American biologist, writer and activist Alfred Kinsey was BOTD in 1894. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, he survived an unhappy childhood with a conservative preacher father and long periods of illness. He studied at Bowdion College and later at Harvard, becoming a professor of zoology at Indiana University in 1920. The following year, he married zoology student Clara McMillen, with whom he had four children. Realising that his students knew nothing about human sexuality, he took over the college’s “marriage course”, showing students explicit photos of sexual intercourse and masturbation and discussing taboo subjects including contraception and homosexuality. In 1942, he established the Institute for Sex Research to study human sexuality, partially funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He and his research students undertook a comprehensive study of male sexual behaviour, interviewing over 18,500 subjects across the United States. Keen to gather as wide a range of data as possible, Kinsey and his team visited gay bars and prisons to interview gay men and sex workers, and (controversially) corresponded with and met several pedophiles. He also attended gay sex parties hosted by celebrity homosexual Glenway Wescott, who introduced him to gay sado-masochists Mike Miksche and Samuel Steward, making a series of erotic films with them for the Kinsey Institute. The resulting study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male was published in 1948. An immediate bestseller, it shocked post-war America with explicit detail about male sexual practices, fantasies and identities. Around one in ten of Kinsey’s interviewees admitting to homosexual experiences, leading him to propose a scale of human sexuality from zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual). Though not intended as a political tract, the book’s evidencing of a spectrum of sexual behaviour highlighted the prejudices implicit in restrictive sex laws, and helped establish homosexuality as a coherent social identity. Kinsey became an unlikely national celebrity, profiled on the cover of Time magazine and gradually drawn into political debates about sex education and criminal law reform. His follow-up volume Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, published in 1953, caused public outrage with its frank discussions of female masturbation, pre- and extra-marital sex and lesbianism. Kinsey was also criticised for his statistical conclusions, unorthodox research methods (including filming and participating in sex with his co-workers) and collection of erotica, prompting a prosecution for importing obscene materials. The resulting controversy prompted the Institute’s funders to withdraw support. Overworked and depressed by the shift in public support, he died in 1956 aged 52. Kinsey was bisexual and had an open marriage, allowing him to pursue relationship with his research student Clyde Martin (who also had an affair with Clara). Hailed as the father of the 1960s sexual liberation, his legacy continues to be controversial, particularly his (now-debunked) theory about the impossibility of women achieving orgasm via vaginal stimulation. He was played by Liam Neeson in the 2004 biopic Kinsey, written and directed by Bill Condon. The Kinseys’ relationship with Martin was fictionalised in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 2004 novel The Inner Circle.