In this essay, reprinted from Serpents in the Garden: Liasons with Culture & Sex (CounterPunch and AK Press, 2004, www.akpress.org), edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, author Susan Davis tours the inner vaults of the Kinsey Institute, the luscious warehouse of erotica hidden in the American heartland.

By Susan Davis

Alfred C. Kinsey.

Indiana 41 is a dangerous road, and I’m a danger to myself when I stop to photograph the frequent roadside crosses, so I push on, cutting through the faded limestone glory of Greencastle, over the bench land to the White Valley. The smoky bottomlands, where they’re burning slash, are lulling, and I’m listening to Ralph Stanley, hallowed banjo player and high-lonesome singer, trying to decide which is the best on his new album of old songs. They’re all good, but “False Hearted Lover’s Blues” is a classic, a “come all ye” warning about the faithlessness of women in general:

They’ll bite the hand that feeds you,
Spend the money that you save.
With your heart strings and silk garters,
They’ll build a doghouse on your grave.

From Ellertsville it’s all strip services into Bloomington. I find my way to the Memorial Union, next to Ernie Pyle Hall, his typewriter on display in the window. There’s still time to change clothes and catch a few hours at the Archive.

But getting into the Kinsey Institute is harder than it looks. The collections and research work there are so provocative that gentle barriers have been set up to make sure no one wanders in casually. I’ve been here before, and I’ve called ahead, but it’s still surprisingly tricky. You go in the front door of Morrison Hall, the biology building, and the Archive is on the fourth floor. But there are no stairs after the second floor, and the Kinsey Institute is walled off from the rest of the building, as if its contents could not be allowed to seep into other scholarly operations. You have to take an elevator to the third-floor so a receptionist can look you over; but since the elevator doesn’t go to the fourth floor during working hours, you have to work your way up a tiny set of winding stairs, through more doors and then into the reading room.

Unexpected developments interfere with my work. The Archive is having its annual unannounced book sale (no dealers invited), clearing out its duplicate copies of everything from Krafft-Ebbing to eighth-rate porn. It takes time to figure out what I might want to buy. “We’ve got to get this stuff out of here!” Shawn Wilson, user services coordinator, tells me. “We have such a space problem.” They do, because Kinsey collected everything remotely relevant to human sexuality, from personal diaries to pre-Columbian sculpture. For decades many other collectors of material considered obscene, illegal or degenerate have sent their treasures here, knowing they would not be burned or thrown out with the trash. The ice sheet of the 1950s pushed a lot of eccentrics Kinsey’s way.

The archive isn’t just a remarkable collection of books about sex, and it doesn’t just contain Kinsey’s voluminous papers. It’s jammed with scrapbooks and manuscripts of all kinds. Then there’s his data reservoir of tens of thousands of face-to-face interviews with people about their sexual histories. Kinsey’s interview technique, carefully designed to preserve total anonymity, tried to break down reserve and banish embarrassment. He fired the questions at his subjects, relentlessly corralling unanswered questions (“Let’s try this again: when was the first time you had sex with an animal?”) but his sympathetic acceptance produced unusual honesty on touchy subjects.

Over the years, Kinsey and his staff compiled an enormous and liberating database of information about what people actually did, rather than what they were supposed to do. It was Kinsey’s research that demonstrated that about 10 percent of the U.S. population was homosexual; bisexual himself, he revealed the frequency of bisexuality. He helped people accept masturbation as a normal adult practice, not a disease of childhood. He drove the final nail in the coffin of the myth of the vaginal orgasm. He found that a lot of people rarely have sex. Some of his interviewees were willing to keep sex diaries for him. And there are endless letters, because Kinsey encouraged people to stay in touch with him. Especially after the publication of The Human Male, people often wrote asking if their behavior, or their children’s behavior, was normal.

This can seem like a collecting mania, but in many ways it made sense. Kinsey started his career as a field biologist, a positivist par excellence, spending years chasing down every subspecies of gall wasp. When he changed his focus to sex he followed the same strategy, operating on the vacuum cleaner principle, scooping up information and artifacts almost indiscriminately, on the theory that no one could know what might prove useful in the future. Towards the end he seems to have been unable to stop collecting. He most likely worked himself to death. Still, vacuum cleaner mode is not a bad scientific method when the problem is range and variation. Five decades after his death provocative books on previously unthought-of topics are still coming out of the Kinsey.

Because the book sale takes up so much of the reading room, they’ve assigned me to work in the John Money seminar room, two floors down (elevator and stairs again), back through confusing corridors. Every day I must lock up everything except the tape recorder I use to take notes, collect a pile of old letters from Shawn, and zigzag through this labyrinth to the Money room, making the same journey in reverse at the mandatory lunch hour, back again after 1 p.m., and repeat the same route at closing time.

But it’s more than inconvenient, it’s disorienting because along those two back hallways are displayed samples of Alfred Kinsey’s remarkable collection of erotic art. Images of every sort of sexual activity, solitary, coupled or group, fantastic or realistic, have been pulled from the vaults and put up on the walls. I almost can’t make it to the Money room, the display is so distracting. There are cheap French postcards, portraits of strippers, and posters for 1950s B movies like I Want More! There are Picasso lithographs, and paintings by Matisse and Chagall, and silver gelatin photographs of the imaginable and the unimaginable. There’s a Michel Fingesten bookplate showing a woman watering a phallus tree; it sprouts little penises. I’m especially struck by an urgent ink brush close-up of a man, fully clothed, masturbating in a street. And an etching of a reclining nude, an odalisque. She spirals, pointing her face, an elbow and one breast upward, her back and heart-shaped rump to the artist. It’s obvious he loved her.

