The Kinsey stag collection, how seized reels became an archive in Indiana

Police departments sent Alfred Kinsey the sex films they confiscated, and his Institute for Sex Research kept them when everyone else burned them. A seven-year fight with US Customs, United States v. 31 Photographs, decided in 1957 that a research archive could hold what a shop could not sell.

Indianapolis, November 1950. In the customs office of the Federal Building, a package addressed to Professor Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University has just been opened, and its contents, Japanese erotic prints and old French miniatures, are spread across the desk of the collector of customs, Alden H. Baker. A newspaper reporter drops in for coffee, as reporters often do. Baker shows him the pictures and calls them dirty stuff, with "nothing scientific about it". On 17 November the story is on the front page of the Indianapolis Star¹.

That chance visit started a legal battle that lasted seven years and outlived Kinsey himself. It ended with a federal judge ruling that material obscene in a shop window was not obscene in a research archive. The same principle protected the vault where Kinsey's institute kept something else the authorities would gladly have burned: the largest surviving collection of American stag films, including the first gay porn films. This is the story of how that archive was built and defended.

A zoologist who collected everything

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and spent the first half of his career as a zoologist at Indiana University, in Bloomington, studying gall wasps. He collected them by the million, measuring and classifying every one, convinced that only huge samples showed how varied nature really is².

In 1938 he began teaching a course on marriage for students, found that almost nothing reliable was known about human sexual behaviour, and turned his collector's method on people. He and his team interviewed thousands of men and women about their sex lives. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in January 1948, became a bestseller, and its finding that a large share of American men had had some sexual experience with other men caused a sensation.

In 1947 Kinsey set up the Institute for Sex Research as a non-profit corporation, separate from the university, so that his confidential case histories and his collections could be protected. He wanted everything: books, diaries, drawings, photographs, objects, and films. Material that other people hid or destroyed was, for him, data².

Reels from the police

Films were hard to find, because nobody who owned a stag film admitted it. From about 1948 until his death in 1956, Kinsey and his staff bought copies wherever they could, noting down what they learned about the men who sold them. They also made arrangements with police departments across the country to send them copies of films seized in raids³.

The police were happy to help. A reel that would otherwise have been burned as evidence went to Bloomington instead. "They're all amateur, all illegally made, all with bad lighting, but real gems," the Indiana University film archivist Rachael Stoeltje told the news agency UPI in 2010. "They're unique because this doesn't exist anymore"⁴.

How many there are depends on who is counting and what counts as a stag. Stoeltje spoke in 2010 of about 2,000 stag party films from the 1920s to the 1960s, within a film and video archive of some 14,000 items⁴. A Kinsey archivist quoted by Vice in 2018 put the stag collection at about 1,600 films, all digitised, and said it was still growing as people sent in finds from family attics³.

The archive is not a fair sample of what was made. The film scholar Linda Williams, who worked with it, has called Kinsey an indiscriminate collector who never tried to make it representative, either of pornography or of the sex lives of the time⁶. It contains what happened to be seized, sold or given, and nothing else.

The collector who changed his mind

Kinsey's trouble was the Tariff Act of 1930, which banned the import of anything obscene. As early as 1947 he had written to the legal adviser of the Customs Bureau asking for an exception for research. That same year Baker, the seventy-seven-year-old collector in Indianapolis, seized a shipment containing an illustrated Japanese book on sex. A law professor whose father was an old friend of Baker went to see him, and Baker agreed to let Kinsey's parcels through¹.

That informal deal lasted until 1950, when a new assistant collector, Eugene Okon, decided it was not the job of a local office to make exceptions to federal law. He sent samples to Washington. In May the assistant commissioner of customs replied that all the books were "grossly obscene", and the parcels began to pile up¹.

Kinsey called the New York lawyer Morris Ernst, who had defended James Joyce's Ulysses against the same customs law in the 1930s, and his partner Harriet Pilpel. Then came the reporter in Baker's office, and the story went out on the wire services across the country.

Thirty-one photographs from Copenhagen

Ernst and Pilpel wanted a clean test case, with material nobody could claim was art. In March 1951 Kinsey wrote to Philobiblon, a bookseller in Copenhagen, asking for the most openly erotic material available, including photographs of homosexual activity. From April the dealer sent small packages, among them thirty-one photographs he described as the most openly erotic anyone could imagine¹.

At first New York customs let them through. Pilpel sent them back to be seized. In all, seven shipments addressed to Kinsey were held in New York, along with Japanese material sent over from Indianapolis.

Then nothing happened for years. The Treasury Department, which had the power to admit books of scientific merit, was in no hurry to decide; Pilpel called the case a hot potato. In September 1953 Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and the criticism grew louder. In February 1956 the Secretary of the Treasury refused to make an exception and handed the matter to the Justice Department, which filed its case on 1 August 1956¹.

Kinsey, worn out by years of overwork and by heart trouble, did not see the trial. He died in Bloomington on 25 August 1956, aged sixty-two².

"A subject of scientific inquiry"

The new director, the anthropologist Paul Gebhard, took over the case. The institute collected sworn statements from doctors, psychologists, librarians and even the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett, who said that its research had helped in understanding sexual offenders. Both sides asked Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the federal court in Manhattan for a decision without a jury, and argued the case before him on 16 July 1957¹.

On 31 October 1957 Palmieri ruled for the institute. He accepted, for the sake of argument, that the material would appeal to the prurient interest of the average person. But it would never reach the average person: it would be kept under security, for staff and qualified scholars only, and to them it had no such appeal. "For what is obscenity to one person," he wrote, "is but a subject of scientific inquiry to another." And: "The work of serious scholars need find no impediment in this law"⁷.

Lawyers called the idea variable obscenity: the same object could be obscene or not depending on who would see it. The case had cost the institute more than 11,000 dollars in legal fees, and that was with its lawyers charging half their normal rate¹.

The ruling was about photographs, books and other imported objects, not films. But it set out in law the condition under which the whole collection, stags included, could exist: locked away, for research, and closed to the public.

Behind a locked door

That condition shaped everything that followed. In the late 1960s two sociologists at the institute, John Gagnon and William Simon, studied the men who had watched these films in lodges and clubs⁸. In the early 1980s the Canadian film scholar Thomas Waugh came to Bloomington, watched the reels with sex between men, and drew on them in his history of gay erotic images⁹.

For decades, according to UPI, the reels sat in a converted bowling alley near the campus before moving to better storage⁴. In 2016 the institute, independent since 1947, became part of Indiana University.

The rules of access have changed little since Palmieri's day. The institute says its film, video and audio collection now holds more than 12,000 items, from stag films to sex education. It can be seen only on site, by appointment, by registered users aged at least eighteen with a demonstrable research need, and the film archive asks for two weeks' notice. Nothing is lent out for screenings¹⁰.

It is a strange inheritance. Films made in secret to be laughed at in smoke-filled rooms survived because policemen confiscated them and a zoologist asked for them, and they are still seen almost only by scholars. The wider story of what those reels showed, and of the few in which men touched men, is told in the chapter on stag films.