>newground
On the steps of Swain Hall, Liam Neeson sits with Kinsey set designer Richard Sherman, writer/director Bill Condon, and producer Gail Mutrux.
What was actor and Oscar-nominee Liam Neeson doing on the Bloomington campus in the spring of 2004?
If you guessed that he was visiting The Kinsey Institute, you were right. For the leading role in the new film biography, Kinsey, Neeson made use of The Kinsey Institute’s exceptional resources to gain insight into a character that has often been a lightning rod for controversy at IU.
“I think Kinsey was quite a remarkable man,” says Neeson. “He opened the door and supplied at the very least, access to knowledge about human sexuality. Americans certainly needed it, and Western Europe certainly needed it.”
Whatever one's opinion of Alfred Kinsey—and he remains controversial—before he came along, scientific understanding of human sexuality was virtually nonexistent. There was only assumption, myth, and cultural bias. After Kinsey, the ice was broken.
Today, the institute Kinsey founded remains at the heart of research into sexuality. With the release of the film, The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction finds itself in the spotlight again.
“Oh, yes,” says Jennifer Bass, head of information services at the Institute, “we started getting calls from the media even before the film opened, from both the liberal and the conservative press. We quickly realized that this gave us an opportunity to get the word out about the important work we are doing.”
The Kinsey Institute is a quiet, academic place, housed in a vine-covered limestone building at the heart of the Indiana University Bloomington campus. Few would suspect it to be the hub of a global scientific effort to understand sex in all its aspects.
“Sexuality is fundamental to human existence,” says the Institute's new director, Julia Heiman, “and yet cultural attitudes keep it from being well understood. It is a subject crying out for objective study. It just happens to be one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.”
The Institute provides basic resources for scholars in many disciplines. Even the filmmakers used them. However, Bass notes, “While the Institute does not endorse this movie or any other, the filmmakers and actors were welcome to conduct research here.”
She adds that neither the Institute nor the University will receive any profits from the movie. Yet, several of the principals were so impressed by what they learned that they joined the Friends of The Kinsey Institute donor society, and they are lending their voices to a new fundraising effort.
The Kinsey Institute has no official position on the movie, but some of the staff members are unofficially relieved that it depicts Kinsey as a complex but largely sympathetic figure.
“We did not expect the film to be entirely factual,” says Bass. “It is one writer's interpretation of a person's life. Dr. Kinsey was in many ways a very reserved man. Even we don't know many details of his private life.” But she feels the film does portray accurately Kinsey's dedication to his research, his nonjudgmental attitude toward differences, and above all, his compassion for people who were suffering because they lacked information.
“In those respects” she adds, “The Kinsey Institute today operates very much in the spirit of its founder.”
>Bill Holladay
Learn more about The Kinsey Institute.