The 2004 movie [*Kinsey*](http://imdb.com/title/tt0362269/) brought an understandable renewed interest in
the work of Alfred Kinsey. But anyone who lives in Bloomington for a
while knows the basics about him: That he usually sported a bowtie; that
he became famous as a sex researcher (in many ways the first sex
researcher); that he did his work on the Bloomington campus of Indiana
University; and that the institute for for sex research that he
founded and which now bears his name lives on to this day — a tribute
to his determination and that of then IU President Herman Wells. Oh, and that the Institute houses one of the largest
collections of “pornography” in the world (more on that below).

I was vaguely aware of the IU/sex research relationship when I moved
to Bloomington in 1992, but by the following year I was very well
aware of the basic details described above. However, here in 2006 I
had never been to the Institute, nor did I even know where it was
located, even though I am amicably acquainted with its Director and
her husband (it’s certainly an exaggeration to say that everyone in
Bloomington knows everyone else… but it’s not a ridiculous
exaggeration).

Well, leave it to the highly motivated and highly effective founder of
the new polyamory group in Bloomington to blaze me a path to the
Institute’s door after fourteen years. Much to the delight of me and
many of my fellow members, she just called them up and asked if we
could take a tour. Sure! And, so it was that some of the mystery of
The Kinsey Institute was unveiled.

According to [kinseyinstitute.org](http://kinseyinstitute.org),

Tours of The Kinsey Institute are open, by appointment only, to student groups, as well as individuals and groups whose research and/or professional interests are related to the Institute’s mission.

I didn’t get impression that we had to submit a lot of credentials to be approved for a tour. This gives a good impression of the Institute’s relationship with the public: it’s not that they are hiding, but they also aren’t hanging lighted signs outside their doors. They seem to me to have reached some equillibirum with the University where they do enough publicity to
raise money and expand their collection, but keep it quiet enough so
as not to invite protests from social conservatives.

So, yeah, I really didn’t know where the place was. My friends in the
group had to lead me there. At least one person went to the wrong
building. And, the only clue that I saw that we were really in the
correct building was a little black building guide with removable
white letters (picture the things that tell you which dentist’s office
is which). You had to take an elevator to get there. As we were
waiting for the doors to open, we discussed that there wasn’t
obviously a way to get there by staircase. Was this intentional?
Probably not, but it’s so easy to develop conspiracy theories
surrounding this place…

Hopefully I’m already giving a sense of how understated the place is,
but there’s plenty more to follow. Our group had about ten members,
only one of whom (I believe) had been to the Institute before. He
warned us that when the elevator doors opened upstairs, we would exit
to a room about the size of the elevator car itself. With some
concern that they wouldn’t be ready for us, this fellow rode up to
tell them that we were coming. He sent word back that we should go on
ahead, they were ready for us, but that we shouldn’t overload the
elevator, so maybe we should come in two groups. Upon entering the
elevator car, I saw that the posted capacity was 2500 lbs, and,
quickly estimating that the average weight of our 10 people was far
less than 250 lbs., I figured we had nothing to worry about. “No no,
they said it was an old elevator and it gets easily overloaded.” Hey,
whatever.

So we arrived in two groups on the third floor, and indeed, exited the
elevator to a tiny hallway/room that basically just had the elevator
and a bulletin board to greet those exiting it. We turned left to
enter the Institute, and were greeted by our guide, Catherine,
who immediately advised us that if we had turned right instead of left
then there was a coatrack there where we could hang our wet jackets.
“Actually, it’s kind of nice, sometimes in the summer people come
wearing just shorts and t-shirts, and, well, we keep the institute at
a constant temperature year round and, well, it *can* get a bit
chilly.”

[editors note: I don’t have total recall, the quotes I attribute to
Catherine in this post are recreations intended to give a sense of
what we learned from her and the spirit in which it was said. I hope
and intend to accomplish this accurately, but I may not always succeed.]

Catherine Johnson-Roehr is the currator of the Institute’s art collection, and she was very friendly, very informative, a very good tour guide all-around.
To me it was clear that her general attitude would
have been the same if she had been giving a tour of, say, an archive
of 12th century religious texts. That is, as long as she had an
interest in that subject. This was a person who, I’m sure, has a
healthy interest in sex, but her job is to manage an archive, and she
is clearly excited about her duties, irrespective of the subject
matter. And, that excitement seemed endearing here in exactly the
same way here that it would have if she were bubbling with
explanations about those hypothetical ancient texts.

