Looking For Mr. Kinsey's Institute
Looking For Mr. Kinsey’s Institute
A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana as a part of World AIDS day. I was to speak on campus that night as a part of several events the university and the city of Bloomington had organized. I grew up in Indiana and had attended Indiana nearly 20 years ago, so my mind was in that state that it gets in when you physically re-enter spaces which were once familiar. In places like this your body becomes sensitive to the emotional memory that was so much a part of your life at the time. When I attended college, I was a tortured young man from a small town who wanted so much from the world and at the same time I was terrorized by the interior physical and psycho-spiritual drama going on in my body. Sexually, my body was as hungry for men as it was for women. I was lost and alone with these thoughts. Instinctively, I knew my bisexual flowering was not wrong, but outwardly I was terrified of anyone having any idea that I was conflicted. As a student at a great institution of learning, my mind was free to go wherever it wanted: I explored religion, ancient history, literature, drama, biology, and philosophy. And yet, my body was left in the dark, cloistered, left to stew in a socially imposed shame. I was not supposed to understand my body’s function or history. I was not given any courses on what desire was or how it was related to my health or my spiritual life.
Meanwhile, left to it’s own unstructured and uncultivated darkness, my mind was at war with my body, fighting instincts, doing drugs and drinking to try to punish or free it, depending upon my anger and mood. It was a kind of torture surely Kinsey himself understood and recognized, as he himself struggled with his sexual identity and the shame that prevents a healthy and rational understanding of it. I knew that the Kinsey Institute was somewhere on campus, hidden away. And that thought gave me some solace. I checked out the famous Male Sex Report from the library, absorbing page after page, graph after graph about bisexuality and feeling vindicated that Science backed up what I was feeling. And yet, I did this all in secret.
It was snowing heavily as I walked across campus that morning to find the Kinsey Institute.
I’d just come from an 8 a.m. talk I gave in the Kelly Business School. The university had made me available to speak to any class. But it was only this woman prof in the business school and the Kinsey staff who invited me to come and speak. But in this Marketing class something truly transformative happened. And for those that had first thought of World Aids day 20 some years ago must have imagined happening: change brought about by knowledge, honesty and dialogue. For when I finished my little talk about my life and my journey to several countries to chronicle the stories of AIDS activism there, a brave young woman opened the Q and A session with her hand shaking and her mouth puckered to ask me: “How did you learn to speak so naturally and openly about your sexuality and being HIV because . . . because . . . because my brother is HIV and . . . I’m so ashamed to admit this . . . but my parents disowned him and we could never see him, for ten years.” Then she began to cry, and the 30 some students--honor students, almost all white, bright and confident-- froze in their seats and the room became beautifully silent and all you could hear was the snow falling and the hum of the heaters by the window. We all listened to the tragedy of AIDS and the sadness of human shame; it was real and the students sent her so much compassion in that moment, I could feel it like the sudden burst of wings of a flock of birds taking off at once. This was why you came here today I told myself: For this woman to tell this story about her brother openly to her peers. I knew, too, why it was this prof who’d invited me; she was no ordinary prof. Immediately she came to her student’s side, slipped into the seat next to her, put her arms around her, and let her fall into her chest. I told the young woman she was very brave to ask her question and that her brother needed her love.
I was thinking about this young woman and her brother and my 20 year old self terrified of my sexual body when I finally found the Kinsey Institute on the third floor of one of IU’s chiseled limestone buildings. I was greeted by a very relaxed and warm woman by the name of Jennifer Bass, who was the assistant to the director. Ms. Bass took my coat and walked me around to meet everyone. I immediately felt completely at home on this single floor of wooden doors and warm light. Down one main hallway to my utter surprise and glee—yes glee—were hundreds of exquisite pieces of erotic art from their collection. Art from everywhere in the world. Each piece either had a humorous or playful quality or they depicted sexuality and the human body as truly a piece of art, illuminating its mystery and natural aesthetic beauty as all can do with the human form. The feeling too these pieces gave was one of reverence. These pieces had a generosity to them or perhaps it was the way they had all been arranged so carefully and artfully on the walls, I don’t know. They seemed to say: your body wants to be treated this way, it once to be seen as a piece of art, as a part of the divine mystery of life.
Ms Bass later introduced me to the staff and the graduate students as we walked around, and the lovely curators for these artworks. Students set at carols researching and using the Institutes archival material. On the wall were friends of Kinsey, artists and writers, actors and academics and intellectuals. Also on the walls were scientific graphs and diagrams depicting various studies on sexual behavior and it’s relationship to health.
I gave my talk in a conference room for a handful of researchers and graduate students. I had so many things I wanted to say to these people I respected, but it was the story of the young student’s across campus that I had to tell them first. They smiled and nodded and told me that they had a program where they go to the dorms and hold informal talks with students about sexual issues. I was pleased to here this. We talked about HIV and bisexuality, yoga and its relationship to sexual health, sex work in Asia, the growing problems of AIDS in America’s prisons, and the rise in infections in the black community. I told them, too, how in my book I speak of my own struggles with bisexuality and the role shame played in my contracting the HIV. It was like I was in a confessional. When I was finished, one of the researchers raised her hand and asked: “Would you consider donating your papers from all the interviews you took for you book to our archives so that others can use them?”
It took me 20 years to find this famed corner on the campus of my alma mater. And though I had to struggle with my health and come near death and travel around the world, I’m grateful that I finally opened its doors and stepped inside.
