Kinsey, Alfred

Kinsey, Alfred (1894–1956), zoologist, sex researcher, reformer.Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Kinsey was a sickly child. At his parents’ insistence he spent much time attending the Methodist church, thoroughly absorbing the tenets of evangelical Protestantism. Following two fruitless years at Stevens Institute of Technology, he broke with his domineering father and transferred to Bowdoin College in Maine. Majoring in biology, he graduated magna cum laude in 1916. Three years later he received a doctorate in zoology from Harvard. In 1920 he joined the faculty of Indiana University. Here he abandoned religion, raised a family, and won a reputation as a respected teacher and preeminent authority on gall wasps.

Privately, Kinsey experienced sadomasochistic and homoerotic urges deeply at odds with conventional morality. Like many closeted homosexuals of his day, he lived a double life, pursuing same‐sex liaisons at every opportunity. Rejecting society's judgment that homosexuality was abnormal, he in 1938 began to study human sexuality, using essentially the same taxonomic methodology he had developed in his gall‐wasp research. Attracting grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, he founded the Institute for Sex Reserch at Indiana University in 1947. Defended against critics by the university president, Kinsey and his staff interviewed thousands of subjects nationwide. The value of the massive data they compiled remains contested, however, because of methodological and sampling flaws. In the studies that made him famous, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Kinsey and his coworkers shattered the conspiracy of silence surrounding sexuality. Showing that millions of American men and women routinely violated middle‐class morality, these books sparked sustained debates about sexual mores and practices.

Along with the library and archive of his institute, Kinsey left three important legacies, summed up in his beliefs that human sexuality can be studied scientifically, that social and legal policies relating to sex should be informed by scientific knowledge, and that society should cultivate tolerance in the face of such diversity in sexual behavior.
See also Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Methodism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Social Science.

Bibliography

James H. Jones , Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, 1997.
Jonathan Gathome‐Hardy , Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey, 2000.

James H. Jones