Novelist T.C. Boyle has long been obsessed with the past. In his latest, The Inner Circle, Boyle takes a look back at the life and work of Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneering sexologist whose life is also portrayed in the controversial new movie, Kinsey (read the review on page 31). It's a picaresque tale about Prof. K's and his assistant, John Milk's travels and research for Kinsey's landmark studies. Boyle's Kinsey is not just researching other people. His lab experiments include organizing, filming—and often participating in—orgies, wife swaps, and thousand-man masturbation sessions. He encourages full staff participation.
In doing research, what did you discover about our attitudes about sex in the '40s?
I don't know what people would talk about privately at dinner parties, but as far as I know, there was no discussion of sex in the media. After Kinsey published his surveys, though, there was titillation—and it seemed OK to discuss him. His name set off fireworks. There were songs written about him; he was everywhere. He loosened things up.
How much of the action is made up? Did Kinsey really film 1,000 men masturbating?
Everything is true to fact. I am amazed and struck and overjoyed to find these bizarre bits of our history. All that gives me a tremendous pleasure and I want to communicate that to the reader in the form of a story. Every fact about Kinsey is from his biography. Him filming 1,000 men masturbating? It's all true.
Is Milk an invention or is he a composite?
No, he's made up. And as for the inner circle, there were in fact three men—their names are on the spine of Kinsey's volume about female sexuality—but they remained relatively unknown. One of them was famous for his ability to have sex with anyone at the drop of a hat. Two of them are still alive, but I wouldn't want to use the actual people. So I didn't talk to anybody who knew.
Milk uses a lot of clinical words—coitus, H-history, etc.—when describing sex. Is that part of the times or because he's a researcher?
I believe he's using the language of the sex researcher. But it also becomes euphemistic, doesn't it?
Yes, and it also makes the sex seem cold and joyless, more about power than anything.
One thing I am exploring is what it is like to give yourself over to a guru, to a great leader. The most poignant part of my research was to read the letters of people who would write to Kinsey with their stories. The sadness of those letters is that everyone has emotional problems related to sex. Here they are writing to a total stranger who is not a medical doctor and thinking that this man can resolve the dilemma for them. You can parallel this to a political movement: Come to me and I will anoint you. No one but the individual can do that.
There's a lot of gay sex in this book, but we don't get to see a whole lot of it.
Another editor wanted to know why I drew the curtains on the gay scenes, but I drew the curtains on the heterosexual scenes, too. I think every good artist has an idea of the shape of a scene, and perhaps the actual moments with regards to sex—or violence, for that matter—are best left to the reader's imagination. There are more sex scenes in this book than in any other book I've published, but they are not much more graphic than scenes I've had in the past.
Why is there so little sex in fiction today?
In fiction, everything happens a lot less than it does in real life. Unless you're Nick Baker (Checkpoint: A Novel), where the physical details of life are more important than the sweep of events, you have to move a story and create a story. In fact, I'm a quarter of the way through this identity-theft novel I'm writing and there's no sex in it—none at all!
Did you fall under Kinsey's sway?
I don't have a political point of view. I'm not sitting here saying, Oh, Kinsey is overrated, a pervert, and I'm going to take him down. The key to this book was to realize that I had to do it in the first person. What this does for me is it allows the reader to be mystified, and to have a little ironic distance from Milk.
What is Kinsey's ultimate significance?
What's interesting and admirable about the historical Kinsey is how he normalized all sorts of relationships. Any behavior is normal to him. And I tend to agree.
Would you participate in a sex quiz?
I wouldn't mind participating in one of Kinsey's surveys, as long as it was anonymous. Other people, Pamela Anderson, for example, they don't think of that as private and want people to watch them on the Internet. Everyone has their own threshold, I suppose. To give up that history to Kinsey in his time, was not just to be under his spell, but to give up your deepest secrets.