For the record: Alfred Kinsey, a son of America's heartland, undertook in the late '30s the first modern, scientific study of sexual behavior, free of the religious cant and societal strictures on the subject that had victimized humans for centuries. He believed in a sexual world without guilt. There was no such thing as ''normal" behavior in this arena. His investigation of our sexual habits and appetites lay the groundwork for the sexual revolutions, gay and straight, of the '60s and the women's movement.
A zoologist who lost his way, Kinsey began teaching a course purportedly on marriage at Indiana University in 1938. It was, more to the point, about sex. Young men and women who had never heard of a clitoris before were stunned and transfixed. He then began interviewing his students about their sexual histories. Eventually, he and three assistants roamed the country interviewing people from all walks of life. It was during this research, while married, that he had his first homosexual experience.
''Kinsey," written and coproduced by Barak Goodman, benefits from extraordinary access to letters and files from the Kinsey Institute and boasts a strong roster of talking heads, including biographers James Jones and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, and former assistant Paul Gebhard. Visually, though, it is thin gruel, doing the best it can with old stills, film footage, and impressionistic re-creations of events that don't quite work.
In 1948, Kinsey's first bomb, ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" sold 200,000 copies and received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, of all things. In it, based on more than 10,000 interviews nationally, Kinsey broke it to the public that men peak sexually at 19, that 68 percent of them had had sex with a prostitute, and 37 percent had at least one homosexual encounter.
