I was reading about Kinsey, the upcoming movie based on his life on AICN and was perusing this talkback when I saw a number of allegations that Kinsey was had abused children that he was studying. Most of the people making the accusations seem like idiots and my cursory google search turned up a lot of right-wing websites making wild allegations but I couldn’t really find any substantive cite taht he was a pedophile or that he had sexually abused any children.
So what’s the straight dope? Is this all just smears and propaganda or is there anything to it?
All the people Kinsey studied were adults, so pedophilia was not an issue. And there was never a serious contemporaneous allegation that Kinsey had sex with any of his subjects.
There’s a post somewhere in the board’s archives where I summarise the literature and controversy about Kinsey, but it seems to have completely disappeared.
The film is based on Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s sympathetic biography Sex: The Measure of All Things (Chatto&Windus, 1998). This was published after James Jones’ unsympathetic authorised one. Both trawl through Kinsey’s sex life in quite some - and appropriate - detail, coming to rather different conclusions. Yet neither suggests he was a pedophile.
There has been the suggestion that he took evidence from a pedophile, without turning them in, but that’s another allegation entirely.
Contemporaneously, no. Subsequently, yes, though not with children.