Photo by Bill Dellenback Kinsey Institute

Dr. Paul Gebhard, former director of the Kinsey Institute (formerly the Institute for Sex Research), died on July 9, 2015, near his home in Nashville, Indiana after a brief illness. He was 98 years old.

Paul joined Alfred Kinsey’s research team at Indiana University in 1946. He was a co-author of the 1953 bestselling research book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which revealed sexual experiences of women in mid-century America. A Harvard-trained anthropologist, he conducted interviews and also devised the classification scheme for the Institute's extensive collection of photographs.

Following the death of Alfred Kinsey in 1956, Paul served as director of the Institute and continued in this position until 1982. Under his leadership, the institute staff continued to conduct interviews and analyze data. Notable books include Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion in 1958 and Sex Offenders: An Analysis of Types in 1965.

During his tenure, the Kinsey Institute researchers continued ground-breaking research on homosexuality, sexual deviance, erotic art around the world, and the social structure of sexuality, among other topics.

In 1979, Gebhard and Alan Johnson published The Kinsey Data: Marginal tabulations of the 1938-1963 interviews conducted by The Institute for Sex Research. The primary purpose was to encourage secondary analysis and facilitate new approaches and ideas. The original Kinsey data continues to be analyzed and compared with new approaches by contemporary researchers.

A series of interviews with Paul from last year recalling his experiences, such as his first meeting with Alfred Kinsey, working with Masters and Johnson, and his opinion on the movie KINSEY, can be viewed on the Kinsey website.

Paul is survived by his son Mark Gebhard, of Nashville, Indiana, his daughters Jan Worthy of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Karla Gebhard of Bloomington, Indiana, four grandchildren and one great grandchild, and his stepchildren: George E. Huntington III and his family, and John Christie Huntington and his family.

Pictured from left: Alfred Kinsey, Clyde Martin, Paul Gebhard and Wardell Pomeroy. Photo Courtesy of The Kinsey Institute.

Alfred Kinsey and Paul Gebhard, 1953. Photo by Bill Dellenback

IN MEMORIAM DR. PAUL GEBHARD July 3, 1917 - July 9, 2015. The last surviving member of what might be called the Four Horsemen of the Sexual Revolution (and some would still say "of the Apocalypse"), Gebhard along with Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and their leader Alfred Kinsey, unquestionably changed the world, and for the better. The staggering-to-most (even gays themselves) statistics on the amount of homosexual experience reported in the Kinsey Institute’s first major publication, 1948’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (for which Gebhard’s primary contribution at this point was helping tabulate the results of interviews the other three had done), powered the second and first successful effort to start a gay rights movement in the United States. Late Mattachine Society cofounder Harry Hay recalled:
“In the spring of 1948, a man named Alfred Kinsey brought out a book about the sexuality of the American male. It becomes an overnight absolute bestseller throughout the community. It was a shocker for us because we had assumed that we [gays] were a few hundred in every city. Turned out, we were thousands in every city that even he knew about. So, with my copy of ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’ under one arm, a sheaf of papers under the other, I go through the entire gay community as I know it at that time--which isn't much. Absolutely nobody will touch it. Terrified. And I walk back and forth for two years.” Until he met and fell in love with Austrian refugee Rudi Gernreich who agreed with him that such a group was necessary, and helped him recruit the first members. And ever since the statistics have been used again and again (if not always entirely accurately) by the Gay Rights Movement. Frank Kameny referenced them in his first-of-its-kind appeal to the Supreme Court in 1961 challenging his firing by the US Army Map Service.
The figures on lesbian experience in the female study released in 1953 (when TV’s then-most beloved married couple, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, were portrayed sleeping in separate beds and not allowed to say the word “pregnant”), and for which Gebhard was a coauthor, added to the Movement, too, and its overall affirmation of broad sexual experience and desire among women helped fuel the Women’s Rights Movement. Ultimately, the loud outrage of moralists (including Rev. Billy Graham) about both books helped dry up the Institute's funding, trigger a Congressional investigation (READ: witch-hunt), and virtually hound Kinsey to death.
Unfortunately the obituary for Gebhard most being referenced is that from “The New York Times” which demonstrates what a strumpet the once great “Gray Lady” has become. They recklessly quote the so-called “biography” of Kinsey by James H. Jones Jones despite the fact his book is reviled in the field as psychobabble by a transparently rabid homophobe with an agenda: to bury Caesar (Kinsey) not to praise him. Jones’ labeling of Kinsey as a “homosexual” when his documented passionate love affair and 35-yr. marriage with wife Clara makes him as deserving of anyone of the label “bisexual” is ludicrous. The label “masochist” is also challenged by his most respected (albeit problematic in his own ways) biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (“Sex the Measure of All Things”).
Further, the NYT author’s assertion that Gebhard “believed that the original Kinsey study may have overstated the number of men who had homosexual encounters because a disproportionate number of prisoners had been interviewed” grossly misrepresents what he believed—and documented. While he did state that: “our lower social level sample, that is the grade school educated, was bad, I'm sorry we even published on it,” he added: “Our sort of middle high school level, it's an approximation, I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but it's a pretty fair approximation. Our upper middle, our sort of college level sample I'd say is excellent. I don't think it's ever been approached since. I think it's the best sex sample done on that particular level.”
In 1977, the National Gay Task Force released a letter from Gebhard about the results of his having reexamined the interview responses about same sex experiences, specifically excluding groups whose inclusion was criticized such as prisoners and respondents found through gay rights groups. See graphic below for his revelations about the famous 10% figure. This information was also published in a 1979 book, and he often explained the resorting results in interviews. “It didn't really make much difference. I thought, for example, that famous 37 percent figure [of men who had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm], I thought maybe if I clean out all of the artists, and the writers, and friends of homosexuals maybe it will drop down to 28 or something. It didn't. It came out almost exactly 37 again, and I was surprised, pleasantly.”
I met the delightful Gebhard in 1975 when he was still head of the Institute. Bloomington Gay Alliance was about to show the pioneering gay independent film “A Very Natural Thing” on campus, and I arranged a private screening for him and some other KI staff members. I’ll always remember his praise for how realistically the movie portrayed two men making love by a fireplace (paced to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”) without showing any frontal nudity in the scene which might have turned off some viewers/reviewers (as it would still some even today). How deeply I regret having put off getting in touch with him again.
In the brief video at the link below, Gebhard, who was publicly closeted lesbian Jeannette Howard Foster's closest ally during her four-year tenure as the Institute's librarian, talks about his friendship with gay rights legends and Daughters of Bilitis cofounders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and the treasured honor they bestowed upon him.
Requiescat in pace, old chap, you did it well!
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Paul Gebhard Video

Paul Gebhard with his son Mark at home in Nashville, Indiana 2013

Paul Gebhard at home with his chihuahua Luke, Nashville Indiana 2013

His autograph from an Ebay ad