



   Granted.  Pomeroy, Bell, Weinberg, 1967.  "National Institute of
Mental Health Paper 12353, ''Patterns of Adjusment in Deviant
Populations.''"  Cited as part of the National Institute of Mental
Health Task Force on Homosexuality.

   Pomery concluded, "The Kinsey statistic of 37% is probably higher
than is realistic.  According to these estimates, 33% is a more
realistic figure."

   (I went out and bought LOTS of Bell & Weinberg this weekend... can
you tell?)

   Also, The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior (Samuel S. Janus, Ph.D.
and Cynthia L. Janus, M.D., John Wiley & Sons (pub), 1992) has the
following:

Table 3.14
Have you ever had a homosexual experience?
          Men.    Women.
N=        1,335   1,384
Yes       22%      17%
No        78%      83%

Table 3.15
How often have you had homosexual contact?
                      Men   Women
N=                    294     235
a. Once                5%      6%
b. Occasionally       56%     67%
c. Frequently         13%      6%
d. Ongoing            26%     21%

Active (c. + d.)      39%     37%

39% of 22% is 9%.  This number is consistent with Kinsey, Pomery,
Gebard (1953), Bell & Weinberg (1967, 1974), and Rice (1987) in the
finding that 9% of the male population is actively homosexual, with
an further breakdown (Bell & Wienberg, 1978) of 4% exclusively so and
5% self-identifying themselves as "bisexuals."

   (pp 69, 70)

   As for debunking Kinsey, the following article is an important
lesson for everyone to read:

Was Kinsey a Fake and a Pervert?
by Philip Nobile

     Far out on the grassy knoll of sexology, there is a cult of
prochastity researchers who claim that the late Alfred Kinsey was a
secret sex criminal, a Hoosier Dr. Mengele, who bent his numbers
toward the bisexual and the bizarre in a grand conspiracy to queer the
nation and usher in an era of free sex with kids.  

     But what really riles these critics is Kinsey's towerin~ cultural
influence.  His bestselling surveys-- Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)-- tore the
sheets off the country's erogenous zones and undermined midcentury
morals.  His charts and graphs, based on detailed histories of 12,000
men and women, demonstrated that practices generally considered rare
and/or 'abnormal'-- masturbation, extramarital relations,
homosexuality, and even barnyard bestiality, were as American as
strawberry shortcake.  

     Yet for a hard core of these heterosexual supremacists, aided and
abetted by Pat Buchanan and the religious right, the zoology professor
from Indiana University remains the evil genius behind the sex
revolution and a target for character assassination.  

     Judith Reisman, the prosecution's expert witness at the
Mapplethorpe trial in Cincinnati, is the leader of the anti- Kinsey
revisionists as well as his Inspector Javert.  In 1983, during a radio
interview with Pat Buchanan in Washington, Reisman accused Kinsey of
having been inolved in "the vicious genital torture of hundreds of
children."  She speculated that he kidnapped and drugged ghetto boys in
order to carry out clandestine orgasm tests.  

     Now, seven years later, Reisman has revived her charges in a
different book, titled Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, just released by the
small and religiously oriented Huntington House in Lafayette,
Louisiana.  Her coauthor is Ed Eichel, a Manhattan psychotherapist who
has invented a new style of intromission ("the coital alignment
technique") that supposedly triggers simultaneous orgasm with
considerable regularity and thereby increases compatibilty between the
sexes.  In the book Eichel contends that "Kinsey deliberately cooked
the gay stats because, being an oddball himself, he wanted to advance
the 'denormalization' of heterosexuality."  

     If the authors are right, then the world- famous Kinsey Reports
are, as the introduction boldly asserts, "the most egregious example
of scientific deception in this century."  And if they are wrong,
Kinsey, Sex and Fraud is a shameful smear.

     Despite the less- than- stellar credentials of Kinsey's
detractors, legends are not what they used to be.  Martin Luther King
may have committed plagiarism.  Bruno Bettelheim slapped young mental
patients around.  Father Bruce Ritter, the founder of Covenant House,
preyed on runaway boys.  Closer to Kinsey, Masters and Johnson have
been disgraced for faking it in one way or another.  

     So it should not surprise anybody that Kinsey, who filmed strange
people having sex in his attic, may have had skeletons in the closet.
The problem is that Reisman does not seem to have the intellectual
prowess to pull off the job.  

     As a thinker, the woman is no Madame Curie.  The 55-year-old
former songwriter for Captain Kangaroo has little professional
standing, no current university position, and no peer-review
publications, though her creative 1983 resume was padded with phantom
accomplishments.  For instance, it listed a book as her own-- Take Back
the Night: Women on Pornography-- that was actually written and edited
by others.  Then there is her Ph.D. in Speech Communication from
Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University.  Although Reisman has no
bachelor's degree, Case granted her a master's in 1976 and a doctorate
in 1979.  Her dissertation was on the commentaries of a local
octagenarian TV commentator.  But on the resume, Reisman gave this
piece of scholarship a fancy Hautes Etudes moniker-- to wit: "The
Application of Aristotelian and Systems Analytic Theory to Mass Media
Effects."

     When Reisman burst into prominence on Buchanan's program, it was
love at first sight for Al Regnery, the outwardly anti- 
porn head of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Ed Meese's
Justice Department.  Regnery was a young law-and-order conservative and
amateur social philosopher who wanted to help change the sexual
climate of the United States.  

     After Reisman's sensational radio session, the sexual equivalent
of Joe McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Regnery summoned 
her to meetings to discuss mutual interests.  First he tried to shovel
her $800,000 for a quasi-Frankenstein study that was going to measure
the brain chemicals of men and boys who looked at arousing
photographs.  Guffaws on Capitol Hill killed the original proposal, but
$734,000 in govemment money went to Reisman anyway for plan B- a probe
of child images in the cartoons Playboy, Penthouse, and Hust
ler.  (Incredibly, this grant surpassed the entire budget of the
attorney general's pornography commission.) 

     When the overpriced and oversold project was completed in 1986,
it was immediately shelved by an embarrassed Justice Department.  That
spring, Regnery resigned from his post only days before the New
Republic carried this admission that he had kept porno magazines
around the house.  

     Notwithstanding the six-figure humiliation, Reisman went on to
scratch out a niche on the ioony right.  As the darling of the sex
cranks, she deplores subversive phenomena like shaved genitalia in
men's magazines and blames AIDS on gays.  Kinsey, Sex and Fraud is
Reisman's latest grasp for respectability.  Pat Buchanan, of course, is
putting his Krugerrands on Reisman's ultimate vindication.  "This book
is social dynamite," he says in a blurb an the front cover.  He
especially liked the antigay parts.  Smacking his lips in his
syndicated column, he declared, "It may just blow the sewer cap off
Kinsey's monumental reputation, reestablish homosexuality as a 1-in-50
aberration, expose the Gay Rights movement as a paper tiger, and even
put at risk the enormous sex industry built upon Dr. Kinsey's
'research.'"

     The blockbuster charge at the heart of the cluttered and
repetilive j'Accuse is that Kinsey was a sex-mad pedophile who
molested little boys in Nazi-type experiments and recorded their
orgasms in his male volume/ A similar charge was first recited at the
Fifth World Conference on Sexology in Jerusalem in 1981 to no effect
before being recycled by Reisman for Buchanan in Washington in 1983.

     Here is how Reisman and Eichel repackaged the Mengele business in
Kinsey, Sex and Fraud:

     Mengele-like 'scientific' experiments on infants and children
were the basis for Kinsey's conclusions...  on childhood sexuality.

     Somewhere and sometime in the course of the project, Kinsey
appears to have directed experimental sex research on several hundred
children aged from two months to almost 15 years.

     This, of course, would implicate Kinsey and his team in
promoting, and perhaps participating in, the criminal activity.

     In the opinion of this book's authors, that is exactly how part
of Kinsey's child sexuality research took place.


     Donning his psychohistorian's cap and citing an FBI manual on
child molesters as a guide, Eichel casually diagnoses Kinsey as a
homosexual pedophile with the perfect motive for doing exactly as
 

     [Kinsey] placed himself in professional and nonprofessional
positions where he had access to young boys, such as Y.M.C.A.  camp
counselor, boys' club leader, and Boy Scout leader-- activities he
kept up 'during his college and graduate yeaers, and even after his
marriage."
 

     As crude as his analysis seems, Eichel was more than happy to
elaborate even further in a recent phone interview.  "If you've ever
been around boy- lovers, pedophiles, they are absolutely compulsive,"
he averred.  "Everything in his life is directed at getting children.  I
didn't mention this in our book but the caption under Kinsey's high
school picture was a quote from Hamlet: 'Man delights me not, no,
[sic] nor woman neither.' What do you think they were picking up on?" 

     Before weighing what Reisman and Eichel pass off as proof of
Kinsey's sex crimes, something must be said about Kinsey's scientific
modus operandi.  He was a fiendish collector.  As a young zoologist with
a D.Sc.  from Harvard, he collected 4 million gall wasps and 1.5
million related insects.  When he switched to sex exploration after
agreeing to teach a marriage Course at Indiana University in 1938, he
was no less curious or acquisitive.  Nothing that mammals did in the
realm of reproduction was foreign to him.  He compiled masses of erotic
materials including toilet wall inscriptions from male and female
johns that highlighted differences in sexual psychology and flms of
mating in 14 species of animals that showed an amazing similarity in
oral eroticism.  

     Naturally, the sexual response of children, the genesis of eros,
fascinated him.  It was impossible to understand the sexual behaviors
of adults without examining their origins.  And so with the fervor of
his bughunting days, Kinsey collected information about kids, though
even his worst enemies-- until Reisman and Eichel-- refrained from
linking him personally to his data on preadolescent sex.  

     Kinsey said plainly in the male volume that he got information on
the sex life of young boys from people who had sex with them: "Some of
these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or
other records which have been put at our disposal."  Although he
gathered much boyhood data from the memories of his subjects and the
observations of parents and nursery school teachers, he treated the
documentary materia! of the pedophiles as pure gold.  There was nothing
like it in the literature.  

     Kinsey's main source, a 63-year-old govemment worker, was also
the most unforgettable character he had ever met.  This man, whose
history took 17 hours to log, had sex with over 600 boys and 200 girls
as well as 17 of 33 family members including his father and
grandmother.  A sexual hobbyist and passionate record-keeper, he gave
Kinsey detailed accounts of orgasms that he observed in preadolescent
boys.  Relying on the man's meticulous research, which involved
following some boys for as long as 16 years, Kinsey was able to
identify for the first time six distinct types of male orgasm-- some
of which involved violent contortions at the peak of release-- as well
as the speed and the capacity of climax.  

     What Freud had only imagined about childhood sexuality, Kinsey
had reported as fact.  Children were indeed erotic beings from the
cradle.  "These data on the sexual activities of younger male provide
an important substantiation of the Freudian view of sexuality as a
component that is present in the human animal from earliest infancy,"
he concluded without raising eyebrows in 1948.  

     Then along came Judith Reisman.  Ignorng the legitimacy of
Kinsey's inquiry, she beheld the ghost of Mengele in Bloomington.  She
was appalled by the thought of infant ecstasy and read torture in the
portrayals of prepubertal orgasm rendered by the government worker.
And she dared to say that Kinsey was a sex criminal.  

     Well, was he or wasn't he? Let's go to the text.  There is no
evidence in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud-- no witnesses, no paper, noteven a
trace of hearsay-- that implicates Kinsey in either planning or
partaking in child sex experiments.  After 12 years on the trail,
Reisman has uncovered just two sources to back up her original charge-
- amazingly enough, Kinsey himself and Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey's
coauthor on both reports, to whom Reisman has never spoken.  It turns
out that her whole case rests on a few passages in the male volume
iand in Pomeroy's 1972 biography titled Dr. Kinsey and the Institute
for Sex Research.

     After frisking every "the" and "and" in both books, Reisman came
up with what she believes are "smoking" sentences.  To establish
Kinsey's alleged role in the planning, she says that "there is a hint"
in the fifth chapter of the male volume that Kinsey "directed" the
orgasm studies on kids.  She cites his tell-tale quote from a critic of
armchair psychoanalysis demanding that "writers...test their
theories...by empirical study and statistical procedures."  Then she
combines this quote with Kinsey's statement that some of the
observations of his pedophile sources "were continued over periods of
months or years until the individuals were old enough to make it
certain that true orgasm was involved."  

     Putting two and two together-- Kinsey's empiricism and lengthy
experimentation-- she arrives at her hint.  But realizing this dog
would not hunt, she devoted but a single paragraph to Kinsey's
supposed planning before shifting to the issue of his personal
involvement.  As for the alleged participation, after poring over
Pomeroy's biography, Reisman found several hidden clues suggesting
Kinsey's likely hands-on approach to kiddie sex.  Here the chain of
reasoning is more complex.  She points out that Kinsey was interested
in clitoral measurements, collecting sperm and filming sex in his
attic.  Since Kinsey did indeed mislead Indiana University about the
purpose of his cinematography-- he said that he was filming "animal
sex"-- Reisman asserts that a "similar misrepresentation may yet apply
to Kinsey's child sex experiments."  Catch the "may"!

