America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (21 page)

And thus might Kinsey have carried on to the end of his days—as a conventional mid-twentieth-century father and husband, dedicating his life to entomology. But Clara changed him dramatically. Her steady affection brought out parts of his personality that had been forced to remain in hiding, such as his sensuality, heretofore largely confined to piano playing. A virgin at the time of his marriage, as was his bride, Kinsey soon found that he thoroughly enjoyed sex. This new pastime, however, initially required work. During their honeymoon up in the mountains, the future sex doctor and his wife never did succeed in making whoopee; and it was not for a lack of trying. Terrified and confused, the Kinseys ignored the glitch for a few months until a Bloomington doctor discovered that Mac’s hymen was unusually thick. This rare physiological disorder, in combination with Kinsey’s inordinately sized member, had made consummating the marriage impossible. After some minor surgery on Mac, all systems were go. To ensure against any such humiliations in the future, Kinsey started to immerse himself in the scientific literature on sex such as the work of Havelock Ellis. The couple worked to polish their lovemaking techniques and experimented with various coital positions—the man on bottom was their favorite. Kinsey soon became master of everything to do with his own sex life. He even developed his own special form of birth control, which involved sterilizing condoms with a certain percentage of alcohol so that they could be used time and time again.

Though Kinsey continued to revere cleanliness and control as much as ever, he also began to appreciate the unruly. This turn in his aesthetic sensibility found expression in the two-story house that he built in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood, then on the outskirts of Bloomington, in 1926. While the former engineering student hired a local firm headed by Charles Pike as the contractor, Kinsey both drew up the blueprints himself and supervised every detail of the construction, as Thomas Jefferson did with his house at Monticello. As Pike’s workmen began to lay the overburned bricks—to keep expenses down, they used discards from a local kiln—in a symmetrical fashion, Kinsey suddenly stopped them. The emerging exhibitionist, who liked to prance around naked in front of his children, insisted on an au naturel domicile that featured both misaligned bricks and excess mortar hanging out every which way. This distinctive exterior attracted the attention of neighbors, who were evenly divided between fans and skeptics. Inside the rooms had an adobe look, as Mac washed the brown walls with tea (which she believed would help preserve them). To make sure that all family members could get cleaned up on the double, particularly in those steamy Bloomington summers, Kinsey installed an extra shower, which looked like a telephone booth, in the basement, as Consuelo Lopez-Morillas, who moved into the house after Clara’s death, explained to me.

Buying up a few adjacent lots, Kinsey also created a decidedly disorderly garden. “Straight is the line of duty but curved the line of beauty” was its credo. Built in the English style, it included a lily pond and rock gardens. The passionate horticulturalist sprinkled in a wide variety of plants and flowers around native and nursery-bred trees. Gardening became both his preferred form of exercise as well as his favorite hobby. But Kinsey could never entirely divorce work from pleasure, acknowledging that his beloved irises “do provide material for scientific study.” And study them he did. The collector extraordinaire collected more than 250 different species and summarized his findings in a review article for the
Bulletin of the American Iris Society
. “Instead of just simply having a diverse garden, a damn good second-rate garden,” Paul Gebhard later recalled, “[he had to] have the very best iris collection in the whole Midwest.” Kinsey returned to his notion about the need to merge art and science that he had first spoken of in his garbled college valedictory decades earlier. “Gardens,” he remarked in that scholarly article, “must be made with some respect for…art.” Kinsey worked hard to perfect his earthly paradise, repeatedly tearing up and rebuilding sections of turf. He went at it regularly in the summer months, whiling away many early mornings and most Sundays. The preeminent “bugologist” had no trouble putting in long hours, as he was immune to insect bites. Wearing nothing but a skimpy flesh-c
olored
pair of shorts (“a loincloth type of thing,” as his daughter Joan put it) and one shoe on his right foot so that he could do the spading, he startled neighbors and passersby, who assumed that he was not wearing any clothes at all.

