Bill & Al's Excellent Adventure: Out Oscar Winner Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) Talks about Taking on Alfred Kinsey, Bisexual Icon of the Sexual Revolution, in a a New Film

Steele, Bruce C., The Advocate (The national gay & lesbian newsmagazine)

These days, gay people most often invoke mid-century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey as source for the estimate that 10% of adults are gay (an oversimplification of one of his many findings) and for the Kinsey scale, grading sexual behavior from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (totally gay). Few know much about the Indiana U. professor himself: how he clashed with his evangelical father, how his fascination with gall wasps evolved into a revolutionary research project on human sexuality, and how his 35-year marriage to a former student survived his (only recently revealed) extramarital homosexual liaisons.

The acclaimed new film Kinsey, from out writer-director Bill Condon, brings Kinsey the man vividly to life. Starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney--with a showstopping cameo by Lynn Redgrave, as a lesbian the movie is like nothing you'll ever see on the Biography Channel: deeply emotional, sexually frank, and as current as November's election results.

At Kinsey's core, Condon says, is a "tremendous fight" between people who want to talk about sex, particularly to protect the young from sexually transmitted diseases, and their powerful enemies "who think that the only answer is abstinence." It's a battle only too familiar to citizens of Bush America, and it first coalesced around Kinsey's comprehensive 1948 study of American men's sexuality--straight and gay. As …

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Publication information: Article title: Bill & Al's Excellent Adventure: Out Oscar Winner Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) Talks about Taking on Alfred Kinsey, Bisexual Icon of the Sexual Revolution, in a a New Film. Contributors: Steele, Bruce C. - Author. Magazine title: The Advocate (The national gay & lesbian newsmagazine). Publication date: November 23, 2004. Page number: 70+. © 2008 Regent Media. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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