E-Mail This Article to a Friend Repeat offender Alfred Kinsey is back, and so is the ‘Red’ scare BY PETER KEOUGH

BLAME IT ALL on Alfred Kinsey, who fired the opening shot in the sexual revolution.

The right wing and the righteous sure have, ever since Kinsey exposed what was really going on in bedrooms and barnyards across America with his two bombshell studies, 1948’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and 1953’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The self-appointed protectors of decency hope to crush Kinsey anew, along with all the demons his work supposedly spawned, evils such as gay rights and marriage, feminism, abortion, secular humanism, genuine science, presidential blowjobs, and Janet Jackson’s exposed-for-prime-time breast. Validated by the triumph of the "Red" state of mind that gave the Bush administration a second term and a new "mandate," they hope to crush Kinsey and the sexual reality he helped define.

They have plenty to get indignant about these days — a recent novel, a new film, and an upcoming television show all feature the pioneering sex researcher. T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle came out in September, Bill Condon’s Kinsey gets a wide release today, and a Kinsey documentary by local filmmakers Barak Goodman and John Maggio will be broadcast on PBS’s American Experience in February 2005.

The troops are already marching against Condon’s film. Right-wing-fundamentalist groups, spearheaded by self-proclaimed researcher Judith Reisman, have charged Kinsey with complicity in crimes such as child rape. Groups such as Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family have rallied their forces against the film and all it stands for. Vigils marked the film’s limited opening last week in New York, Los Angeles, and other locations. One group, Generation Youth, an association of "virgins and renewed virgins," picketed theaters. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America claims that it celebrates a person "whose proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele." He adds that Kinsey "was the godfather of the activist homosexual movement, the campaign to mainstream pornography, and even the campaign to strike down abortion laws."

No doubt Kinsey and his work embody the struggle among political, artistic, and sexual expression and repression that underlies American politics and culture. And as reviled as he is by some, others equally and perhaps unfairly idolize him. But was he indeed responsible for the sweeping changes ascribed to him? More likely he was more of a catalyst and figurehead in a movement that was already stirring.

In 1943, while Kinsey was still conducting his research, Jane Russell’s breasts caused a Janet Jackson–like stir when she flaunted them in The Outlaw. Director Howard Hughes battled with the Hays Office, the MPAA ratings board of its day, to save most of the cleavage. This was the beginning of the steady decline of that office’s restrictive powers in an era already colored by the cynicism and seaminess of the film-noir movement. And 10 years earlier, in 1933, federal judge John M. Woolsey had ruled that James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses was not obscene and could be published — a landmark decision against censorship that no doubt allowed for the publication of Kinsey’s more provocative, if perhaps lesser-read, volumes.

Moreover, when his studies came out, a receptive and enthusiastic audience awaited them. Kinsey had tapped into a culture of sexual and artistic liberation that was already thriving. Among the thousands Kinsey interviewed for the male volume were the then-unknown William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, founders of the Beat movement that would transform American literature. In 1949-’50, he took interviews from the Broadway casts of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams, the painter Paul Cadmus, the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the writer Gore Vidal, and many other progressive cultural figures of the day or of the future were his friends, supporters, and subjects. In the end, however, these famous figures were incidental to Kinsey’s work, which largely took as its subject anonymous average Americans.

Kinsey is perhaps a convenient symbol for a particular crisis in tensions between repression and liberation, religious fundamentalism and secular humanism, superstition and reality. When Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published, in 1948, the Cold War, a perpetual, seemingly unwinnable conflict against a relentless, evil enemy, had just begun. Just months before, the House Un-American Activities Committee had come down on the Hollywood 10, and the studios initiated what would become the blacklist. It was a crisis not unlike the situation we’re facing today, with our own war on terror, the constitutional encroachments of the Patriot Act, censorship in the name of decency by the FCC, and the cowardice and greed of studio and media heads who have collaborated with politicians to stifle free expression.

The icicles of chilled expression are all around. On Veterans’ Day last week, ABC canceled a broadcast of Saving Private Ryan, fearful that the FCC would fine the network for suggesting that GIs get killed in action or use the F-word. That fear may not have been unfounded, given the FCC’s past actions against Howard Stern and against the MTV Awards live broadcast that allowed U2 lead singer Bono to utter an expletive. Underlying that threat, of course, was the power of the religious right, eager to capitalize on its contribution to the president’s re-election. The Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association had filed complaints with the FCC against the two previous network broadcasts of the film. His organization failed then, but its threats to file complaints with the FCC this time apparently intimidated ABC.

Not only do Oscar-winning movies face the wrath of these moral watchdogs, so too do classic children’s books. Outraged religious groups have mobilized to ban Katherine Paterson’s Newbery Medal–winning novel Bridge to Terabithia, published 25 years ago. Their objections? Words like "Lord," "damn," and "hell" and a realistic examination of children’s spiritual crises. In a November 13 interview in the Boston Globe, Paterson recalled how one Christian schoolteacher responded to the book by writing, "From now on, I’m going to teach literature from the Bible alone." Commented Paterson, herself a Presbyterian elder, "I hope she doesn’t use the Book of Judges."

These signs of right-wing ascendancy notwithstanding, Kinsey and the movement he represented did make a difference, even though the backlash against him might have undone some of the progress achieved. After all, 60 years ago, people were still being imprisoned for engaging in oral sex with a spouse. Today, television remains free to air the smarmiest and most titillating programming as long as the bad words are bleeped and the naughtiest bits obscured — as fans of Wife Swap and The Bachelor, both programs of the easily intimidated ABC, well know.