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Furthermore, no one gets excited about nudity on stage anymore. No one takes exception when Elfriede Jelinek, whose novel The Piano Teacher (later a movie), a celebration of sadomasochism, wins a Nobel Prize, or when Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, filled with eloquent, unabashed descriptions of gay sex, wins Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Nor does Hollywood show any signs of toning down. This year has seen a surge in sexually explicit, NC-17, and otherwise provocative films (see "Sexual Behavior in the Hollywood Movie," this page). Video, DVDs, the Internet — there’s no end to the supply of sexual material simply because, as Kinsey demonstrated, there’s no end to the demand.

BILL CONDON, director of Kinsey, and T.C. Boyle, author of The Inner Circle, both agree that our sexual, artistic, and political freedoms seem intact. But they do have reservations.

Condon, for example, whose previous film, the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters, dramatized the life of closeted gay film director James Whale, is wary of the more sinister similarities between the current era and Kinsey’s time, particularly 1953, when Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out." That was the time of Eisenhower and an all-Republican Congress," he says. "It was the time of the McCarthy hearings and all that. Seeing everything through the prism of the Cold War, many saw a book on female sexuality as an attack on American mothers and pro-socialist somehow and anti-capitalist somehow, and against the family. Now I think we see everything through the prism of terrorism. With the current Congress and political climate, morality is making its way into science.... I think if you look at the stem-cell-research debate today, it’s identical to what Kinsey went through. The idea of pure science being almost impossible in the context of this political culture that imposes morality on every discussion."

Supporting Condon’s fear that ideology is hijacking science is the story "Long After Kinsey, Only the Brave Study Sex" in the November 9 New York Times. It notes that despite a pop-culture environment that offers TV commercials with Bob Dole promoting Viagra and programming awash with mostly titillating sexual content, scientists today are less willing to risk sexual research for fear of condemnation than they might have been in Kinsey’s time. Despite — or because of — the pedophile scandal among Catholic priests, religious groups are more likely to hound such a study. Says Dr. Gilbert Herdt, the director of human-sexuality studies at San Francisco State University: "I have been in this field for 30 years, and the level of fear and intimidation is higher now than I can ever remember. With the recent election, there will be even more intrusion of ideology into science."

But the question of scientific objectivity hovers over Kinsey’s work as well. Detractors have long claimed that a personal agenda may have shaped Kinsey’s science. Though married for 35 years and the father of four children, Kinsey would have scored fairly high on his own seven-point heterosexual-to-homosexual rating scale. He engaged in several homosexual relationships, including some with his staff members, and developed an interest in masochistic practices. Indeed, purportedly in the interests of science, Kinsey encouraged intermarital relationships among his staff, filmed sexual acts between staff members and study subjects, and established what might today be described as a polyamorous lifestyle in his research institute. It’s likely that Kinsey’s desire to investigate human sexuality was driven by an urge to understand his own inclinations. But critics go further, insisting that Kinsey shaped his findings to fit his own predilections.

Another criticism commonly made by detractors was that Kinsey either condoned or committed acts of pedophilia. Some of the statistics in his male volume include specifics on the sexual responses of minors that could have been obtained only by firsthand observation. That data, apparently, was procured from one prolific subject, Kenneth Braun, who meticulously recorded his thousands of sexual experiences with adults, family members, 22 species of animals, and male and female children as young as infants.

Condon, whose film is based on two recent biographies — Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s mostly adulatory Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (University of Indiana Press, 2000) and James H. Jones’s more critical Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (Norton, 1997) — dutifully covers these aspects of Kinsey’s life, if with some cinematic license. "I couldn’t leave out some of the bigger things that people have had problems with," he says. "At the same time, I did leave out some of the things that I think a more-traditional movie would have included, like the death of his first child, which was a tragedy for him and his wife." And he does depict a Kinsey interview with Braun in his film (though he deviates from the truth when he has Kinsey’s assistant Wardell Pomeroy, played by Chris O’Donnell, leave the interview in disgust). Condon sighs when asked about whether the pedophilia charge, and Kinsey’s own personal kinks, tainted Kinsey’s research.

"It was what the whole discussion was about last time when all these books came out," he says. "It becomes half of every article written on the subject." He points out that Braun died shortly after his interview with Kinsey. "It wasn’t as if any action Kinsey might have taken would have protected another child. At the heart of this was the trust between Kinsey and his subjects. The idea that somebody tells a researcher something and he goes and gets him arrested is a very contemporary one.... But [raising the pedophilia issue is] a common tactic."

Expect more of the same now that the film has been released. Reisman for example, has dismissed Condon as a "gay activist." Condon is bemused by that characterization. "It’s funny, because I’ve never been an activist. My only activism is that I’m openly gay. But for [Reisman], that’s the same thing."