closed to the general public, fostering an impression of the institute as an impenetrable fortress, a culture closed to all but researchers and scientists. The perceived secrecy didn’t improve its public relations.
Condon’s biopic comes at a transitional period for the Kinsey, renamed for its founder in 1981, 25 years after his death. Under Heiman’s leadership, the Kinsey is in the process of establishing a cross-discipline collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington, hoping to combine the institute’s strengths in psychosocial research and Washington’s respected biomedical departments.
The Kinsey’s vast library and research facilities claim the upper four floors of Morrison Hall. In recent years, the doors have opened — slightly. Public tours now visit selected rooms, and the institute published “Peek: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute” in 2000, offering a glimpse into its erotic art collection.
“We’ve made efforts to make people more aware of what we have,” says associate director Stephanie Sanders, a 22-year veteran at Kinsey. “People have to understand what science is so that they can support science.”
Letter from Freud
Behind a glass case in the Kinsey Institute library’s reading room sits a copy of a handwritten letter from Sigmund Freud to a concerned mother.
“I gather from your letter that your son is homosexual,” Freud wrote in 1935. “I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention it yourself in your information about him. May I ask you why not? Homoset is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be considered a disease.”
Next to Freud’s carefully composed letter, an elaborate display of “Tijuana Bibles” — small, illustrated eight-page books (largely from the mid-1900s) featuring celebrities and other famous characters in erotically comic situations — is arranged, with pages flipped open in clinical nonchalance.
Once, nobody but staff and scholars could see such materials. Heiman concedes that “before, the place wasn’t open. You really couldn’t get in here. Reporters would be seen now and then, [but that was it].”
Even biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy met some resistance when he visited the institute for his book “Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey” (Indiana University Press, 2000).
“It was very difficult at first,” Gathorne-Hardy says. “At first, I got a very strong feeling that I was being blocked off. I wasn’t allowed to see correspondences. I think it was someone with [sex researchers] Masters and Johnson who said no one who works in sex studies could avoid being paranoid, and they were very paranoid. And it’s not surprising.”
What Gathorne-Hardy alludes to is the Kinsey’s history with its most vocal detractors, among them preacher Billy Graham, talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger and self-described independent researcher Judith Reisman.
Reisman targets what she describes as fraudulent sex science, sex education and “the power and effect of images and the monopoly media to alter human brain, mind, memory and conduct.” She has made a 20-year career attacking Kinsey and his work.
In 1991, she sued the Kinsey Institute and the Indiana University for $5 million in damages for defamation of character and slander, claiming the institute blocked her efforts to promote a book called “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud” (Vital Issues Press, 1990). The suit was thrown out of court.
The Kinsey movie has again given his critics a platform. Reisman recently said the movie trade magazine Variety rejected her advertisement calling Kinsey “a man who produced and directed the rape and torture of hundreds of infants and children.”
Earlier, such hyperbole and rhetoric only served to make the institute more cautious.
Gathorne-Hardy says, “I think it took them a while to figure out that I was serious, that I wasn’t a Reisman spy sent to smell out a scandal. Finally, I was allowed to see everything I could.”
Very helpful
While researching for his screenplay at the Kinsey, writer/director Condon says he expected some reticence, but “I found them mostly, very, very open. They were helpful in getting us materials to use and copy for the film.”
If there was one minor frustration in the process, Condon says, it was not being allowed to view the so-called “attic movies” — intercourse studies filmed by Kinsey and his staff.
“Because I’m a filmmaker, I wanted to see what they look like, stylewise,” Condon says. “But I completely understand because people were donating their services through anonymity, but so many of them were just close-ups of genitals.”
Heiman says the tours help make the Kinsey more approachable. “It probably hurts some things but it’s important that people see and know what we do,” she says. “I’m sure some people are shocked at what’s on the walls.”