The place seems small. “This building was originally built as a
women’s dorm.” It looks like it. I mean, it’s been remodeled, a bit,
but it still looks like the institutional building that it is: mostly
narrow hallways and small rooms. It’s not at all hard to imagine how
the reception area used to be a dorm room or small lounge or
something. The ceilings were all low and the rooms were all small.
[IU’s Lilly Library](http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/) of rare books is far more glamourous than this
place. This place seems like they are trying to do the best they can
on a shoestring budget.

Well, anyway, on with the tour. We actually spent over twenty minutes
in the front hallway, flanked by B&W photos of Kinsey and some of his
colleagues from back in the day. Our group was clearly in its
element, and Catherine loved it. Questions flowed without hint of
inhibition, and Catherine answered with an “Oh, it’s so great that you’re
interested in this! Oh it’s so great that you know something about
this!” joy that any nerd in any field can relate to.

Catherine was smart to talk about the recent movie right off the bat.
I was very glad to hear that she and the Institute both approved of
the film from a historical perspective. Ever since I saw *A Beautiful
Mind* and then learned how horribly far from the truth its story is,
I’ve been highly skeptical of non-fiction film. But, *Kinsey* seems
to be all right in this regard, according to people who should know.
“It is a dramatization, so not everything is exactly as it happened of
course, but most of the facts are correct.” Works for me. The two
main factual inaccuracies that she highlighted were: that Kinsey never
did interview his father (a fact which I learned from a Fresh Air
interview with Director Bill Condon); and, amazingly, that the IU
Board of Trustees never voted against continuing support for the
Institute. Wow, that one was very interesting to me. She started to
say “Herman Wells was able to…” I don’t remember how she finished
the phrase, but she stumbled a bit. It seemed like she wanted to say
“Herman Wells supported it, and he was able to convince the trustees
to support whatever he wanted them to support.” But that doesn’t
sound very nice, now, does it?

The first stop after there was the research area, where people
definitely seemed to be in offices, doing research. We looked at few
posters that were almost identical to the type that you’d find in the
hallway of any science wing, and with which I grew very familiar
through Xie. Like any such posters, the titles were typically about 20 words and 60 syllables long, and pretty much incomprehensible to people outside of the field.

We moved on from there to the Library. Like the Lilly Library, this
one is very careful with its collection. It’s non-circulating, and
only staff are permitted in the stacks. However, answering a question
before I could ask it, Catherine told us that it was [searchable
through the rest of the IU online catalog](http://kinseyinstitute.org/library/kicat.html). “Just send us an email a couple of days in advance with the call numbers of the materials that
you want, and we can have them waiting for you on the reserved reading
carrel.” Actually, you also have to be working on a research project.
This seems to be very loosely defined: a presentation at a group
meeting was confirmed to be sufficient to qualify as “research”.
Maybe even a blog post would count.

The reading room was, as you might expect, just like any other small
reading room at any other library. The main difference was the titles
of the materials. They had bound volumes of multiple years of
*The Journal of Homosexuality* and *The Journal of Bisexuality*,
neither of which I had ever heard of. Other journals and magazines
like that, and lots of books with hundreds of pages of talk about
whatever particular sexual topic. Not very many books that looked
like they’d have dirty pictures in them, though. This was definitely
a place for geeks. Personally, my favorite part was the glass encased
collections of (what appeared to be first-run printings of) Kinsey’s
*Sexual Behavior in the Human Male* and *Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female*, translated into more languages than I could identify.

The conversation between the tourers and the guide was pretty much
continuous, including as we filed down the dorm-style staircases to
the art collection. Most of the art on display is just hanging on
walls in the dorm-style hallways… very nicely framed, yes, but if
you’re picturing an art gallery, just stop. Picture a long narrow
hallway with pictures on the walls. Naturally, Catherine had a story
to tell about any piece that anyone seemed particularly interested in.
“Oh, it turns out that this poster” (there were a lot of old movie
posters) “is really only the top third of a really huge movie poster,
which explains why we were never able to find that title in IMDB,
because that’s not really the title, that was just the attention
grabber. Now that I know that it’s not the entire thing, I can barely stand to look at this as it is.” It appears that IMDB is a valuable resource for them.
“Even the obscure ones are usually in there, not with very much
information, but at least the date.” Netflix is also a service they
rely on, and the Institute is generally impressed with their
collection.

