Kinsey
Not-for-the-faint-of-heart kinda reading. This New York Times article reports on an upcoming biopic of scientist Alfred Kinsey, whose work, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, is widely credited as giving the gay movement momentum and credibility. It gives information about his life, as well as the movie that will open in the States in November, starring Liam Neeson.
As one would expect, the article does its best to portray Kinsey in a positive light. In the first paragraph, he writes that “His studies helped bring sex—all kinds of sex ... out of the closet and into the bright light of day.”
The problem is, that since then, Kinsey himself has been widely outed as a sexual deviant, whose scientific methods were often suspect and certainly would have biased the results that he collected.
The article does its best to make Kinsey a hero of liberation, but keeps unavoidably running into the facts of Kinsey's life. Funnily enough, a similar thing happens to a biographer, James H. Jones, and Kinsey film director, Bill Condon:
(Jones) speculated that Kinsey's personal preferences might have affected his findings, especially about the pervasiveness of homosexual activity. But today he says that though Kinsey's reformist impulse probably did have an effect, any distortion was “unconscious and heartfelt.”
...At a recent screening in New York, Mr. Condon admitted that his first draft left him terrified. “At the center was someone who was socially maladroit, a bully, a scientist who spent most of his time looking at bugs,” he said. Then there's the hero's bisexuality, self-circumcision and encouragement of wife-swapping. “I think if you're unsympathetic to Kinsey,” he later added, “there's plenty, lots in the movie that would support that point of view.”
And, finally:
“It's like having a jigsaw puzzle on the table,” says Mr. Jones. “You have all these pieces that speak to his warmth, and then you've got all these other pieces of people telling you how badly they were hurt by him.” He adds, “What do you do with them? Do you brush them aside, or do you try to put them in the portrait?”
Exactly.
(For further reading, Pure Sex covers Kinsey in the context of covering the history of the sexual revolution.)