Diary
Christopher Turner
I am Dr Kinsey from Indiana University, and I’m making a study of sex behaviour. Can I buy you a drink?
In a simple attic room, with only a mattress on the pine floor, two people would have sex in a cone of light. Sometimes the director would disappear into the shadows so that the performers would forget he was there; at other times, according to one biographer, he would observe the action ‘inches removed from the couple’s genitals, close enough to smell body odours and hear the squish of juices’. He would whisper instructions to his cameraman, and offer subtle direction to his actors (‘If you would just come now,’ he once said calmly when a camera was threatening to overheat). Often he would star in his productions himself.
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[1] Three biographies of Kinsey are mentioned in this piece: Pomeroy’s Dr Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (1972); Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life by James Jones (1997); and Alfred Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (1998).
[2] It will be released in the UK on 4 March.
[3] Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £16.99, February, 0 7475 7557 6.
Vol. 27 No. 1 · 6 January 2005 » Christopher Turner » Diary (print version)
pages 34-35 | 2617 words