A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana as a part of World AIDS day. I was to speak on campus that night as a part of several events the university and the city of Bloomington had organized. I grew up in Indiana and had attended Indiana nearly 20 years ago, so my mind was in that state that it gets in when you physically re-enter spaces which were once familiar. In places like this your body becomes sensitive to the emotional memory that was so much a part of your life at the time. When I attended college, I was a tortured young man from a small town who wanted so much from the world and at the same time I was terrorized by the interior physical and psycho-spiritual drama going on in my body. Sexually, my body was as hungry for men as it was for women. I was lost and alone with these thoughts. Instinctively, I knew my bisexual flowering was not wrong, but outwardly I was terrified of anyone having any idea that I was conflicted. As a student at a great institution of learning, my mind was free to go wherever it wanted: I explored religion, ancient history, literature, drama, biology, and philosophy. And yet, my body was left in the dark, cloistered, left to stew in a socially imposed shame. I was not supposed to understand my body’s function or history. I was not given any courses on what desire was or how it was related to my health or my spiritual life.
Meanwhile, left to it’s own unstructured and uncultivated darkness, my mind was at war with my body, fighting instincts, doing drugs and drinking to try to punish or free it, depending upon my anger and mood. It was a kind of torture surely Kinsey himself understood and recognized, as he himself struggled with his sexual identity and the shame that prevents a healthy and rational understanding of it. I knew that the Kinsey Institute was somewhere on campus, hidden away. And that thought gave me some solace. I checked out the famous Male Sex Report from the library, absorbing page after page, graph after graph about bisexuality and feeling vindicated that Science backed up what I was feeling. And yet, I did this all in secret.
It was snowing heavily as I walked across campus that morning to find the Kinsey Institute.
I’d just come from an 8 a.m. talk I gave in the Kelly Business School. The university had made me available to speak to any class. But it was only this woman prof in the business school and the Kinsey staff who invited me to come and speak. But in this Marketing class something truly transformative happened. And for those that had first thought of World Aids day 20 some years ago must have imagined happening: change brought about by knowledge, honesty and dialogue. For when I finished my little talk about my life and my journey to several countries to chronicle the stories of AIDS activism there, a brave young woman opened the Q and A session with her hand shaking and her mouth puckered to ask me: “How did you learn to speak so naturally and openly about your sexuality and being HIV because . . . because . . . because my brother is HIV and . . . I’m so ashamed to admit this . . . but my parents disowned him and we could never see him, for ten years.” Then she began to cry, and the 30 some students--honor students, almost all white, bright and confident-- froze in their seats and the room became beautifully silent and all you could hear was the snow falling and the hum of the heaters by the window. We all listened to the tragedy of AIDS and the sadness of human shame; it was real and the students sent her so much compassion in that moment, I could feel it like the sudden burst of wings of a flock of birds taking off at once. This was why you came here today I told myself: For this woman to tell this story about her brother openly to her peers. I knew, too, why it was this prof who’d invited me; she was no ordinary prof. Immediately she came to her student’s side, slipped into the seat next to her, put her arms around her, and let her fall into her chest. I told the young woman she was very brave to ask her question and that her brother needed her love.
I was thinking about this young woman and her brother and my 20 year old self terrified of my sexual body when I finally found the Kinsey Institute on the third floor of one of IU’s chiseled limestone buildings. I was greeted by a very relaxed and warm woman by the name of Jennifer Bass, who was the assistant to the director. Ms. Bass took my coat and walked me around to meet everyone. I immediately felt completely at home on this single floor of wooden doors and warm light. Down one main hallway to my utter surprise and glee—yes glee—were hundreds of exquisite pieces of erotic art from their collection. Art from everywhere in the world. Each piece either had a humorous or playful quality or they depicted sexuality and the human body as truly a piece of art, illuminating its mystery and natural aesthetic beauty as all can do with the human form. The feeling too these pieces gave was one of reverence. These pieces had a generosity to them or perhaps it was the way they had all been arranged so carefully and artfully on the walls, I don’t know. They seemed to say: your body wants to be treated this way, it once to be seen as a piece of art, as a part of the divine mystery of life.
Ms Bass later introduced me to the staff and the graduate students as we walked around, and the lovely curators for these artworks. Students set at carols researching and using the Institutes archival material. On the wall were friends of Kinsey, artists and writers, actors and academics and intellectuals. Also on the walls were scientific graphs and diagrams depicting various studies on sexual behavior and it’s relationship to health.
I gave my talk in a conference room for a handful of researchers and graduate students. I had so many things I wanted to say to these people I respected, but it was the story of the young student’s across campus that I had to tell them first. They smiled and nodded and told me that they had a program where they go to the dorms and hold informal talks with students about sexual issues. I was pleased to here this. We talked about HIV and bisexuality, yoga and its relationship to sexual health, sex work in Asia, the growing problems of AIDS in America’s prisons, and the rise in infections in the black community. I told them, too, how in my book I speak of my own struggles with bisexuality and the role shame played in my contracting the HIV. It was like I was in a confessional. When I was finished, one of the researchers raised her hand and asked: “Would you consider donating your papers from all the interviews you took for you book to our archives so that others can use them?”
It took me 20 years to find this famed corner on the campus of my alma mater. And though I had to struggle with my health and come near death and travel around the world, I’m grateful that I finally opened its doors and stepped inside.
posted by Unknown at 7:04 PM
0 comments