Kinsey also combined his idiosyncratic mix of the sensual and the scholarly in a unique form of entertainment that he hosted on Sunday nights in his living room: the musicale. In the late 1920s, he started collecting 78 rpm records—within a decade, he had more than a thousand—and he liked to play his favorite selections for friends. He was drawn to conservative—tonal—composers such as Jean Sibelius. These carefully choreographed gatherings were an act of rebellion against Alfred Seguine, who had once ordered Kinsey’s aunt out of the Hoboken home for playing the piano on the Sabbath. At precisely eight o’clock, the piano player turned music critic began with an introductory lecture. For the next two hours, as he mixed in compositions and more commentary, the guests, who sat in preassigned hardback chairs arranged in a semicircle facing the master, were expected to listen in absolute silence. “You could be expelled from the group,” one attendee recalled, “if you squeaked.” But he played the music loud because he wanted to draw attention to the details. At ten o’clock on the dot, Mac would pass out the refreshments—persimmon pudding and iced water—and conversation was briefly permitted. Twenty minutes later, Kinsey would return to the turntable and put his special cactus needle—he would count the number of times he used it—on the final piece, which was some kind of lighter fare. At ten thirty, he would usher everyone out the door.

After several years of marriage, Kinsey officially transformed Mac from his mate into his mother. She provided him with what he had never had as a boy, a secure emotional base. But rather than responding in kind, Kinsey made use of his newfound self-confidence to go scouting for new sexual partners. On his research trips, he no longer was interested in communing solely with bugs; he began hitting on his male grad students. His first major crush was on Ralph Voris, who, as Kinsey later confided to Gebhard, became the second great love of his life. A handsome small-town boy from Oklahoma, Voris, who first went gall collecting with Kinsey in 1925, completed his doctorate at I.U. in 1928. A brilliant entomologist who became the reigning expert on the staphylinid beetle, Voris could, as Kinsey once noted gleefully, “sit all day beside an uninhabited pile of dung until it came alive with bugs.”

“He was in love with Voris,” recalled a colleague, “from day one.” While eyewitness accounts are missing, most Kinseyologists assume that the two insect mavens boosted each other’s orgasm counts on those nights when they shared the same tent or hotel room. The intimate friends communicated about everything from classification to coital positions. They also swapped sex histories. After leaving Bloomington, Voris, who was also married, took up a teaching position at Southwest Missouri State College in Springfield. In frequent letters, Kinsey shared his innermost thoughts and aspirations with Voris, whom he affectionately dubbed “Mr. Man.” But except for a few isolated days every year or two—on research trips, at academic conferences, and at their respective homes in Bloomington and Springfield—Kinsey saw little of Voris between his graduation and his sudden death in 1940. Not as smitten as his mentor, Voris was often fending off Kinsey’s invitations. Unable to stare the truth in the face, Kinsey settled on a scientific explanation for the infrequency of their trysts, lamenting to his former star student that “your bugs and mine do not always live in the same places.” The torch would never be extinguished, as Kinsey kept a picture of Voris on his desk for the rest of his life.

With Voris proving elusive, Kinsey became sexually interested in the research assistants whom he took on field trips. Letting his inner exhibitionist out, he had no hesitation about walking around naked in front of a student, whom he might ask to take his picture as he bathed in the river. He regaled his crew with smutty chatter. “He would just bring it [sex] up right out of the blue,” recalled Homer T. Rainwater, an I.U. graduate student who accompanied Kinsey on his 1934 expedition to Arkansas and Missouri. While Rainwater was a little startled when Kinsey started prying into the details of his marital relations, he was floored when Prok expatiated about the wonders of masturbation. Asked if Prok ever initiated group masturbation sessions, Rainwater responded, “No, he didn’t go that far. He almost did, but didn’t.” But on other occasions, Kinsey was not able to show similar restraint. The following year on his jaunt to Mexico and Guatemala, not long after enlightening grad student Osmond Breland about his theory of “explosions”—according to Kinsey, ejaculations were produced by a closed plumbing system of sorts—he and Breland engaged in a threesome with an unsuspecting undergrad. By the mid-1930s, a pattern had been set; travel became a means to gratify his limitless sexual curiosity and desire. And by the end of the decade, as his scientific orgasm counting began, Kinsey would spend more and more time away from Bloomington. While Mac continued to play the good soldier, she did privately lament that marriage to Prok meant “being alone a lot.”

