Kinsey did not exist in a vacuum. The Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS) had already been working for nearly two decades, since 1921, a product of the Progressive Era’s “penchant for bringing together reformers and experts to attack social problems with a potent blend of moral fervor, money and research.”

        In order to address problems like prostitution and the kidnapping and transporting of young women as sexual slaves, they looked to science to explain why people behaved as they did sexually.

    The CRPS was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, but in the late 1930s it was having trouble finding available scientists who had the background for this type of field investigations.

Freed from the responsibilities of teaching, Kinsey was looking for funding to allow him to do full-time research.

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Chapter 5

In December 1940 he applied to the CRPS for a grant, touting the 1,700 sexual histories he had compiled, mostly in his private conferences with students, his visits to prisons and in his meetings with individuals deeply involved in sexual subcultures in Chicago, Indianapolis, and other cities. In 1941, they approved his request for funding, unaware of his unusual personal lifestyle or of his plans to use science to subvert the sexual controls they surely hoped to strengthen through his findings.

World War II was raging, but Kinsey put everything he had into collecting data, his weapon of choice in his private war against conservative morality. He expected the wives of job candidates at the Institute for Sex Research to join their husbands in contributing their sex histories. Kinsey avoided coworkers with orthodox sexual values. By requiring applicants to give their sexual histories, he did his best to limit the pool to candidates who shared, or who he believed could be taught to endorse, his biological, materialistic attitudes about human sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular.

Nor were attitudes his only concern. Kinsey had a preference for coworkers with certain behavioral items in their histories.