America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  Hooked, Kinsey did everything he could to assure himself a steady supply of the dopamine rush provided by his bug of choice. Year after year, he kept collecting, organizing, examining—he took twenty-eight microscopic measurements—and labeling his gall wasps. Aided by a few research assistants and a light teaching load, he soon amassed “quantities never dreamed of by any previous investigator,” according to Edgar Anderson, who was floored by the exactitude with which he conducted his research. “Each insect was glued to a snippet of stiff paper and impaled on a steel pin. Minute paper labels…were affixed to the same pin and thousands upon thousands of these exquisitely prepared specimens were pinned in insect-proof boxes.” Using India ink, Kinsey’s staff recorded in his own specially developed lettering style a slew of data for each insect such as species, place and date of collection, and sex (the females were infinitesimally bigger). When properly crafted, these tiny labels—no more than three-eighths of an inch by five-eighths—often left the boss “beam[ing]…[with] pleasure,” as one former student recalled. With all this data to crunch, Kinsey began publishing up a storm. In the 1920s, he came out with a half dozen major papers, which were followed by a six-hundred-page doorstop, The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of Species (1930). As the title indicates, Kinsey, whose belief system by then had shifted from Methodism to Darwinism, emphasized the theoretical implications of his findings. Having identified fifty new species, many of which he named after himself—we now have gall wasps such as Advene Kinsey and Anda Kinsey—he offered a series of speculations about the nature of evolution itself. As usual, he bragged about his numbers, noting that since 1917 he had traveled thirty-two thousand miles and had managed to label seventeen thousand wasps.

  After finishing a magnum opus, many researchers take a minute to catch their breath, but not Kinsey. Doing without his galls—his raison d’être—for any length of time was unthinkable. On January 30, 1930, just as his first bug book was about to be published, the soon-to-be thirty-six-year-old typed a memo, “Major Research Problems,” in which he listed thirteen additional studies that he wished to complete. Next to each, he estimated in pencil the number of years it was likely to take; the total came to thirty. Thus, as he noted at the bottom of the page, he was unofficially booked until the age of sixty-six. The two most ambitious projects were a book on the biology of gall wasps, which he anticipated would take four years, and a three-volume critique of taxonomy [the science of classification]—a six-year job. He went to work right away on the former, which would eventually take him, accompanied by several graduate students, to Arizona, Mexico, and Guatemala in both 1931 and 1935. As with his traveling fellowship from Harvard, he planned these extended field trips with a military precision. To collect his galls, he insisted on specially sewn cloth bags because “they are much stronger, take up less room and may be more securely tied at the top than paper bags.” In 1936, Kinsey published a follow-up book, The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips. Like its predecessor, it elicited a half dozen good reviews by specialists but was ignored by the larger scientific community. Eager to make a mark, Kinsey worked at a feverish pace, churning out nine more papers for leading entomology journals over the next two years.

  But Kinsey never did write that megatome on taxonomy, as by the late 1930s his attention had turned from crawling critters to climaxes. Surprisingly, though his object of study was now radically different, his overall approach remained the same. Kinsey said as much in the introduction to his male report, where he explained how his sexual research “was born out of the senior author’s long-time experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human material is not illogical.” For Kinsey, distinguishing between different species of gall wasps was no different from distinguishing between different types of human sexual behavior. Repeatedly referring to the “human animal” in his two reports, this sexologist would attempt to erase the distinctions between human beings and all other animals. In his framework, human sexuality, like the mating patterns of insects, is severed from any relational context; both men and women are biologically driven orgasm machines pump-primed to get their next fix.

