An institute breaks open the boxes
Before 1947, America hardly talked about sex. Then Alfred Kinsey founded an institute that broke open old boxes.
On 8 April 1947, the Institute for Sex Research was founded in Bloomington, Indiana, as an independent, non-profit corporation closely linked to Indiana University. Behind the sober name stood the biologist Alfred Kinsey. He had spent years studying gall wasps and then turned to a subject that hardly anyone in America talked about openly: people's sex lives.
The founding had a concrete reason. Kinsey and his team had conducted thousands of detailed interviews, full of intimate confessions. These data were to remain confidential and be permanently secured. Anyone who confided their innermost thoughts to Kinsey was to be sure that nothing would get out. Support came from university president Herman B. Wells and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In January 1948, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was published. The book became a bestseller and a scandal at the same time. One finding was particularly explosive: many men did not fit into the boxes of heterosexual or homosexual. Same-sex experiences were far more common than society wanted to admit.
To capture this, the team developed the Kinsey scale. It runs from 0 for exclusively opposite-sex to 6 for exclusively same-sex behaviour and feeling. In between lie all the gradations. For the emerging homophile movement, this provided an argument against the idea that homosexuality was a rare illness.
The volume on women followed in 1953. Together, the two reports sold almost a million copies and appeared in 13 languages. Criticism was not lacking, from guardians of morality as well as from experts who, for example, faulted the selection of respondents. Kinsey died in 1956. His institute still exists today and has been called the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University since 2016.