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Kinsey: Public and Private
The official companion to the new fall 2004 release from Fox Searchlight, written and directed by Academy Award-winner Bill Condon ( Gods and Monsters , Chicago ) and starring Liam Neeson ( Schindler's List ), explores the life of the pioneer of human sexuality research, Alfred Kinsey. Spanning six decades from his childhood in the early 1900s to his death in 1956, the film turns the microscope on the man whose landmark studies on the sexual behaviors of the common man rocked a nation. The interviewer of tens of thousands, Kinsey subjected his own life and that of his researchers to the same type of analysis that produced his 1948 bestselling book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. But while the Kinsey team's focus was predominantly outward, perhaps what they learned about themselves was as great as that which they taught their country. In addition to Liam Neeson, the cast includes Laura Linney ( You Can Count on Me , Love Actually , Mystic River ) as Clara Kinsey, Chris O'Donnell ( Scent of a Woman , Batman & Robin ) as Wardell Pomeroy, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Oliver Platt, and Tim Curry. The illustrated book includes the complete screenplay, an exclusive introduction by writer/director Bill Condon, extracts from histories and biographies of the period, film stills and complete cast and crew credits. 150 color photos.
351 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 1998
About the author
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
29 books5 followersBritish author born in 1933, nephew of the English garden writer Robert Gathorne-Hardy.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 10, 2026
If you're looking for an objective, balanced, American view of Kisney then this isn't the biography for you. The left-wing British author is incredibly biased and opinionated, spewing his thoughts in almost every paragraph, from the significant to the mundane. His choice of couching speculation and interpretation of facts in vague language like "perhaps" or "probably" means you can't trust what he's presenting since he is adding conjecture where there is no information, trying to spin data to influence the conclusions of the readers.
As a basic outline of the sex researcher's life this is just barely okay. Though it's incredibly long at over 500 pages, the author skips through things quickly and fails to provide context or depth, which can make some of it confusing. He should have cut out all his tangential rambling opinions, especially slamming other Kinsey biographers, and instead devoted more space to pure facts.
Kinsey himself, of course, is an immoral hypocrite who was not as open with his private life as he expected others to be about theirs. While he collected thousands of sexual histories through interviews (for some reason believing everything people told him as truth when they should be assumed to be flawed and biased), he refused to bare decades of his own private sexual experiences.
Kinsey had huge impact on society in the name of "man is just another animal." Gathorne-Hardy repeatedly points out his subject's perceived flaws--but from a modern woke perspective that often concludes Kinsey was not being liberal enough!
With Dr. Kinsey "anything goes" when it comes to sexuality--he didn't believe in monogamy, thought having multiple sexual partners of different genders while being married was not just okay but to be encouraged. He also was a lawbreaker and encouraged that as well. "As far as Kinsey was concerned, there was nothing automatically wrong with child-adult sex." He actually supported pedophilia and "put in a good word for the molesters."
Add to that his requirement that some male employees have sex with him. You read that correctly-- in order to interview people about sexuality Kinsey required that his male workers take part in all sorts of sex they weren't used to, including him having sex with one guy who had never been with a man before, surrounded by a couple other male employees. No surprise that employee immediately quit.
So this "hero" of the sexual revolution freely did illegal things and supported others doing that as well. In one case he discovered a female prostitute he interviewed had killed her husband for sleeping with another woman. Did he report it to police? Of course not. "As far as he was concerned, the morality of the project far outweighed any other morality; he was quite prepared to break the law or flout convention (even scientific convention)."
From a scientific standpoint it's troublesome he did such a poor job at objective academic research. The entire process was biased & variables were not controlled. All the data could do was provide a snapshot of the people his group interviewed and not draw sweeping conclusions about humanity. For all the sermonizing from progressives about the positive things that have evolved from this questionable research results, ultimately it's all about hiding behind "nature" and "people are just animals" to justify having sex with children, multiple partners, and employees. Where is the modern outrage at this man?
The problem is that the author does most of the same things he criticizes Kinsey for. He condemns the professor's research for using the terms "predominantly" and "incidentally" for "pretending a precision they cannot sustain." Oh, you mean like this guy does in his book with his overused "probably" and "possibly" opinion statements? Two pages later this writer does the same thing by speculating that the sex researcher "was at last able to satisfy fully his longing for a homosexual physical outlet" at age 45! "Kinsey's upbringing--indeed the orientation of his whole society--would probably have always meant he would feel more at ease with men."
This is PURE OPINION (note the "probably") because, as the author admits, it's first "concrete evidence" of Kinsey playing with men was not until 1939. But to come to this conclusion you have to ignore dozens of private trips with male students and researchers, many spent in hotel rooms together, along with all sorts of hints at his sexuality in private correspondence.
