Kinsey's beatnik.

The recent revelations about Alfred Kinsey's sex life have raised some questions about the reliability of the research upon which Kinsey's landmark books were based. I know nothing about Kinsey's sex life, but I do know a bit about his research.

One of my friends during my college days at Columbia was Allen Ginsberg. He introduced me to a friend of his named Herbert Huncke, who had been a source and a recruiter for Kinsey. Herbert was a junkie who supported himself and his habit by petty larceny. Kinsey gave him $10 for the interview and $2 a head for each recruit. I've always thought that the word "beat" was first used by Allen to describe Herbert. He looked defeated--terribly thin, almost ghostly in appearance. He moved with stealth--"like an Arab," Jack Kerouac wrote. I saw him fairly frequently for a couple of years, but usually only when he was trying to sell me something that I was confident he had not acquired by legal means. Athough he later developed genuine talent as a writer, and earned a three-column obituary in The New York Times, at that time I would not have trusted him around the corner or anywhere else for that matter.

He was the kind of fellow whom I suspect would have told Kinsey anything that would titillate and, even if he was telling the truth, would have described a sex life, that was, to put it as gently as possible, atypical. Herbert called his autobiography Guilty of Everything.

Although Kinsey may have found a representative sample elsewhere, he definitely did not find it at the place Herbert did his recruiting. It was the Automat on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, which was patronized almost exclusively by minor criminals--thieves, con men, pimps, prostitutes of both sexes--and major league substance abusers.