Don't forget your toothbrush

Spectator, The, Sep 5, 1998 by Hubbard, Kate

In 1939 Alfred Kinsey, who abhorred all signs of sexual frustration, lent his car, as a dating aid, to a poverty-stricken young student at Indiana University, Clyde Martin. The car became 'a sort of mobile double bed', loaned to other desperate lovers. Martin became first Kinsey's gardener, then both his and his wife's lover, and, finally, one of his interviewers. It's a story illustrative of both Kinsey's compassion and of how closely intertwined were his private and professional lives.

In recent years Kinsey, entomologist turned sexologist, author of the famous and ground-breaking Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour In the Female (1953), has been vilified as a man whose methods were questionable and statistics dubious, who condoned and shielded paedophiles, who slept with his colleagues and their wives and prostituted his own wife. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy does much to restore his ailing reputation. Paul Gehard, a colleague of Kinsey's, has spoken of his `powerful streak of crusading humanitarianism'. The latter sounds the keynote in this biography, a work characterised by the self-same qualities - tolerance, warmth, humanity - that Gathorne-Hardy identifies in his subject.

Kinsey was undeniably obsessed by sex, but then he was also obsessed by gall wasps, cleanliness, peanuts and raisins, music and gardening. He came to sex and to sex research relatively late in life, the former on marriage, aged 27, the latter in his forties, after years devoted to the study and collection (Kinsey had a collecting mania) of the gall wasp. Growing up in the slums of Hoboken, New Jersey, with a rigidly repressive Methodist father, he spent his youth in an agony of sexual frustration. Relief only came with Clara MacMillan, known as 'Mac', his wife. Even then the couple failed to consummate the marriage during the honeymoon - not wholly surprising since Kinsey insisted on hiking (another obsession) in the White Mountains in ferocious blizzards. Mac, though not a beauty, appears to have been a stalwart spouse, and she was severely tested. A member of Kinsey's team observed, during the filming of a gruesome session of sado-masochistic homosexual sex, that Mrs Kinsey - herself a true scientist appeared in the attic and once in a while calmly changed the sheets on the workbench. It all began with the marriage course (you had to be married or engaged to attend) that Kinsey set up at Indiana University in 1938. The lectures were, by all accounts, electrifying. Kinsey was a handsome man with a charming smile, he spoke without notes, referring, breezily, to 'clitoris' and 'orgasms' - and this was in a climate of extreme moral conservatism, when oral and premarital sex, not to mention homosexuality, were illegal. He developed a highly effective interviewing technique for the gathering of sex histories, as described by one subject: It wasn't `have you ever?' it was `when did you last have sex with a pig?' You said `Never!' OK but he had you hooked if you were a pig lover.

The details of others' sex lives are invariably riveting; there are plenty here. There's the man who had only one orgasm in his life and that on a piano stool, while listening to music. There's Alice Spears, who had her first orgasm aged 40 - `comforting,' says Gathorne-Hardy - but, in her sixties, which was when she was observed, i.e. filmed, by Kinsey and team, several of whom she had sex with, she was capable of 15 to 20 orgasms in 20 minutes. Her photograph still hangs in the Kinsey Institute, an elderly, smiling lady, rather thin, with big uneven teeth. You couldn't possibly tell from looking at her what a rare creature she was. Gathorne-Hardy devotes a fair amount of space -- rather too much in my view to refuting allegations made by James Jones, in his 1997 biography, that Kinsey was both a homosexual and a masochist. Gathorne-Hardy views Kinsey as bisexual, as Kinsey believed all human beings to be, and places his masochism - he practised urethral insertion, graduating from pencils to a toothbrush, bristles first -- within the context of his `changing and evolving sexuality' and his fascination with extremes.

The Kinsey who emerges from this unfailingly reasonable and humorous biography is a kindly despot, a frequently touching, sometimes absurd figure, a man who forced his staff to keep sex diaries and bossily dolloped extra salad cream on their plates during staff lunches, but a man who would also reply, at some length, in the midst of a whirl of lectures, travelling and interviews, to a letter from a girl worried about her parents' plans to sterilise the family dog. His flaws - excessive zeal, ruthlessness, intemperance - were those of the visionary. And he was indefatigable till the end. In 1955, his heart failing, he made an exhaustive tour of Europe. In London he visited Wormwood Scrubs, the Maudsley and the collection of erotica in the British Museum. He lunched with Vyvian Holland, the son of Oscar Wilde, and `talked about homosexuality in rabbits'. Every evening, between 8p.m. and 3a.m., he would patrol the streets of Piccadilly, observing prostitutes, the faithful Mac trailing in his wake. A year later he was dead.