Suddenly, Americans are rediscovering Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University sex researcher who is the subject of a movie and now “Kinsey” (9 p.m. Monday, WTTW-Ch. 11), a PBS documentary that’s part of its “American Experience” series.
Cagily scheduled to air on Valentine’s Day, this 90-minute probe actually makes a nice companion to Bill Condon’s equally excellent feature film “Kinsey.” Both unavoidably cover a lot of the same material.
But while the theatrical movie leans on some of the sudsier aspects of Kinsey’s personal life, PBS’ “Kinsey,” produced and directed by Barak Goodman, boasts extensive access to Kinsey’s research materials and features interviews with surviving associates, including assistant researchers Paul Gebhard and Clive Martin.
Also included are some surviving subjects among the 8,000 people Kinsey and his team studied during their project in the ’40s and ’50s. One recalls that her mother first explained sex as that moment in church when the pinkies of a man and a woman accidentally touch while sharing a hymnal.
Like the feature film, “Kinsey” the documentary lionizes the researcher for his moxie in shattering such quaint sentiments. Clearly, he was a pylon in the bridge between Victorian repression and the sexual revolution.
But Kinsey was also a flawed man with some flawed methods. He used his younger associates as both surrogate offspring and libidinal lab rats. All these years later, Gebhard describes how Kinsey goaded him to explore gay sex, even though Gebhard eventually concluded he had absolutely no interest in it.
And the documentary goes into more detail about some of the statistical mistakes in Kinsey’s initial research, including an unwise reliance on the confessions of one man, whose numerous sex acts included incest and pedophilia.
But we also see news clips from the time, plentiful cartoons and magazine stories illustrating the connubial shock and awe Kinsey inspired in his day. When his second volume — on female sexuality — begins to diminish his reputation, a woman of the time nevertheless tells the camera, “I think it’s a good thing. The more you know about something, the better you do it — irrespective of what it is.”
What emerges is a complex portrait of a bold pioneer with a touch of a God complex. He gets credit, as the film argues, “for starting a national conversation about sex.” One mother confesses she regularly made her daughters dust the library shelves, knowing they would discover and pore over her Kinsey volumes stored there.
But he died despondent and out of public favor in 1956, too soon for the ’60s sexual revolution he helped ignite. His single-mindedness, which enabled his break with tradition, also accounts for his mixed legacy, one expert notes.
He’d no doubt disagree. “It is the history of science,” he says in one filmed interview, “that wherever we fill in a gap in our knowledge, mankind may ultimately profit.”