In early 1938, Kinsey was feeling restless. While fellow entomologists acknowledged that he had no peer in gall research, their numbers were few and their influence negligible. And since I.U. did not attract top-flight graduate students, nationally, the ambitious academic was still a relative nobody. Kinsey was relieved that the university’s longtime president William Bryan, whom he detested as a stodgy Victorian, had finally retired, but he harbored doubts about his thirty-five-year-old replacement, the former dean of I.U.’s Business School, Herman Wells. “Wells [is] not too long on scholarship,” Kinsey confided to Voris that March. “I am not yet certain that I want to fix my future here. If it comes out right in this shuffle, I.U. will be a good place to stay; if it is screwed up as soon things threaten to be, I shall be in the market for another job. Someplace where there is…a graduate program that allows a better ground for taxonomic…studies.” Kinsey ended up staying put, as a dream assignment suddenly came his way. That spring, I.U. students petitioned the new president to update the university’s ossified one-hour “hygiene” class, which, rather than educating students about sex, celebrated Victorian mystifications. Wells turned to Kinsey, who relished the chance to turn his hobby—combing through the sexological literature—into a scholarly sideline. Heading a committee of seven tenured professors, who hailed from a variety of disciplines including law, sociology, medicine, psychology, and history, Kinsey systematically designed a “Marriage Course,” which was first offered to I.U. seniors in June 1938.

“Marriage Course” was a euphemism for “Sex Course,” because any sex outside of marriage was then still considered socially taboo, if not criminal. In the late 1930s, all states had sodomy laws on the books, under which homosexuality as well as anal and oral sex—even between spouses—could be punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. Kinsey was taking his cue from the leading sex manual of the day,
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
by the Dutch gynecologist Theodoor van de Velde. (While the 1930 American edition of this graphic how-to manual, which the Catholic Church immediately placed on its index of banned books, contained a note from the publisher limiting its sale to medical professionals, after World War II it would sell nearly half a million copies.) Citing experts on love from the Latin poet Ovid to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, van de Velde called marriage “sacred to the believing Christian.” “If there are varieties,” ran an aphorism from the French novelist Honoré de Balzac that summed up the Dutchman’s angle, “between one erotic occasion and another, a man can always enjoy happiness with one and the same woman.” Emphasizing physiology rather than psychology, van de Velde addressed his step-by-step guide to orgasmic bliss to “the husband who wants to be more than a blunderer.” In van de Velde, who insisted that the genitals be touched only with “perfectly clean hands,” Kinsey found a kindred spirit. The gynecologist who had helped him to perfect his own technique between the sheets would forever shape Kinsey’s thinking. A decade and a half later, in ads for the female volume placed in the
New York Times
, Kinsey included the following question, “Do you realize that many authorities believe that reading the book can strengthen the individual’s family life?” Like van de Velde, Kinsey would present himself as an ardent defender of marriage when offering his steamy suggestions, but privately he felt otherwise. He once described the rise of romantic love in the Renaissance as “the worst thing that ever happened to Western humanity.” For Kinsey, as for Dewey, Lindbergh, and other obsessives with runaway sexual impulses, purely monogamous relationships were akin to a prison sentence.

Of the twelve lectures in that initial version of “Kinsey’s course in connubial calisthenics,” as the I.U. students dubbed it, Prok delivered three. In the opener, he sketched his biological view of society, which obliterated nearly all distinctions between humans and infrahumans. Just as the French students would argue a generation later that “we are all German Jews,” this sexual revolutionary made his case that we are all insects. For Kinsey, sex alone was the glue that organized animal societies of all stripes. “The anthropoid [ape] family breaks up,” he insisted, “as soon as the sexual attraction wanes.” Identifying the breast as a sex organ, he also argued that mother love in humans was motivated by the “sexual response” elicited by “the feeding babe.” In other words, for Kinsey, women were interested in the welfare of their children largely because they saw them as a source of sexual gratification. (At the time, little was known about oxytocin, the so-called bonding hormone, but the very concept of nonsexual bonding would never register with him.) In the second lecture, using several slides of penises and vaginas, he covered everything students might want to know about human anatomy and physiology—and then some. Here, he leaned heavily on van de Velde’s manual, which had also broken down the sex act into its component parts with an analytic detachment, as if the issue at hand were how to rev up an automobile engine. “Intercourse,” Kinsey declared matter-of-factly, “consists of a series of physiological reactions which are as mechanical as the blinking of an eyelid.”