     Reisman was also struck by Kinsey's doubting Thomas attitude
toward the never before recorded climax of female rabbits: "Kinsey,
according to Pomeroy, was the type of person who needed to see things
for himself.  Pomeroy gave the example of orgasm in the female rabbit.
Because he had not personally witnessed this event, Kinsey had
difficulty in accepting its reality, even on the strength of testimony
from a distinguished scientist.  How then did Kinsey testify to the
actuality of orgasm in a 5-month-old infant from the mere 'history' of
a sex offender?" (But, of course, he did not: he depended on their
records.) 

     From this fantastic alchemy of conjecture mixed with clitorides,
sperm, attic cumshots, and climax-in-cottontail has Reisman defamed
the legendary Kinsey.

     Paul Gebhard succeeded Kinsey as the director of the Kinsey
Institute and now lives in retirement outside Bloomington.  Reached by
telephone, Gebhard defended the pedophile connection and denied
Reisman's nasty imputations.  "I don't understand the resistance of
people like Reisman to studying the sexuality of children," Gebhard
said more in exasperation than anger.  "That is where sex begins.  We
were happy to take data wherever we found it.  Even though pedophiles
commit criminal acts, they are usually not violent folks.  They
wouldn't be very successful if they were.  One of our best sources was
a headmaster of a boys' school who maintained a kind of alumni club
and sometimes went to the weddings of his former students.  As for
directing experiments, that's absurd.  We never told any of our
subjects what to do.  lt was against our principles.  Almost all of the
pedophile material was retrospective anyway.  Nor did we ever conduct
sex experiments with children ourselves.  That would have been highly
inappropriate."  

     I asked Gebhard if Kinsey had ever seen a child in a sexual
situation.  "I think a mother once brought in a little girl who humped
her teddy bear and Kinsey watched it."  

     As for Kinsey's sex life, it is still shrouded in
confidentiality.  He was married to the same woman for 35 years and
fathered four children.  Apparently, there are no huge sexual
revelations, although rumors of homosexuality have persisted without
confirmation through the years.  Gebhard took his boss's history back
in the '40s, but he refuses to discuss what he knows.  "We never
divulge anything about anybody's history, whether dead or alive," he
says.  

     Reisman said no to an interview for this article on the grounds
that I had once worked for Penthouse-- not to mention the fact that we
have been debating each other in various forums for the past five
years.  In keeping with our contentious history, she took a swipe at me
in her book for continuing "the Kinsey practice of euphemizing
incest."  My offense was using the biblical variant "lying with a near
relative" in a 1977 article on the subject of incest.  As a synonym for
intercourse, "lying with" appears eight times in Genesis.  

     Ed Eichel is a different story.  Though seemingly obsessed by
Kinsey like his coauthor, he was friendly in long conversations.  He
told me that he began to smell a big baised agenda in sexology when he
was a student in New York University's Human Sexuality program in the
early '80s.  "It was literally a gay studies program for heterosexuals,"
he says.

     Around 1985, Eichel came upon Reisman's critique of Kinsey and
the conspiracy theory started to sink in: the sex establishment was
ruled by a Kinseyan bisexual bund advocating the overthrow of the
heterosexual norm.  No wonder he was having such a rough time promoting
the joy of simultaneous orgasm-- anything that enhanced sexual
compatibility between men and women inevitably raised objections.

     Eventually, Eichel exchanged philosophical fluids with Reisman,
and from this union Kinsey, Sex and Fraud was born.  Eichel's main
contribution to the book is discovery and analysis of a Kinsey
conspiracy that supposedly seeks "the establishment of bisexuality as
the balanced sexual orientation for normal, uninhibited people" which,
by destroying the traditional family structure and normal sexual
behavior, "would open the way for the second and more difficult step--
the ultimate goal of cross-generational sex (sex with children)."  

     When I pressed him for specific references to back up his
outrageous contentions, he said weakly, "You don't think Kinsey is
going to come right out and say that everybody is basically bisexual
and should have sex with kids, but this is implicit in the Kinsey
reports."  

     Meanwhile, Eichel is demanding a congressional investigation of
Kinsey and his data.  Perfect.  That's just what the country needs-- a
House Un-American Sexual Activities Committee, looking under beds and
asking people if they are now or have everbeen a reader, a sympathizer
or-- God forbid-- a subject of Dr. Alfred Kinsey.


         Elf !!!
--
elf@halcyon.com  (Elf Sternberg)