THE name of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a household word. To those who do not know him, it stands for sex with a capital S, with special emphasis on sexual aberrations. To those who do know him, it stands for a quiet, 58-year-old academician who takes the same kind of interest in sex as he does in gall wasps.
About gall wasps, Dr. Kinsey knows just about all there is to know. About sex, he probably knows more than any other man alive, and he has built up one of the greatest collections of erotica ever assembled. Yet he is an almost monotonously normal human being.
While he was still a boy, Kinsey wrote his first published paper, based on his observation of what various birds did in the rain. Some birds, he noted, sang, some shut up, some flew for shelter, some danced in the sky. This early ornithology foreshadowed the two main drives of his life—love of nature and passion for explicit details.
While he was still at Harvard, he began his enormously erudite, monumental work on the gall wasp, a tiny insect of which some 3,000 species exist. Kinsey traveled 80,000 miles collecting gall wasps, and he measured, catalogued and preserved 3,500,000 specimens to demonstrate their individual variations. Under a microscope, he took and recorded 28 different measurements on each wasp.
Kinsey joined the staff of Indiana University, where he still works, in 1920, and rose slowly in the academic hierarchy. He might still be an obscure professor of zoology had not twelve teachers, of whom he was one, joined together in the '30s to give a "Marriage Course." Students asked Kinsey about sex, and he was shocked to discover how little was known scientifically about the sexual behavior of human beings. Before this, he seems to have had no particular interest in the subject. But once he got started, it was the gall wasp all over again. When he began his research, some of his scientific colleagues (and their wives) cut him dead, and the period of semi-ostracism left him somewhat touchy and thin-skinned.
Kinsey is a solidly built man with greying, buff-colored hair in a short pompadour, eyes that vary between blue and hazel, and a sensitive, rather tense mouth above a hard jaw. His wife, whom he calls "Mac," was a graduate student of chemistry, and has been a great help. Being scientifically trained, she raised no objection at all when he started his work on sex, and sometimes she helps him in the office typing confidential documents. She teaches classes in swimming, runs the local Girl Scout camp, and loves the great outdoors.