He wanted men who -- like himself -- would be conservative in appearance, but liberal-minded about sex. Paul Gebhard: The first time I ever heard about Alfred Kinsey was in Cambridge when one of my professors came up and hesaid "What do you know about the work of Alfred Kinsey?" By 1953, having poured over hundreds of hours of footage and nearly 18,000 interviews, he began writing the female report, the much-anticipated follow-up to the male volume. The source of Kinsey's conviction was a tiny flightless insect called a gall wasp. Brad Cook Is it possible for a person to be male and female as the same time? However, Kinsey published the book in question in 1935, Wells was not appointed as president until 1937 (interim) or 1938, and the film was not released until 1941. If you came out after an hour, they were not interested in you. Laura Congleton He would go into a gay bar and say, I'm Alfred Kinsey and I want to talk with you guys about your private lives. And those, and those things would have warmed his soul. He said that all these categories that culture has invented like homosexual or heterosexual that these are inventions of the human mind they're not the products of nature. The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Fox Searchlight Pictures present a special screening and gala reception in celebration of KINSEY, the motion picture that examines the life of Alfred Kinsey. Morris & Alice Binkley: I think he was sincerely wanting to help. Narrator: Kinsey returned from Chicago flush with excitement. Bob Bayer: There was a lot of braggadocio, but uh, no, that was all bluff. Mortified by his sexual fumblings with Clara, Kinsey went in search of answers, plunging into the existing literature about sex. Duberman: We're talking about a body of theory that stresses the fluidity of human sexual desire. I think the more you know about anything the better you can do it and the better you can do it the more successful you are, irrespective of what it is." Ken Preis Gebhard: As he once pointed out, he said it, you have to be careful about masochism because the threshold always rises, you need more and more stimulation. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: At school, like sick people often are, he was bullied a lot. And as he comes to understand their pain and suffering, I think his own pain and suffering begin to diminish. How did women become aroused? Eugene Brancolini, Production Assistants Narrator: Kinsey's experiments with masochism had started years before, but as his depression deepened, they became more intense. Clyde Martin: It was a very friendly sort of interview and I came away with the idea that masturbation's perfectly okay. The man behind the inflammatory reports seemed at first glance an unlikely "revolutionary." James Jones: The marriage course gives him his first opportunity to collect sexual histories. And I looked at that picture and I thought my god, it's a picture of me. And uh, I was always impotent and humiliated, so I finally said, Kinsey you know I said, Prok, to hell with this, it's not, it's certainly not doing me any good and I'm sure it, it doesn't...it doesn't make my tentative partners very happy either, so..... No, so then he, he stopped, he said, okay. If you came out after two hours, they made a pass at you. Doctors doubted whether his heart would last until he was 20. And this was compounded by the fact that his father was also a bully. And she said, now if you go to a church meeting some evening with your boyfriend and you share a songbook and you hold it, and you help hold it with your hand and your little finger sticks out and he helps hold it with his hand and your, his little finger, that's sex. Kinsey countered with another bold argument: A woman's sexual freedom didn't threaten her marriage, it strengthened it. And they describe how many of the boys experienced orgasm, boys, young boys having repeated orgasm. Penny MacDonald Alfred Kinsey grew up in a world where sex education, such as it was, focused on abstention. To be told that it's perfectly normal to sleep with another man if you're a man, its perfectly normal to want to sleep with another woman if you're a woman, this made a huge difference. Hardy: He could use Pomeroy as a sort of sexual missile, which he could fire as, as it were at people he wanted to film. Bancroft: Tables 31 to 34 are about orgasms in pre-pubital boys. Getty Images He would interview everyone in a group, while making sure the groups themselves were different: bowling leagues in Kinosha, sewing circles in Syracuse, Fraternities at Indiana university, and even the cast of a streetcar named desire on Broadway. And I said, well it's I think all the universities will probably want a copy, another, a library. Miriam Hecht, Kinsey Associate: Are you kidding? Then he started getting the building and grounds people. Narrator: By 1946, the team had completed more than 8,500 interviews. Joe Maggio A general