Alfred Kinsey's seven-point scale treated orientation as a spectrum, not two boxes
Rather than asking people which label fit them, Alfred Kinsey rated what they had actually felt and done, on a scale from 0 to 6. His point, drawn from more than 8,000 interviews, was that people do not sort neatly into two camps. The world, he wrote, is not divided into sheep and goats.
On the scale, 0 means exclusively heterosexual and 6 exclusively homosexual, with 1 to 5 covering mixes of attraction or experience, including occasional same-sex interest. An extra category, X, was listed in both of his reports. Kinsey, often called the father of the sexual revolution, first sketched thirty categories based on thirty case studies before paring them to seven. He stressed that a person could be placed at different points in different periods of life, and that real people fall at every point between his categories.
The findings appeared in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Among white men aged 20 to 35, 11.6 percent were rated 3 for that period, and 10 percent of American men surveyed had spent a stretch of three years or longer, somewhere between ages 16 and 55, rated at 5 or 6. Among women aged 20 to 35, 7 percent of single women and 4 percent of previously married women rated 3. More men than women leaned homosexual, contradicting reports of the opposite, which Kinsey put down to wishful thinking among heterosexual men.
Historians give the scale credit as an early effort to recognise how varied and fluid sexual behaviour is, at a time when most studies came from doctors treating patients who sought them out. Critics note its limits. The psychologist Jim McKnight writes that treating bisexuality as a midpoint has been severely challenged since a 1978 study by Martin Weinberg and Alan P. Bell, and researchers still mostly rely on self-chosen labels anyway.
Alternatives have followed. In 1980 Michael Storms proposed a two-axis chart that allows for asexuality and for strong attraction to both sexes at once, and Fritz Klein's grid added how orientation can shift over a lifetime. Studies in 2014 and 2017 asked people who are not heterosexual how well the scale captured them.
Source: Kinsey scale
