Before the presentation of “Kinsey” at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Thursday, Jessica Hille, assistant director for education at the Kinsey Institute, gave a brief talk where she discussed the history, current initiatives and importance of the institution. During this talk, she offered her favorite quote from Alfred Kinsey:
“We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe,” she quoted Kinsey as having said.
This month, Purple for Parents United Indiana, a group that seeks “to protect children from harmful agendas saturating the education system” called on the state legislature to strong-arm IU over its continued support of the Kinsey Institute using non-state funds. House Enrolled Act 1001, which declared “State appropriations may not be used to pay for the administration, operation, or programs of the Kinsey Institute,” passed in the Indiana General Assembly in 2023.
All this is to say that we are still feeling the effects of Kinsey’s research, both all the good it’s done for the vast expansion of human knowledge as well as all the intense, zealous anger it’s borne in those who’d rather it all had never been approved in the first place.
Kinsey was and remains a controversial figure. His research, nothing short of revolutionary in the field of sexology, brought him equal parts fame and infamy. The 2004 film, directed by Bill Condon with Liam Neeson as the titular scientist, doesn’t shy away from this reality. In fact, it’s the driving force of conflict. What it also doesn’t shy away from are the, often uncomfortable, truths about the studies Kinsey conducted in the name of understanding what is, really, at its core, elementary human behavior. Characters, just as they did in real life, admonish his techniques and practices; others find his frank exploration of the topic of sex admirable, a lighthouse toward which society should swim.
But, then again, sex has long made us uncomfortable. There’s a moment in this film, toward the end, when Kinsey, failing in his health, speaks to a group of philanthropists in an effort to fund his research after his grant from the Rockefeller Foundation was rescinded. The men and their wives slowly shuffle out of the room as Kinsey pontificates on the importance of sex research. It’s here where he makes a particularly provocative statement.
“I sometimes wonder what this country would look like if the Puritans had stayed at home,” he says. “What if all the rogues and libertines had crossed the Atlantic instead?”
Perhaps it would look something like the Kinsey’s household, an intensely sex positive unit that discusses these matters over dinner as if they’re the weather or football. Maybe relationships would look like the one Kinsey and his wife, Clara McMullen had, where the two loved each other endlessly and agreed to permit extra-marital sex as well. Or maybe it wouldn’t necessarily look like either of these two things because, as Kinsey hammers in repeatedly throughout the film, everyone is different.
Like Kinsey himself, this film is deeply nonjudgmental. Its depictions of sex — I hesitate to use the phrase “sex scenes” because of how profoundly unerotic they are — are almost appropriately scientific. What might’ve, in another film, felt like a shocking moment felt here like standard procedure. Kinsey showing a lecture hall full of students a close-up photograph of the moment of heterosexual penetration, presenting Herman B Wells (Oliver Platt) with a massive collection of pornography, has never seemed more unexciting.
Hille, whose research focuses on asexuality and ace identities as well as LGBTQ+ healthcare, made a point to mention the Kinsey reports’ impact on queer communities. Like any lecture on his research, she opened her slideshow — titled, “Am I Normal?” — with an explanation of the Kinsey Scale. Essentially a visual, albeit very simplified, representation of the sexual attraction spectrum, the scale attempts to number people from zero to six based on their ability or potential to be attracted to people of the opposite sex. Zero, in this case, would be exclusively heterosexual, six being exclusively homosexual.
Kinsey himself was bisexual, and, in the film, he admits that he’s probably a three on his scale. His first attempt at interviewing people about their sexual histories is at a gay bar in Chicago, and not only is it here that he’s exposed to the willingness of people to talk about these intimate topics but it’s here where he’s exposed to the extent of violence and terror that queer peoples in the U.S. were — and, in some ways, still are — subjected.
One of the final scenes is an interview between Kinsey and a woman (Lynn Redgrave) who fell in love with her best friend, but chose to stay in the closet. Because she couldn’t or wouldn’t come to terms with her own queerness, she considered suicide.
“It’s just a reminder of how little things have changed in our society,” Kinsey remarks in the film.
“What are you talking about?” she replies. “Things have gotten much better.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Why, you did, of course.”
It’s a sobering moment, dramatized or not. It’s also a reminder of the material importance of sex research, of what Kinsey unleashed on the world. His two books, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” revealed to people that they weren’t abnormal, they weren’t immoral. It opened up people’s eyes to the rest of the world, to the real, basic ways humans behave and interact with each other. It’s an understatement to say the Kinsey Institute remains a gravitational center of controversy; it’s also an understatement to say that, because of its continued existence, things have gotten better.
