The Inner Circle

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Book: Read The Inner Circle for Free Online
Authors: T. C. Boyle
question came up. Dr. Kinsey studied my reaction, my face, his eyes locked on mine, his pencil poised over the sheet of paper.
It’s all right,
he seemed to say,
whatever it is, it’s all right. You can confide in me.
And further:
You
must
confide in me.
    I hesitated, and that hesitation told him everything. “Never,” I said. “Or, that is, not yet, I mean.”
    Unbeknownst to me, there were a series of questions—twelve of them, to be exact—that gave an indication of one’s predilection toward same-sex behavior, or, as Prok liked to call it so as not to alarm or prejudice anyone, the H-history. It was at this point that he shifted in his chair and cleared his voice. “Backtracking now,” he said, “you werehow old when you first saw the naked genitalia of a person of your own sex?”
    I gave him the answer, which he quickly checked against my previous response.
    â€œAnd when did you first see another individual’s erect penis?”
    I gave him the answer.
    And then the questions proceeded in what we would come to call our “steamroller” fashion, one hard on the heels of the next. “When did you first touch the genitals of a person of your own sex? When did you first bring to orgasm a person of your own sex? When was the first time you brought a person of your own sex to orgasm orally?”
    I looked away and he broke off the interview a moment. There was a silence. I became aware of the bells tolling six on the clock tower across campus. “Milk,” he said, “John—let me remind you that there is nothing, nothing whatever, to be ashamed of. There is no sexual act between consenting parties that is in any way qualitatively different from any other, no matter what the prevailing ethos of a given society may be. If it will interest you to know, my own sex history was very much similar to yours when I was your age—and even later.”
    But perhaps this would be a judicious time to bring up the 0–6 scale Prok devised to measure an individual’s sexual preferences—a scale that seeks to chart the entire range of human sexual proclivities, from the purely opposite-sex context (0) to the purely homosexual (6). You see, Prok believed—and I’ve come to believe too—that man in a state of nature is pansexual, and that only the strictures of society, especially societies under the dominion of the Judeo-Christian and Mohammedan codes, prevent people from expressing their needs and desires openly, and that thus, whole legions suffer from various sexual maladjustments. But I get ahead of myself.
    That day, in that room, with a handkerchief pressed to my dripping nose and Prok’s presence guiding me, I began to know myself in a way I’d never thought possible. What I’d seen as a source of shame became usual—Prok himself had had similar experiences as a boy and had masturbated continually—and if I could say I rated perhaps a 1 or 2 on the0–6 scale, then that was something, something momentous. And I hungered for experience, like anyone else, that was all. I’d been awkward with girls, terrified of them—I’d placed them on a pedestal and never saw them as sexual beings just like me, who had the same needs and desires as I, and that it had been perfectly natural to experiment with the only partners available to me, with boys, because as Prok says, we all need outlets. Or perhaps I didn’t realize all this on that late afternoon in Prok’s office, but I did think of Laura Feeney sitting there before me—in the very chair—and how Prok would have asked her at what age she began to masturbate and when she’d first seen the naked genitalia of the opposite sex, and when she’d first seen the phallus erect and first brought the opposite sex to orgasm, and I felt like Columbus spying land on the horizon.
    The clock on the tower was tolling the quarter hour, for six

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