This amused me.
The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the
people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy
for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work.
It was, at least, refreshing to me....
I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known,
by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same
facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey
elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own
experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has
merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data
in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected
with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans.
What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have
refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports,
all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state
legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens,
either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as
the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the
couches of psychiatrists--if not in prison. It is the most depraved
truth about us.
Kinsey--with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his
findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans--had
accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like
myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the
sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown,
where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal,
that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced,
the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become--that
use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves,
capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those
of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as
ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the
law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a
light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long
last more visible than the foul rags covering them.
I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always
bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual
experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without
precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men--older
men--stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves
for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had
prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often,
these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of
Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their
decades--without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature
enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to
learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of
an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed
zoologist.
It didn't matter to me where the facts came from--so long as people
began to perceive they were facts--facts that made a far truer
picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers,
legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.
We behave sexually like other mammals--apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of
suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct,
not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow
yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly
minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise
in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all
deny....
She was reading the Kinsey Report.
"What for?" I asked.
The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not.
She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met
mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut
the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you
speaking to me?"
She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.
"I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly--and my
curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want
to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."