• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1729 0

before 1870, twenty-three between 1870 and 1900; and almost two hundred in the first half of the twentieth century—sixty—eight reported cases in the decade of the forties alone.89 The cases of the twentieth century broadened the meaning of “sodomy” to include any sex except the kind that makes babies. There was, for example, the delicate question of oral sex. Was this a crime—“sodomy” or the “crime against nature”? Most courts thought it fell under the ban. In State v. Start, an Oregon case of 1913, one Rodby accused Harry Start of the “disgusting act” of “taking into his mouth the penis of Rodby and sucking the same until a seminal emission ensued.”90 The (rather vague) Oregon statute covered this act, said the court. In “the order of nature,” the human body gets its “nourishment” by virtue of the “alimentary canal”; food enters at one “opening, the mouth,” and wastes go out “through the nether opening of the rectum.” Either end of the body, then, was equally off limits to sex; and both ends were included in the ban against “moral filthiness and iniquity.” 91 It was iniquitous, of course, even when oral sex came into play between man and woman; this, too, was held unlawful.92

Legal change was, at first, exceedingly slow. Public attitudes began to change rather noticeably after World War II. The famous “Kinsey report,” Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, appeared in 1948. This report, an empirical study of the sex lives of American men, created a sensation in its day. Its main author, Alfred C. Kinsey, had at one time been an expert on gall wasps. This may seem an obscure subject, but human sex life was so taboo that it was just as obscure, if not more so. Kinsey set about to rectify this situation.

He and his associates wrote their report in a dry, objective tone, liberally larded with charts, graphs, and figures. Even so, the book carried a distinctive, startling, and radical message. The message was this: illegal sexual behavior was as common as rain. Kinsey claimed that 85 percent of the men in this country who were sexually mature had gone in for some form of premarital intercourse, 59 percent had “some experience in mouth-genital contacts,” 70 percent had “relations with prostitutes,” and between 30 and 45 percent had “extra-marital intercourse.” There were even worse shocks for conventional morality. As many as 37 percent of his subjects had had “some homosexual experience,” and 17 percent of the “farm boys” had experimented with “animal intercourse.”

All these activities, of course, were quite “illicit”; the vast majority of the behaviors were listed in penal codes as crimes. “Mouth-genital contacts” were a form of sexuality that a clear majority of the population had tried on for size; yet judges on the bench had called this behavior unspeakable, too disgusting for words, and totally beyond the pale. Kinsey was eager to draw policy conclusions from his figures. The men “involved in these activities, taken as a whole,” amounted to “more than 95 per cent of the total male population.” They were all technically “sex offenders.” Taken literally, the idea of sweeping the community clear of “sex offenders” was, in effect, a “proposal that 5 per cent of the population should support the other 95 per cent in penal institutions.”93

Kinsey followed up his report with a book about the sex lives of American women, which was less shocking only because the book about men had prepared the way.94 There were plenty of differences between men’s and women’s sex lives, to be sure, both big and small (women, for example, did not seem to write sexual graffiti on toilet walls).95 But the bottom line was the same: there was a lot of sex going on, and a lot of it would be a crime if we took the laws literally. So, for example, almost one woman out of five in Kinsey’s sample had had a homosexual experience by age forty.96 There was—and is—a great deal of controversy over Kinsey’s methods, figures, and results. But for the public at the time, these books were bombshells. And, beyond a doubt, the Kinsey reports delivered a plain, simple,