Alfred Kinsey
WASHINGTON - Guess who had a "don't ask, don't tell" kind of relationship, sort of. Two 20th Century American legends did - FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and it involved each other's porn collections.
A 126-page file the FBI kept on Kinsey which has just been released says Hoover and Kinsey and their people had eyes for each other's porn collections. Kinsey apparently wanted the FBI material in the interest of more sexual research, while Hoover and the FBI - who had believed Kinsey's work had little actual scientific sophistication - wanted to see just how serious a researcher Kinsey was.
But neither the FBI nor the Kinsey Institute on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction ever did get to see each other's porn, not even when the FBI stepped in to investigate after a police seizure of a porn shipment destined for the Kinsey Institute.
Alfred Kinsey became as much of a household word as J. Edgar Hoover with the 1948 publication of "Sexual Behavior of the Human Male", and died of heart disease in 1957. The FBI file discloses that, a year after Kinsey died, the Indiana Police Department intercepted a shipment of porn intended for the Kinsey Institute, with the FBI stepping in to probe whether laws barring interstate transportation of obscene material were violated.
The bureau let the matter go due to a prior court decision ruling such a shipment was not obscenity involved if the importer had legitimate scientific use in mind. But that didn't stop the G-men from getting a little advanced knowledge of just how Kinsey was getting the stuff. They got some help from Kinsey's successor and field director, Paul Gebhard and Wardell Pomeroy, who showed the FBI their porn collection, according to APBNews.
The collection, according to the Kinsey FBI file, included some eight decks of cards with "obscene photographs", sexually oriented books, various latex items, and miscellaneous sex toys and novelties. But Gebhard would not disclose the sources of the Kinsey Institute's porn collection, largely because the institute normally guaranteed anonymity in return for research information and items.
Then the Institute and the FBI switched roles, sort of - the institute tried in 1959 to get a look at the FBI's porn collection for a report on sex offenders, but a memo in the Kinsey file late that year suggests the FBI didn't exactly think the institute had legitimate reasons in mind.
To the day J. Edgar Hoover died, only two people in the FBI had free access to the porn collection - Hoover and his right hand man Clyde Tolson.
When "Sexual Behavior of the Human Male" came forth in 1948, the bureau said it didn't question his sincerity but it did believe Kinsey was somewhat in over his head and questioned whether his methods were truly scientific.
In one memo in the Kinsey file, FBI crime records chief Milton Jones said lawmakers might get good information in forming more effective sex laws from Kinsey's work. "But it is also conceivable that this book could do incalculable harm in the hands of adolescents who read it as justification for their own sexual habits." Yet another FBI agent working on sex offenses thought Kinsey's first book had limited value, if any, according to the file.
The FBI actually mulled the idea of meeting with Kinsey face to face, but the meeting never took place, according to the Kinsey file. Only two people were ever granted open access to the FBI porn collection - Hoover himself and his right hand man, Clyde Tolson. Hoover himself also mulled whether the FBI and Kinsey should meet - not because of Kinsey's sexual research and views so much as because Kinsey was a critic of the FBI and that rankled Hoover even more.