This includes photographer George Platt Lynes’ stark, black and white portrait of actor Yul Brynner–nude except for an uncharacteristic full head of hair. Because the institute’s privacy policy remains rigid, “it’s always going to appear as a somewhat closed-down place; it’s not like the local museum,” Sanders says. “You can’t do research well unless you can promise people confidentiality, and we maintain that very strictly.”
Volunteers recruited
As in Kinsey’s day, much of the work done in Morrison Hall relies on questionnaires and interviewing subjects in person. Some research requires lab work, such as measuring physical responses to sexual film clips. Both kinds of studies require volunteers, recruited locally; some earn a nominal fee for their time filling out a questionnaire or participating in a focus group, if the research underwriter makes funds available.
Funding sex research makes both politicians and even the traditional science funding agencies nervous. Once a major financial supporter of Kinsey’s work in the ’40s and early ’50s, the Rockefeller Foundation discontinued its relationship with the institute under various political pressures. Though in 1982, the institute renamed itself The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Inc. to reflect a “broadenedresearch mission,” studies that peek into America’s bedrooms are still cultural hot potatoes.
Heiman says the institute will “probably focus more on the health-related issues, because studying normal sexuality makes people uncomfortable, irritated and angry, and we’re less able to get money for that.”
An intriguing, challenging question, she observes, is why some people are uncomfortable with the idea of trying to define “normal” sexuality — Kinsey’s original goal.
“It would be in a sense interesting — if people would be willing to answer — to do a really good survey on this,” Heiman says. “But no one would give us money for that, either.”
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Kinsey’s life
1894 Alfred Charles Kinsey is born June 23 in Hoboken, N. J.
1914-1918 Kinsey attends Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and graduates magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology. He also becomes interested in the gall wasp, a small, antlike insect he will study for many years.
1919 In September, Kinsey receives his doc-torate from Harvard University in biology.
1920 Kinsey becomes assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University. His students nickname him “Prok,” a fusion of “professor” and “Kinsey.”
1921 In June, Kinsey marries Clara Bracken McMillen, whom he affectionately calls “Mac.” They will have four children.
1936 Final installment published of Kinsey’s multivolume entomological work, “The Origins of Higher Categories in Cynips.”
1938 Kinsey prepares university course on marriage and finds little scientific data. He begins gathering sexual behavior histories.
1947 The Institute for Sex Research Inc. is founded in affiliation with Indiana University. Kinsey is its first director.
1948 “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” is published.
1950 U.S. Customs Service in New York City seizes erotic material being sent to the ISR. Later, a federal court case in 1957 gives the institute the right to import pornographic materials for research purposes.
1953 “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” is published.
1956 On May 24 in Chicago, Kinsey inter-views his last two subjects. Of the approximately 18,000 sex histo-ries gathered by his team, Kinsey himself contributed 7,985 interviews.
– After years of battling heart disease, Kinsey, 62, dies Aug. 25 of an embolism.
Kinsey legacy
1957 The ISR receives its first grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
1958 “Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion” is pub-lished.
1963 “Sex Offenders: An Analysis of Types” sees print.
1976 “Sexual Nomenclature: A Thesaurus” is published.
1978 Book publication: “Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women.”
1981 The Institute for Sex Research is renamed The Kinsey Institute for Sex Research Inc.
1982 To reflect a “broadened research mission,” the institute becomes The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Inc.
1984 “The Kinsey Report” becomes an internationally syndicated newspaper column, disseminating “research-based information to the general public.” The column runs for nine years.
1989 Publication: “Sex and Morality in the U.S.”
1990 Publication of “The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex: What You Must Know to be Sexually Literate,” the first institute publication written for the general public.
1997 The institute celebrates both its 50th birthday and the 50th anniversary of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.”
2000 “Peek: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute” is published, and public tours start at the institute.
2004 Liam Neeson L stars as Alfred C. Kinsey in the feature film “Kinsey,” written and directed by Bill Condon (“Gods and Monsters”).
Sources: The Kinsey Institute; “Alfred C. Kinsey” by James H. Jones; “Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey,” by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