  Just as Kinsey experienced little love during his childhood and adolescence—except perhaps for the occasional furtive glance exchanged with a squirrel or a snake—there is little love in his surveys. This glaring absence led renowned Columbia University English professor Lionel Trilling to note in his review of the first survey that the chapter on human-animal contacts “is, oddly, the only chapter in the book which hints that sex may be touched with tenderness.” Likewise, anthropologist Margaret Mead complained in 1948 that Kinsey “suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep.” “Because of their convenient size,” sheep actually figure prominently at the end of the male volume, where he flashed his data about sex between men and animals. “What is there to prevent,” Kinsey asked innocently, “insects of one species from mating with insects of another species?…Why should mammals mate only with mammals of their own kind?” As he relayed to an America in equal parts stunned and titillated, according to his research, about 17 percent of farm boys experience orgasm as a result of sex with an animal. Noting that besides sheep, “practically every other type of mammal that has ever been kept on a farm enters into the record,” he also reported that vaginal coitus is the “most frequent technique,” though fellatio and anal intercourse are not uncommon. The female volume would contain an analogous chapter where he reported that 0.4% of adult women achieved an orgasm as a result of contact with an animal—dogs and cats were the favored partners. Kinsey tracked down a “shy” sixty-eight-year-old widow who had engaged in weekly sex with her dog, named Tony, for eight years. While this caninophile was an outlier, she wasn’t the record setter; one woman in his sample reached orgasm about nine hundred times via animal contacts. With coitus rarely doable, these women, Kinsey reported, tended to be on the receiving end of oral sex.

  Upon arriving in Bloomington in the summer of 1920, Kinsey made sure that his whole life revolved around bugs. Nothing else mattered, even when it came to selecting a wife. While the assistant professor of zoology, as the authors of the two major Kinsey biographies both argue, had experienced frequent homosexual fantasies since adolescence, in his midtwenties, the only path to success he could envision was as a conventional family man. Clara McMillen, I.U.’s top undergraduate chemistry major, whom he had first met during his interview the previous April, proved irresistible mate material. She had all the requisite qualifications. As a child, she had chased butterflies and moths; so devoted was this Brookville, Indiana, girl to insects that she had once paid for a newspaper ad in the hope of expanding her caterpillar collection. And the dark-eyed tomboy, who did not care for makeup, liked to go on nature walks. While Clara pursued the still shy but handsome Kinsey, she initially worried about their compatibility, considering him “too churchy.” His tone-deaf gifts that first Christmas—hiking boots, a compass, and a hunting knife—also led her to have some second thoughts.

  But in February 1921, after a courtship of less than two months, the couple was engaged. At their wedding a few months later at the Brookville home of Mac’s grandparents, Kinsey did not have a single friend (human or animal) in attendance. Of his bride, an elated Kinsey rhapsodized to Miss Roeth, “She is a very brilliant scholar.…She knows the birds better than I do, knows the flowers and the trees, etc., is a capable hiker and camper, a champion swimmer.…So you see I am even more certainly headed into a life with the open.” And to the outdoors they went on their honeymoon. With his permanent hiking partner often lagging far behind, Kinsey marched to the top of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. At his insistence, they took a fire warden’s trail that, as a terrified Clara—a Midwesterner who had never been near any patch of earth much steeper than a pancake—later put it, “went straight up.” As they recuperated in their tent at night, the professor lectured on plants and animals and taught her how to cuddle a gentle grass snake. From the get-go,
their marriage was a ménage à trois. Long before Kinsey’s sexual escapades, Clara would have to learn how to coexist with a mistress. “I always realized,” she acknowledged later, “that his work would come first. You can’t ask a man to give up what is the driving force of his life because he is your husband.”

  With the easygoing Clara becoming the eternal student of Kinseyana—she cut short her own promising academic career after just a semester of graduate school—the early years of their marriage worked out just as Kinsey drew them up. “He wanted a helpmate and that’s what he got,” recalled Paul Gebhard. “He felt it was the wife’s job to keep the house tidy, raise the children, serve healthy, nutritious meals on time, and that was about it.” Practical, resourceful, and kind, Clara evolved into a nurturing mother and an efficient household manager. She also became the “greatest of cooks,” according to Glenway Wescott—the novelist was a longtime friend and occasional sex partner of Kinsey—who once noted that “if Alfred were not the hardest-worker of men, he would be the fattest.” To be fair to Kinsey, though his need for control was extreme, his ideas about how the sexes should divvy up the labor were not all that out of step with his times. And to his credit, despite occasional outbursts of temper, he did not become a tyrant like his father. Doing his best to treat both his wife and children with respect, he aimed to resolve family conflict through dialogue rather than diktat. While delegating most of the child care to Clara, Kinsey did pitch in, taking charge of the nightly baths—as a neatnik, this was a temptation that he could not resist—and bedtime stories. But he drafted the children into the bug business, taking them along with Clara on several extended research trips. One year, Kinsey sent out Christmas cards featuring a picture of his son Bruce toting bags of galls.

  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-colored 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.”