We actually know little about any "longing" Kinsey had for men and know nothing about his sexual history to that point--to draw conclusions based on silence as this author does is ignorant.
One of the biggest problems is that this foreigner makes sweeping generalizations about American culture but has no idea what he's talking about. In simple things he projects his British norms on the U.S.A. but they don't fit. A statement like Kinsey "rose very fast" to full professor after a decade is just inaccurate--Kinsey was fairly normal in his academic promotion.
The author shockingly comments that "America is at once the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritan country in the world." Oh, come on--I can think of a couple countries that promote legalized public sexuality and others that are much more sexually repressive due to religion (particularly Muslim).
This writer also makes numerous anti-Christian statements and condemns religion. In one absurd footnote he cites as evidence his shock that when he was researching at Indiana University his discovery that "there is an entire (TV) channel devoted to preachers and spokespersons of the Christian Right...The Christian Right, just as it was in Kinsey's day, is against sex in all its manifestations."
Oh, dumb Jonathan Cathorne-Hardy, not all religious believers are right-wing zealots, nor would ANY Christian agree that they are "against sex in all its manifestations." That's a complete bigoted falsehood.
And during Kinsey's time not all of the objections to sex research came from conservative Christians. This wasn't a political issue as much as a moral one and, one could argue, health concern. As he says in the book, most university leaders in the 1930s set up rules that were anti-sexual intercourse between students, and certainly most college presidents were not part of the Christian Right. They were simply being moral and trying to do what was best for the community. Many legitimate medical professionals and academicians also questioned Kinsey's testing, definitions, and results--and many of those weren't conservative followers of Christ either.
The entire text is filled with this kind of lop-sided rage against anyone who believes in morality, monogamy, honesty, spirituality, true science, and doing what's "right." The author uses Kinsey to promote an "anything goes" type of sexuality and research which can be harmful to professional education, science, and society.
He states simplistic nonsense like, "Kinsey's sexual suffering made him able to identify with all suffering." What suffering? You mean his not constantly having random sex or waiting until he was married to no longer be a virgin?
At one point Gathorne-Hardy even writes, "It is important to remember that all his life Kinsey was extremely good looking." HUH? First of all, the guy was not good looking--he was very average at best, and, second, what does his appearance have to do with anything other than we now know you found him attractive?
I do agree with one paragraph--and that's when this author puts down rival James Jones (who came out with a Kinsey biography while this was being written) stating that Kinsey was homosexual. "His declaration that Kinsey was always a homosexual obliterates any idea of change, of development or regression, of variation in attitude and behavior, indeed of any complexity at all." Yes, most of modern society is like that, wanting to stereotype gays instead of seeing all humans as growing, evolving, adapting, and ultimately constantly making choices. Kinsey may have been bisexual, and his closest friends even admit that on the "Kinsey scale" he was maybe a 3 or 4 out of 6.
Gathorne-Hardy also makes a whole lot of assumptions about blank spots in his research--we know zero about Kinsey's physical interactions before his marriage, except for an aside to his playing naked with other children at age nine. The man could have had all sorts of private intimacy with girls or boys during his teen or college years--there are references to he and a male friend sharing a tent or cabin that could have been true examples of homosexual behavior. But the kind of speculation that occurs here, without facts or evidence while ignoring the gaps, means the entire biography is unreliable and can't be trusted. It ends up being a leftist propaganda piece by a subjective author who goes into jealous rages against other writers who drew different conclusions.
Namely, it's the worst type of "scientific research," one that draws conclusions from limited data with the writer's biases assumed to be accurate. Gathorne-Hardy writes that biographical rival Jones made "an odd statement, though a revealing one. Possibly there is a trace of truth in it." Just like this untrustworthy work.
As a basic outline of the sex researcher's life this is just barely okay. Though it's incredibly long at over 500 pages, the author skips through things quickly and fails to provide context or depth, which can make some of it confusing. He should have cut out all his tangential rambling opinions, especially slamming other Kinsey biographers, and instead devoted more space to pure facts.
Kinsey himself, of course, is an immoral hypocrite who was not as open with his private life as he expected others to be about theirs. While he collected thousands of sexual histories through interviews (for some reason believing everything people told him as truth when they should be assumed to be flawed and biased), he refused to bare decades of his own private sexual experiences.
Kinsey had huge impact on society in the name of "man is just another animal." Gathorne-Hardy repeatedly points out his subject's perceived flaws--but from a modern woke perspective that often concludes Kinsey was not being liberal enough!
With Dr. Kinsey "anything goes" when it comes to sexuality--he didn't believe in monogamy, thought having multiple sexual partners of different genders while being married was not just okay but to be encouraged. He also was a lawbreaker and encouraged that as well. "As far as Kinsey was concerned, there was nothing automatically wrong with child-adult sex." He actually supported pedophilia and "put in a good word for the molesters."
