WHEN ALFRED KINSEY’S Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published sixty years ago, in 1948, I was a very gay, extremely troubled, and nearly suicidal sixteen-year-old high school junior desperately seeking any available evidence that I was not the only queer in the visible universe. I was also terribly guilt-ridden and conflicted about having participated in a gay bashing at the tender age of ten and, six years later, still very troubled by how easily and eagerly I had joined in on that assault, and how vividly and indelibly the incident still remained in my memory.
My parents had sent me away to military school at the Carson Long Institute with the express purpose of “making a man out of me” and to disabuse me of the notion that, because I was a very spoiled only child and grandchild, the world revolved around me. A cadet named Nash (surnames only are traditionally used in military address) had been caught in flagrante delicto performing oral sex on another boy, and the snitch who had observed them in the act picked up a pillow from his dormitory bed and began to vigorously pummel the hapless fellator as he vociferously yelled out, “Blow Boy Nash! Blow Boy Nash!” Without any hesitation, all of the rest of us present in the dorm at that incendiary moment grabbed pillows from our own beds as we joined in a unison chorus and shouted even louder “Blow Boy Nash! Blow Boy Nash!” the volume of our invective crescendoing as we intensified the harshness of our downward blows with abandon. Of course, my adolescent mind never stopped for one minute to question why our attack was aimed only at cadet Nash and not at his partner-in-fellatio, who certainly had not by any stretch of the imagination been coerced into passive yet compromising oral-genital contact.
I cannot begin to describe the overwhelming sense of relief my conscience experienced as I began to devour the new sex study, which I hoped would assuage my profound sense of shame and remorse. The completely mind-boggling statistic was that 37 percent of all adult men had apparently tried it, which became the 37% solution for me, because I could now legitimately ask, How could I be alone if nearly four out on ten guys had tried it? Even more palliative to my anxious psyche was Kinsey’s objective assessment of that finding: “The homosexual has been a significant part of human sexual activity ever since the dawn of history, primarily because it is an expression of capacities that are basic in the human animal.”
And as if to slather an extra layer of icing on my now almost anxiety-free cake, the good doctor explained that the vast majority of these encounters were circumstantial rather than habitual. By way of example, he noted how readily many straight men who are incarcerated adjust to the lack of female partners by avidly engaging in same-sex relations, only to return to their heterosexual habits upon release from prison.
With the benefit of this newly acquired insight, I suddenly viewed Blow Boy Nash in a totally different light. In the homoerotic environment of a military school and with hormones raging out of control, had I been just a little older (I became fully pubescent just one year later at age eleven but was back home by then) and with the help of just a little testosterone, I might just as easily have become Blow Boy Ben. Most intriguing of all in my all-absorbing search was Kinsey’s argument that nature loves a continuum and it is only the human mind that imposes categories and pigeonholes people into discrete groups. Sexual orientation, he proposed, could be observed to occupy a spectrum with a scale from zero to six, with zero being fully heterosexual and six being fully homosexual. This seven-point scale he offered as an alternative to the existing two-point, either-or dichotomy, though he emphasized that it was still a very imprecise and imperfect measure of the tremendously wide range of human sexual behavior and did not capture its fluidity over time.
The hardest thing my still immature brain had to wrestle with was the concept that it was a sliding scale, not a fixed one. I had immediately positioned myself as a six, never anticipating in my wildest dreams that just two years into the future, at age eighteen, I would fairly easily move away from that designation. A young woman who was determined to challenge my self-identity as a hundred percent homosexual managed to seduce me into a strictly one-time, experimental sexual tryst. Much to my dismay, it worked to the point of orgasm (or to use Kinsey’s preferred term, “release”), and I reluctantly acknowledged my transition to a Kinsey 5 (predominantly homo and only incidentally heterosexual). Even though my sister insistently argues that a one-and-only opposite sex encounter doesn’t qualify, I have unabashedly worn that badge of being certifiably bisexual ever since.
Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, I survived that period of adolescent angst and turmoil relatively unscathed and emerged fully from the stifling confines of that now-faraway closet. Only much later in life did I fully realize how far ahead of his time the indefatigable Kinsey was when he posed the question, Why are some gay people so completely comfortable with and adjusted to their orientation while others are desperately unhappy with it, seeking to keep it a secret or to pretend it’s not a fact of life, or even to change this orientation by any means possible. Even today, when gay people are far more able to find acceptance and belonging than in Kinsey’s era, there are thriving ex-gay ministries that cater to this desire for re-orientation and people willing to subject themselves to these ministries false promises and cruel treatments.
Like most readers who made Kinsey’s book an overnight best-seller, I anticipated a narrative with at least some salacious details, but encountered instead a myriad of tables, charts, and graphs that only a CPA might find exciting. But buried among all of that tabulated data were some major nuggets about human sexuality. Forty years after the publication of the first volume of his magnum opus, Kinsey is credited with having established the intellectual groundwork for what would become the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1960’s and 70’s: the idea that homosexuality is a normal and recurring feature of the human condition.
