Experts found no evidence that the homosexual group was any more disturbed than the heterosexual group.īased on work such as Kinsey's and Hooker's, the American Psychiatric Association voted in 1973 to drop homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Kinsey's work inspired others to investigate the matter of homosexuality, including psychologist Evelyn Hooker, who in the 1950s administered the famous Rorschach inkblot test to groups of gay and heterosexual men. In the 1940s and 1950s, homosexuality was deemed highly deviant. But the finding was influential far earlier than that. The 10 percent figure became a political slogan during the gay liberation movement of the 1980s. "If it was more common than people thought it to be, then perhaps it was what we would call a normal variation of sexuality rather than a form of mental illness." "That changed the thinking about homosexuality," says Dr. Kinsey also reported that 10 percent of the men he interviewed said they engaged in predominantly homosexual activity between ages 16 and 55. He devised the famous Kinsey scale - a numerical gradation of levels of homosexual orientation, with 0 representing those who were exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual. But his most-famous findings revolve around the issue of homosexuality. Sex researchers say Kinsey's biggest contribution was the sheer cataloging of variation.
"Kinsey also knew that people might lie he had all sorts of questions to find out if they were telling the truth," says Bullough. Kinsey and his carefully trained interview team traveled throughout the country, interviewing people one-on-one whenever they could: every member of a fraternity or church congregation, and people at gay bars. In 1943, Kinsey and his team secured private funding to amass information on sexual habits.
Soon after, he devised his questionnaire and embarked on a brand-new taxonomy - of human sex.
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-gruponacion.s3.amazonaws.com/public/CTGUZR3XKFH7VH74QEKBNONO64.jpg "alfred kinsey controversy")
Kinsey obtained an assistant professorship in zoology at Indiana University in 1920, and gained prominence in his field for the study of the thousands of gall wasps he collected - enthralled, in his studies, by the rich variation he uncovered.īut in 1938, he took a new tack and began teaching a university course on marriage in which he discussed sexual matters quite frankly. his father was an engineer and a Sunday school preacher who spoke out against masturbation. that there was a marvelous and very substantial diversity of sexual behavior in all segments of the population," says Dean Hamer, author and molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, who has studied sexuality and genetics.īeing lauded as the father of sex research may seem an odd fate for a man with Kinsey's start in life. 1 contribution was simply recognizing that sexual behavior is diverse and that people do very different things. Perhaps above all, researchers say, Kinsey's work and the later studies showed social scientists, public health workers, therapists and geneticists just how much there was and still remains for them to study. "Everybody's sin is nobody's sin," Kinsey once said. Kinsey's work did more than reassure people that they were not alone: It highlighted a disconnect between certain laws of the land and actual sexual practice. Over the course of years, 18,000 men and women across the country were asked to bare their souls on such matters as the frequencies of their climaxes, their experiences with premarital sex and even whether they had ever had sexual encounters with animals.
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