Add to that his requirement that some male employees have sex with him. You read that correctly-- in order to interview people about sexuality Kinsey required that his male workers take part in all sorts of sex they weren't used to, including him having sex with one guy who had never been with a man before, surrounded by a couple other male employees. No surprise that employee immediately quit.
So this "hero" of the sexual revolution freely did illegal things and supported others doing that as well. In one case he discovered a female prostitute he interviewed had killed her husband for sleeping with another woman. Did he report it to police? Of course not. "As far as he was concerned, the morality of the project far outweighed any other morality; he was quite prepared to break the law or flout convention (even scientific convention)."
From a scientific standpoint it's troublesome he did such a poor job at objective academic research. The entire process was biased & variables were not controlled. All the data could do was provide a snapshot of the people his group interviewed and not draw sweeping conclusions about humanity. For all the sermonizing from progressives about the positive things that have evolved from this questionable research results, ultimately it's all about hiding behind "nature" and "people are just animals" to justify having sex with children, multiple partners, and employees. Where is the modern outrage at this man?
The problem is that the author does most of the same things he criticizes Kinsey for. He condemns the professor's research for using the terms "predominantly" and "incidentally" for "pretending a precision they cannot sustain." Oh, you mean like this guy does in his book with his overused "probably" and "possibly" opinion statements? Two pages later this writer does the same thing by speculating that the sex researcher "was at last able to satisfy fully his longing for a homosexual physical outlet" at age 45! "Kinsey's upbringing--indeed the orientation of his whole society--would probably have always meant he would feel more at ease with men."
This is PURE OPINION (note the "probably") because, as the author admits, it's first "concrete evidence" of Kinsey playing with men was not until 1939. But to come to this conclusion you have to ignore dozens of private trips with male students and researchers, many spent in hotel rooms together, along with all sorts of hints at his sexuality in private correspondence.
We actually know little about any "longing" Kinsey had for men and know nothing about his sexual history to that point--to draw conclusions based on silence as this author does is ignorant.
One of the biggest problems is that this foreigner makes sweeping generalizations about American culture but has no idea what he's talking about. In simple things he projects his British norms on the U.S.A. but they don't fit. A statement like Kinsey "rose very fast" to full professor after a decade is just inaccurate--Kinsey was fairly normal in his academic promotion.
The author shockingly comments that "America is at once the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritan country in the world." Oh, come on--I can think of a couple countries that promote legalized public sexuality and others that are much more sexually repressive due to religion (particularly Muslim).
This writer also makes numerous anti-Christian statements and condemns religion. In one absurd footnote he cites as evidence his shock that when he was researching at Indiana University his discovery that "there is an entire (TV) channel devoted to preachers and spokespersons of the Christian Right...The Christian Right, just as it was in Kinsey's day, is against sex in all its manifestations."
Oh, dumb Jonathan Cathorne-Hardy, not all religious believers are right-wing zealots, nor would ANY Christian agree that they are "against sex in all its manifestations." That's a complete bigoted falsehood.
And during Kinsey's time not all of the objections to sex research came from conservative Christians. This wasn't a political issue as much as a moral one and, one could argue, health concern. As he says in the book, most university leaders in the 1930s set up rules that were anti-sexual intercourse between students, and certainly most college presidents were not part of the Christian Right. They were simply being moral and trying to do what was best for the community. Many legitimate medical professionals and academicians also questioned Kinsey's testing, definitions, and results--and many of those weren't conservative followers of Christ either.
The entire text is filled with this kind of lop-sided rage against anyone who believes in morality, monogamy, honesty, spirituality, true science, and doing what's "right." The author uses Kinsey to promote an "anything goes" type of sexuality and research which can be harmful to professional education, science, and society.
He states simplistic nonsense like, "Kinsey's sexual suffering made him able to identify with all suffering." What suffering? You mean his not constantly having random sex or waiting until he was married to no longer be a virgin?
At one point Gathorne-Hardy even writes, "It is important to remember that all his life Kinsey was extremely good looking." HUH? First of all, the guy was not good looking--he was very average at best, and, second, what does his appearance have to do with anything other than we now know you found him attractive?
I do agree with one paragraph--and that's when this author puts down rival James Jones (who came out with a Kinsey biography while this was being written) stating that Kinsey was homosexual. "His declaration that Kinsey was always a homosexual obliterates any idea of change, of development or regression, of variation in attitude and behavior, indeed of any complexity at all." Yes, most of modern society is like that, wanting to stereotype gays instead of seeing all humans as growing, evolving, adapting, and ultimately constantly making choices. Kinsey may have been bisexual, and his closest friends even admit that on the "Kinsey scale" he was maybe a 3 or 4 out of 6.
