Prophet, hero, martyr. For real.

See the PBS documentary on Alfred Kinsey.

It's been awhile since any acquaintance or subject of a biographical portrayal has seemed to me truly worthy of lionizing, but after seeing the PBS documentary above I feel that way about Kinsey. While Liam Neeson's Kinsey in the recent "Hollywood" film almost got me there, by the movie's end I couldn't simply admire the man. That may be the rule for thoughtful films about controversial subjects. I appreciate that documentaries, like biographies in general, are liable to downplay or eliminate the negative (that is, if they don't do the reverse), but I'm allowing myself to conclude that the PBS documentary offers a truer or at least more pertinent view of Kinsey than the dramatization.

Note that's not because I doubt the dramatizers' intentions or efforts to portray Kinsey accurately. A drama offers only a theory of a person, and whereever an offense by that person hinges on the mens rea (state of mind) of everybody involved, a dramatization casts shadows of doubt. The almost inevitable mistakes matter a lot, because we sympathize or even identify with the victims in a drama.

This happened to me with Neeson's Kinsey. The movie made me think that I would not want to be Kinsey's wife. But is that true? If you listen to close associates of both of them talk about Kinsey in the documentary, you'll see a lot of love and awe for the man, despite it all. It would not be surprising if Kinsey's missteps hurt people profoundly, even were he treading lightly and with care. He was exploring sex and love. The documentary could have systematically excluded every unsympathetic voice or word, but that would be such a corrupt documentation that I highly doubt it did. My conclusion is that Kinsey was a mensch.

The documentary also caused me a new reaction to the "scientific controversy" (that is, as opposed to the cultural and political one) that attached early on to Kinsey's findings. The scientific criticisms didn't come off as untrue, but as a scientist I now appreciate them as beside the point.

Kinsey's funders sent a statistical SWAT team to review his report, with the result that they found fault with his numbers. The numbers sketched a map of the contours and peak of the true statistical distribution of sexual behaviors across society, and they were unreliable, because Kinsey's sampling techniques were unsuited to that task. He should have known, and he did know. But the norm and normalcy are obsessions of staticians and a conservative society. Kinsey's mission and method were natural history: Documenting, characterizing and sorting what exists in nature. By such an approach, Darwin refuted the Bible. By all accounts Kinsey was a master of the craft: Skeptical, thorough, careful.

Over long days and tens of thousands of hours, Kinsey and his team produced an empirical foundation from which to speak truths not heard in mainstream Western culture since the rise of Christianity--some of them for the first time ever. He stemmed a pandemic of terror and oppression that we were inflicting on ourselves and especially on those who dared pursue happiness. He may have stemmed a holocaust. How would American society have responded to AIDS, were it not for Kinsey? Would there even have been an Act Up to chop down, I wonder. Would a large enough movement have arisen to end the war in Vietnam were it not for free love? Kinsey showed us that beneath our noses--despite democratic governance and an ethos of individual liberty--we were consumed fanatically with convention and its enforcement. Not even statistical scientists were immune.

Kinsey's martyrdom was disgrace, incapacity and death by a broken heart. Let's remember him.