The Money room is distracting, too. Money was an early expert on transsexualism. Not only is it full of his books, but it contains his own erotic art collection, and here I am trying to concentrate on publication dates. I rush through that first afternoon feeling overwhelmed. Tonight as every night when I leave, exhausted from staring at dead people’s handwriting, a weird carillon begins to play. It must be an experimental music project, but it sounds like a child whacking an out-of-tune xylophone as it echoes through the campus woods. But Bloomington has reasonable restaurants and bars, and I can recuperate with a glass of wine over Thai or Yugoslav food, or just a steak. Then to bed, sleeping uneasily and longing to head out to Bean Blossom, an hour away, where Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys are playing this weekend.

Over three days I make the corridor trip at least 24 times, and its effect on me begins to shift. At first I’m stopped in my tracks by the frankness, the beauty of pictures of people making love or simply displaying their bodies in so many different ways. Later I’m distracted by them, wanting to read the carefully composed labels about the artists and subjects. The next thing I know I’m taking notes. And I’m not supposed to be taking notes on erotica this trip, but concentrating on some finer points of folklore publishing history.

At the outset, working at the Kinsey comes as a relief. Everyone is so matter of fact about sex. You could ask to see a manuscript on anything — bestiality among the industrial elite of Indianapolis, for example — and the staff wouldn’t bat an eye. They would simply drop it on your desk and say, “Anything else we can get you?” There’s a kind of comfort in this, given our Puritan inheritance. Catherine Johnson, curator of the art collection, is kind enough to give me a personal tour of the locked museum, which includes an amazing collection of colored, specialty condoms preserved in glass vials of nitrogen gas and an extensive selection of fetish footwear. Kinsey’s art collection, she tells me, holds 7,000 works and artifacts, 48,000 photographs and documents. And that’s not counting films and “special collections”. I retreat to my room for a nap. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s easy working immersed in erotica.

Then, a day later, I begin to get giddy, as if I’ve had too much champagne. I make a crude joke to Shawn about the Money room’s decor: “What is this, the Penetration from the Rear Room?” Shawn’s not getting my joke. “No,” he answers, puzzled. “I told you, it’s the Money room.” Does this mean that after a while it all becomes just wallpaper to the Kinsey staff? Not really, director Liana Zhou says. “It becomes normal to us because it’s part of life. We just think it’s really beautiful.” Lucky Liana. Her office is adorned with Japanese color wood block prints, pages from giant pillow books.

Finally, on day three, it all starts to grate. On my final exit, as I glance at the headless masturbator and my charming odalisque, a voice inside me snarls, “Oh, why don’t you just COVER UP!” Where did that voice come from?

The problem is displacement. Everything stashed at the Kinsey was once stashed somewhere else. In a shoe box in the back of a closet, in a vault, under the bed. Whether fine art or junk, it was originally somebody’s “special stuff,” used who knows how — as a turn on, entertainment or consolation. Now the catalogs and exhibits throw neutral museum light on what was once trash, or delectably furtive, but here promoted to Art. “All of the fingerprints have been cleaned off; there are no tattered corners, no signs of use and love. I guess the Kinsey’s walls say “It’s all really okay.” It’s okay to have this stuff, and it’s okay to do this stuff. Certainly that was what Alfred Kinsey’s published research said, and what he wanted to say, as he sought to breach every sexual boundary of his own. And yet, there are still all those barriers and locked doors and special permissions needed?

I scoop up my tapes and hike over to First and Jordan to take a look at the house Kinsey built. Just an ordinary brick ranch house but here, in a special room, Kinsey began to add film of people having sex to his databank: an assistant shot untold reels of film of people, sometimes Kinsey’s graduate students, sometimes Kinsey himself with a volunteer, getting it on. Sometimes he simply watched and took notes.

Few of Kinsey’s methods would pass muster with the prudish and litigation-phobic University Human Subjects Committees today, including his apparent stipulation that men who worked with him prove they were “unbiased” about homosexuality by having sex with him and each other. It’s unknown whether the few female members of his research team had to pass similar tests. If wives and girlfriends objected to the bisexual group marriage of the research team, as they occasionally did, their feelings were largely ignored.

A young man comes out of the house to ask if I need help. “Can I take a photo?” Sure. “Do a lot of people stop to ask if this is Dr. Kinsey’s house?” All the time, says the blasé college student.

Then I head home, this time straight on I-74, listening to Ralph Stanley again and contemplating traditional music’s view of sex. It’s graphic, but it’s not about how many rules can be broken. Dr. Stanley has been recently saved in the Primitive Baptist Church, and some fans say it’s opened up his vocal style. For Ralph Stanley there are only the 10 old rules and the old songs are terse stories about people who break most of them. When Lord Arnold’s wife seduces Mathie Grove right there in church one Sunday “the like had never been done”, that’s all. There are the brusque consequences. When Lady Arnold defies her husband,

He took her by the hair of her head
And led her through the hall
With his sword, cut off her head
And kicked it against the wall.

The old story songs have a matter-of-fact brutality, even though they’re worn smooth from years of singing.

At 75 Ralph Stanley is more than a generation younger than Alfred Kinsey. Stanley grew up in Virginia. Kinsey was originally from the East Coast, practically a New Yorker, but he did his real work from then-provincial Bloomington. As I cruise down towards the Wabash, I ponder the two men: Kinsey the modernist, building a sexual science, Stanley, the traditionalist, reinterpreting an old sound and present at the birth of a new one, bluegrass. Each did his own most creative work in the cold, cold years of the middle twentieth century. How was it that the heartland made a home for them both?

Back to the feature: Sex Ed.