Gathorne-Hardy also makes a whole lot of assumptions about blank spots in his research--we know zero about Kinsey's physical interactions before his marriage, except for an aside to his playing naked with other children at age nine. The man could have had all sorts of private intimacy with girls or boys during his teen or college years--there are references to he and a male friend sharing a tent or cabin that could have been true examples of homosexual behavior. But the kind of speculation that occurs here, without facts or evidence while ignoring the gaps, means the entire biography is unreliable and can't be trusted. It ends up being a leftist propaganda piece by a subjective author who goes into jealous rages against other writers who drew different conclusions.
Namely, it's the worst type of "scientific research," one that draws conclusions from limited data with the writer's biases assumed to be accurate. Gathorne-Hardy writes that biographical rival Jones made "an odd statement, though a revealing one. Possibly there is a trace of truth in it." Just like this untrustworthy work.
July 2, 2013
Excellent book - I loved learning that the film KINSEY - is based on the biography of Alfred Kinsey by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. Kinsey was a complex character & a brilliant scientist - and I am proud that he began his renowned sex research right here in my home town, Bloomington, Indiana.
(I'm also a bit proud of the fact that his grand-daughter - Wendy Kinsey Corning is my wonderful and very caring gynecologist!)
From Publishers Weekly
Beyond sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's motives—to enlighten people about sex and thereby sweep away crippling fear and ignorance about it—lay a troubled individual whose research helped him conquer his own psychological demons. In this companion book to the film on Kinsey's life currently in theaters, Kinsey biographer Gathorne-Hardy, Newsweek editor Wolfe and director/screenwriter Condon cover these facts and others with fascinating detail. Both Wolfe's biographical essay and Condon's script dramatize Kinsey's struggle with a puritanical father and his romance with graduate student Clara McMillen, who became his lifelong partner and support. Their relationship survived a difficult early sexual adjustment, as well as Kinsey's homosexual liaisons, while Kinsey's 1948 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made waves across the country. The book's second half is devoted to the shooting script, which offers a dramatic contrast to the precise, academic nature of Gathorne Hardy's introduction and Wolfe's essay. In a q&a, Condon talks of his affinity for portraying misfits and outsiders and his decision to adopt a classical Merchant/Ivory filmmaking approach. No biographical work—print or film—can capture all aspects of such a contradictory person, but this book certainly ranks as one of the most illuminating studies ever published about its complex, groundbreaking subject. 32 pages of color photos.
(I'm also a bit proud of the fact that his grand-daughter - Wendy Kinsey Corning is my wonderful and very caring gynecologist!)
From Publishers Weekly
Beyond sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's motives—to enlighten people about sex and thereby sweep away crippling fear and ignorance about it—lay a troubled individual whose research helped him conquer his own psychological demons. In this companion book to the film on Kinsey's life currently in theaters, Kinsey biographer Gathorne-Hardy, Newsweek editor Wolfe and director/screenwriter Condon cover these facts and others with fascinating detail. Both Wolfe's biographical essay and Condon's script dramatize Kinsey's struggle with a puritanical father and his romance with graduate student Clara McMillen, who became his lifelong partner and support. Their relationship survived a difficult early sexual adjustment, as well as Kinsey's homosexual liaisons, while Kinsey's 1948 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made waves across the country. The book's second half is devoted to the shooting script, which offers a dramatic contrast to the precise, academic nature of Gathorne Hardy's introduction and Wolfe's essay. In a q&a, Condon talks of his affinity for portraying misfits and outsiders and his decision to adopt a classical Merchant/Ivory filmmaking approach. No biographical work—print or film—can capture all aspects of such a contradictory person, but this book certainly ranks as one of the most illuminating studies ever published about its complex, groundbreaking subject. 32 pages of color photos.
March 14, 2019
Held my interest. Kinsey was a sick, twisted man. Pedophilia was ok. Coercing people into sexual acts ok, especially if it's your wife or one of your employees or their wives.
March 31, 2008
A really long book - but fascinating from an anthropological standpoint. I saw the movie and was dying to know how much of it was true and what was creative license. Sounds like it was an interesting family to be a part of.
December 12, 2017
This was a biography of Alfred Kinsey, the sex-scientist of the 40's and 50's. We had seen a movie of his life recently. My husband,Mike, thought he was a pervert. I was more sympathetic. His own homosexuality and view of sexuality probably skewed the results of his work.
July 11, 2007
Right up there with Oscar Wilde’s bio, and also serves as a fascinating portrait of postwar America.
November 14, 2008
Very interesting biography of a man unafraid to be different who became obsessed with his life work. Also a very good summary of his work and the reason it was so significant for the time.
October 5, 2009
interesting subject matter makes up for poorly written text
August 4, 2016
Really interesting read. The author occasionally complains about how wrong other authors have gotten Kinsey, and falls on the sympathetic side of balanced.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews