America's Obsessives by Joshua Kendall

Author:Joshua Kendall
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781455502363
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-06-24T21:00:00+00:00

In the fall of 1940, the forty-six-year-old biologist forged ahead by turning back the clock nearly a quarter century. “Get a million [gall wasps] Kinsey” was now “Get 10,000 [sex histories] Kinsey” (a figure that he repeatedly upped as the decade wore on). “For more than twenty years,” he wrote then to a friend, “I have worked on individual variations in the population of insects.… The unearthing of the facts in Human Sexual Behavior proves a much more difficult and much more dangerous undertaking; but the very difficulty is one of the things that leads me on.” Once again, Kinsey would scour “the length of the continent in the most remote desert and mountainous areas” to find his prey. In 1941, working up to fourteen hours a day, he spent 106 days on the road and took forty trips to penal institutions. His persistence soon attracted the attention of donors. That year, he received his first grant of $1,600 from the National Research Council’s Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS), which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The following year, he got $7,500. In December 1942, the top three CRPS scientists came to Bloomington. Over the next decade, these site visits would emerge as a key element in Kinsey’s ongoing PR campaign. He would have little trouble wowing academics (and later journalists) by showing them the nuts and bolts of the research, such as his interview techniques, his coded records, and his orderly files. And to give his visitors a firsthand feel for the project (as well as to gain control over them by learning their secrets), this voyeur would routinely take their sex histories. During these nonstop charm offensives, Kinsey would remain glued to his guests for as many as fifteen hours a day—he would sometimes even follow them into the bathroom. After meeting with Kinsey, the three scientific heavyweights all left with a “very favorable” impression of his survey, though one, a world-famous endocrinologist, could not help but notice that their host was a tad unbalanced: “[Kinsey] thought about his work every waking hour…[he was] the most intense person I ever knew outside of an institution for psychiatry. He was absolutely wound up.” But Kinsey achieved his goal. In 1943, his grant was bumped up to $23,000, and by 1947 it would reach $40,000.

In early 1946, soon after his team had collected the ten thousandth history, Kinsey settled down to write the male volume. He cut back on his travels and put the kibosh on his teaching career. The project would take two years to complete. He pounded out all the words himself, though he solicited feedback from his two top lieutenants, Gebhard and Pomeroy. And his statistician, Clyde Martin, was in charge of charts and graphs. Kinsey’s obsessive touches were all over the manuscript, the first chunk of which he submitted to his publisher, W. B. Saunders, in the spring of 1947. He double-checked Martin’s graphs to make sure the width and length of the lines were just right.

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