search for sex education can be conducted as a keyword search such as "sex education and video$." Hardy: What he did you see; he lifted a huge weight of guilt, anxiety and worry. Julia Ericksen: He realized that in the 1930s, the prisons were full of working class men who'd been unemployed and drifting from town to town and eventually got themselves locked up. These videos cover the following areas: Heterosexual and Homosexual Erotica, Sex Education and Therapy, Transgender, and Sadomasochism/Bondage. John Tebbel: Right from the beginning his main objective was to get as many people as possible in as many different levels of social strata as he could penetrate. Martin Duberman, Historian: When I was a teenager, I remember looking through an issue of Life Magazine in which uh, they had photographs of typical criminals. Kinsey was, above all, a taxonomist, specializing in the "classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships." The majority of the collection is cataloged in The Kinsey Institute Library's catalog. Ericksen: He talks about how many women have had sex before marriage and gone on to have normal marriages. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: It was compared to an atom bomb. This isn't true. When Clara wasn't appearing on camera herself, she helped make others comfortable. The collection contains a variety of formats including beta, videocassette and digital video disc. And the meaning of uh, any symbol or numeral was dependent upon which rectangle it was entered in. "To get data," Pomeroy said later, "Kinsey would have made a deal with the devil.". But I wonder about the emotional valence between them, if there is jealousy. However he asked her and Mack was delighted. After the evenings, do they go home and go to bed? Now just because the guy is a pedophile and it's illegal activity, you don't throw away valuable data. So it's not just the scientist catching fire, it's the man. Laumann: He was able to demonstrate that ordinary, every day types of persons were doing a hell of a lot of things, and it was that characterization of the richness and diversity of human sexuality that was crucial. But there were many more Americans for whom Kinsey's theories and supporting data proved to be deeply offensive. His own response to all the people he dealt with was profoundly compassionate and profoundly generous. In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, Dr. Alfred Kinsey founded the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington.. John Tooker Kinsey sunk into a deep depression. It was not only the best-selling book of that year, but the biggest science book ever. He could be oh so reassuring. He just simply did not believe that that was something that was likely to be successful. Instead Kinsey argued for a sliding scale from zero to six to reflect the many shades of sexual behavior. The institute also releases informational videos on various sexuality topics. And perhaps one of his pitfalls is that at some point with sexual behavior, there should be some kind of moral restraints. And that perhaps his behavior with his inner circle, with his wife, with the wives of - of his fellow researchers might have been harmful in ways that he wouldn't admit. And, and it would begin to flow from there. Within several months, more than 200,000 people bought a copy. And they, and they had nowhere to make love. Johanna Baker Narrator: On January 5, 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was released. Paul Gebhard: The code sheets were divided up into a series of rectangles. It is a scientific gold mine. A panel of experts answered your questions on the events of Alfred Kinsey's life, the impact of the Kinsey Reports when they were released, Kinsey's legacy, historical and scientific views of Kinsey today, and more, in this online forum. Group by group, Kinsey planned to construct a picture of American sexual behavior. In fact he actually suggests and really says women who've had orgasm before marriage are much more likely to have orgasmic marriages then to have satisfactory sex lives within marriage. Danuta Gorlach Richard Remsberg, Additional Voices And the basic interview was a little over 300 questions, so you had to memorize 300 questions. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: One of the things about his marriage was he never hid anything from her, ever. Kinsey spoke at packed auditoriums across the country. Kinsey Institute Library Jim Goodwin The criticism that stung Kinsey most came from fellow scientists, who focused on the accuracy of his sample. Gebhard: She used to uh, just astound some of the people that were there, here, these guys would be sitting around, some of them nude or something, the door would open and she'd come in, 'I thought you'd like some ice cream and vanilla pudding, you know what I'm saying, hand out food. James Jones, Biographer: In boardrooms, in barbershops, at the ballpark, people standing on the corner. By 1943, they were averaging 300 interviews a month. They were very stigmatized. Narrator: Masturbation was a consuming worry not just in the Kinsey household. Consuelo Lopez Morilla and Family He's a rebel fighting against the forces of censorship and oppression and Victorian, Victorian morality. Narrator : Whatever students had hoped for from Kinsey's course, few imagined what they would actually witness. He was especially interested in women, the subject of his next book. During gall wasp expeditions, Kinsey had initiated discussions of sex with his graduate students. The role of sex research, it was widely believed, was not to find out what people were really doing, but to endorse a narrow range of acceptable behavior. Robert Knight, who directs the Institute for Family and Culture at Concerned Women for America, is another Kinsey critic who sees a potential silver lining in the movie. And then when they got married they couldn't uh, participate, they didn't know how and didn't, and they were afraid. Your support will help ensure the historical preservation of our library and collections and also give a diverse field of researchers continued access to the resources they need to make new discoveries. Most Students, even those already engaged, knew next to nothing about what to expect on their wedding nights. James Jones: His heart goes out to the people whose experiences are similar to his own, people who had felt conflicted in childhood, people who were made to feel guilty. He actually thought if society wasn't so repressive, probably everybody would have been somewhere in between. Kinsey is an Drama movie that was released in 2004 and has a run time of 1 hr 58 min. James Jones : The only sex that is condoned in American society is sex between a man and a woman in marriage. Kinsey refused, stubbornly insisting that, in sex research, only a large number of interviews would work. And one of the manifestations was the McCarthy episode. Julia Ericksen: Kinsey thought if he got enough cases, he'd be able to represent everybody and he'd be able to say how often all of these kinds of things occurred in the population... Narrator: To gain access to large numbers, Kinsey hit upon a novel idea: what he called 100% groups. Narrator: On a crisp fall day in 1938, the bucolic campus of Indiana University in Bloomington was a buzz with excitement. On the first day of class, Kinsey boldly staked out his philosophy. Rachel Dretzin The Kinsey Institute For more than a half century, most developed nations have been undergoing a “sexual revolution.” This radical shift in traditional sexual norms, values and expectations has led to the liberalization of laws regulating sexual behavior. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: Alice Martin never forgave Kinsey. Reading, Alfred Kinsey : It is ideas as to what is proper and what is not which interferes with the consummation of marriage. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: And now the scientist is absolutely overwhelmed, and not only the scientist, because it's then in Chicago that he had sex with men for the first time. Paul Gebhard: He fell in love with Voris is what it amounts to. I stayed out later. The Kinsey Institute's pedophile team was guilty of deliberate sexual torture of children and was financed by state monies and by federal funds. Those spill over into the evenings. Jamie Wong Hardy: The photographer would fix up the lights so that the, the people being filmed or the person being filmed were in a sort of cone of light, so they couldn't see the, the observing... And there they'd be, Kinsey sitting, taking notes, the cameras whirring. A single married person um, an hour-twenty, maybe an hour. Of course now all the ethicists say we should have turned him in, nonsense. Narrator: Clara wouldn't be the only one wounded by Kinsey's vision of sex disengaged from love. From Executive Director, Dr. Justin Garcia. David Tyson He lectured that sexual ignorance led to real suffering, and sexual liberation was the key to a strong marriage and a happy life. James Jones: There is a cataclysmic confrontation with his father that takes place in the driveway of their home...he doesn't recognize the son who's in front of him, this is the kid who's supposed to be dutiful, this is the kid who's supposed to do his father's bidding. He would have seen Women's Lib, he would have seen the Civil Rights movement. Variety therefore, became, um, fundamental to his thinking. John Tebbel, Kinsey Associate: He made you feel that you were not talking about yourself even though you were. Narrator: As he left the prison farms Kinsey was deeply upset, in part because of his scientific beliefs and his resentment of arbitrary authority. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: Kinsey at this time was showing slides of penis entering vagina and Thurman Rice was a burly person at the medical school was turned on by this.