Eventually we arrived at the actual Gallery, but this too was not very fancy. It seems to have been created by removing the wall separating two
adjacent former dorm rooms. It is presently displaying entries to
the first ever *Kinsey Institute Juried Erotic Art Show*. “We didn’t really have any guidelines,
except that we couldn’t really accept video, because we don’t have the
equipment to show it (!), but other than that, we just let the artists
define it.” This explains the vast array of materials. Several
photographs, several paintings, several sculptures (“this is a pretty
large group (!), so I’ll ask you to please be careful about the
sculpture on the floor”), even some fabric art. All of it was very
well done, most of it was very interesting, but I didn’t really find any of it very arousing.

Now, I’m personally not much for porn. I don’t buy pornogrphic
magazines, I don’t watch pornographic films, I don’t visit
pornographic websites, etc. There are a variety of reasons, some of
which I may not fully understand myself, but one thing is for sure: I
am less interested in pornography than many of my peers are. So,
maybe I just wouldn’t find any collection of art such as what we saw
here to to be sexually exciting. But I think there’s more to it,
which I think lies at the heart of my interpretation of the
collection. If the underlying message of pornography is something
like “You find this exciting, don’t you?” or “you wish you could
experience what these people are experience, don’t you?”, the message
I got from just about every piece I saw in the Institute was more like
“people everywhere, across time and geography, are interested in sex,
and in very different ways” or “some person(s) somewhere found this
item to be exciting, disturbing, humorous, or otherwise interesting
enough to bother creating it and preserving it.” The Institute
clearly maintains and develops its collection for purposes of
education and research, regardless of how titlating anyone might find
it.

Thus, I wasn’t at all surprised that our tour guide didn’t introduce
the holdings of the Institute as “the largest collection of
pornography in the world.” So venerable a source as [snopes.com](http://snopes.com)
believes that this is true ([debunking the myth that the Vatican
owns that honor](http://www.snopes.com/risque/porn/vatican.htm)), although there are also arguments that in this information age, Kinsey’s collections is
completely dwarfed by others, such as that of the [Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality](http://www.iashs.edu/) in San Francisco. Indeed, if one allows digital media, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some personal hard drives that contain more pornography than the Kinsey collection, although they would certainly be nowhere near as broad in scope historically or geographically. Catherine’s lack of interest in this
debate is probably indicative of the Institute’s attitude. She did
say, in her charmingly introspective, excited intellectual way, “we
get calls from new students who ask if we really have the largest
collection of pornography in the world, and I always just have to
think, is it really pornography? I mean, it all has to do with sex,
but it isn’t really what I would call pornography… well, I mean,
*some* of it is, but…” I pictured one of those politicians who use
the line “I know it when I see it” looking at what I was seeing
(which, I must point out, was certainly only a tiny fraction of their
entire collection, most of which is not on display). I would guess
that such a person would end up labelling about 25% of the displayed
materials as porn. If I played the same game, the number would be
much lower. But I think the more interesting issue, even for this
nameless politican, would be the process of determination. Was the
photograph of the two (seemingly) 80-somethings having sex
pronography? It was unquestionably graphic, but at the same time, the
purpose didn’t seem to be to arouse as much as to encourage reflection
on sexuality, aging, and life-long-love. The Kinsey Institute would
be unable to deny that it promotes this kind of reflection, even if
they downplay the pornographic nature of their collection.

The last stop on our tour was the “lab” where they conduct studies on
sexual arousal in actual people. This former dorm room still looked a
fair amount like a dorm room. There was more art hanging on the
walls, but this stuff was not at all erotic. As Catherine
explained, this was so that the subjects didn’t get distracted. The focal
point of the room was a comfortable looking easy-chair, with an
extremely unnatural-looking setup of a video screen and (I believe)
computer keyboard in front of it. The countertops were covered with
scientific looking equipment and materials instead of text books.
Catherine introduced us to one of their measurement devices, saying
simply “This is called a RigiScan”. The device used to measure the
same thing in females was called a “photoplethysmograph”, and as the name suggests,
was substantially more complicated. It worked, we learned, by
actually using light to determine if there is an increase in blood
flow, whereas the RigiScan measured changes in size. Once you understood those two devices, pretty much everything about the whole operation
seemed transparent. Seeing the cables leading to the video monitor
taped to the floor using plain packing tape made me feel like I could
have set the whole thing up myself.

And, with that, we headed back up to the third floor to pick up our
coats. “This has been a great way to end the week, you were a very
fun group.” Thanks, Catherine. You did a great job introducing us to
this famous but quiet local institution. It’s curious how completely
unmysterious everything felt once we were there.