Coming Up: When Kinsey Brought Sex Out of the Closet
Coming Up: When Kinsey Brought Sex Out of the Closet
Hey peeps,
I hope this post finds you well. As of late, I’ve been deep in thought, which is the new norm during this time of year. This weekend marks five years since my mother died. It’s hard to believe how quickly time moves and how the mind and body feels everything as if it were yesterday.
Despite the ache, I am elated by the volume of new subscribers and high engagement in my essays, including the Gay-for-Pay series on Str8 No Chaser® and personal essays about Brian Wilson and fair-weather friends (links at bottom). As fellow “Substackers” can attest, I am gobsmacked, humbled, grateful, and (ironically) at a loss for words.
This Thursday, I’ll publish a new essay that’s long been in the works. It centers on a name you may have heard, even if you’ve never read his work: Alfred Kinsey. Before we began utilizing neat but not-so-tidy identity labels (gay, straight, bi, ace, fluid), Kinsey and his researcher team asked people about sexual behavior: what they did, desired, how often, and with whom.
In the 1940s and ’50s, The Kinsey Reports blew the lid off America’s sexual assumptions, revealing that behavior was far less binary (and far more frequent and unconventional) than anyone was willing to admit. Two landmark publications by Kinsey and fellow researchers, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), unmasked sexuality that had been long-ago closeted by colonialism and the Victorian era.
This week’s essay will explore:
Who Kinsey really was (and who he studied)
Why the “Kinsey Scale” was revolutionary, misunderstood, and misinterpreted (even to this day)
What his research tells us about same-sex behavior, sex work, and the limits of modern labels
Why so many of today’s debates around identity and behavior, especially around gay-for-pay, are still echoing the work of Kinsey and his team.
Subsequently, I’ll drop the companion Str8 No Chaser® podcast episode, an audio reflection on Kinsey’s legacy, how his work rattled the public, upended the rules, and still lingers in how we frame desire and identity. If you missed the first few episodes, now’s a great time to jump in:
Listen here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
And looking ahead, upcoming podcast episodes will explore male-on-male sex work (aka, gay-for-pay) in adult entertainment: its history, popularity, and polarization. Those will be the first videosodes of the podcast, which I’ll continue tying to the deeper essays here.
Until then, if you’ve found this work meaningful or thought-provoking, I’d be honored if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps me keep diving deep and sharing freely. And if a paid subscription’s not in the cards right now, free-subscribing, sharing and commenting is greatly appreciated.
💙 Kelvin
Thumbnail Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash
Aforementioned Posts:
Gay-for-Pay: Polarization, Posers, and the Pleasure Principle
The History of Gay-for-Pay, Part I