Wardell Pomeroy, 87; Sex Researcher, Author

Wardell B. Pomeroy, the colleague and biographer who helped Alfred C. Kinsey study Americans’ sexual habits half a century ago and later provided historical insight about the very private founder of the Kinsey Institute of Sex Research, has died at 87.

Pomeroy died of complications from Parkinson’s disease Sept. 6 in Bloomington, Ind., home of the Kinsey Institute and Indiana University, to which it was attached.

A clinical psychologist associated with Kinsey for about 20 years, Pomeroy was one of Kinsey’s three co-authors of the landmark “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948 and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953. Pomeroy conducted 8,000 of the two-volume study’s 18,000 interviews with individuals about their sexual preferences and practices.

Scientific tomes, the two volumes became bestsellers and set off a storm of protests, smirks and jokes over their frank discussion of such topics as homosexuality and premarital and extramarital sex.

Years after Kinsey’s death in 1956, Pomeroy profiled the kindly biology professor and how the study was made in the 1972 biography, “Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research.”

In the book, Pomeroy attributed Kinsey’s success in such a taboo research field to his remarkable ability to empathize and induce people to discuss their intimate sex lives.

Pomeroy should know. He met Kinsey after the doctor addressed a group of social workers on the topic of sex and prisons. A clinical psychologist for the Indiana Reformatory at Pendleton and the South Bend welfare department, Pomeroy introduced himself after the speech--only to be questioned by Kinsey about his own sex habits.

“I found myself telling him things I had never dreamed of telling anyone else,” Pomeroy wrote in his Kinsey biography. “Occasionally, as he deftly and persistently questioned me, I hesitated a moment, but then I said to myself, ‘Of course. I must.’ ”

Pomeroy also pointed out in the book that Kinsey, whom he described as “one of the great persuaders of his time,” was very uncomfortable in social situations and “simply froze up and could not ask for money” from potential institute benefactors.

Robert Kirsch, in reviewing the biography for The Times nearly three decades ago, praised Pomeroy for providing insight into a “complex and paradoxical” Eagle Scout and devoted family man who, in his scientific revelations about sex, unwittingly became instantly famous.

“Although an official biography, and a sympathetic one at that, this is also an admirably candid book,” an Atlantic Monthly review stated. “No attempt has been made to disguise Kinsey’s failings. Pomeroy characterizes him as warm, persuasive, enthusiastic, yet at the same time driven, authoritarian, and totally intolerant of criticism. Above all he emerges as a man of great passion.”

Pomeroy, born in Kalamazoo, Mich., was educated at Indiana and Columbia universities and served as director of field research for the Kinsey Institute. He left in 1963, disagreeing with its shift from interviewing subjects in the years after Kinsey’s death, and moved to New York, where he became a marriage counselor. In 1976, he relocated to San Francisco as academic dean of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

And he wrote. In addition to his Kinsey biography, Pomeroy was probably best known for two books aimed at adolescents: “Boys and Sex” in 1968 and “Girls and Sex” in 1970. He updated both in 1991, telling the Chicago Tribune: “Even though sex isn’t the mystery it once was, the same old problems and the same old areas of misinformation seem to crop up generation after generation.”

Like the books he worked on with Kinsey, the two small volumes drew pats and pans, earning the distinction, said the American Library Assn., of being among the 100 books most often mentioned by people seeking to ban books in the 1990s.

Asked by the Ladies Home Journal what he would advise a teenage daughter about sex, love and marriage, Pomeroy said in 1984: “I’d explain that sex is fun, and that it doesn’t have to lead to pregnancy or VD unless she lets it. I’d tell her there are many different ways to enjoy sex, that it’s possible to feel sexually attracted to someone without being in love.”

Pomeroy’s expertise made him popular on the witness stand as well as at the lecture podium. In 1977, he became an unlikely defender of Al Goldstein’s Screw and Smut magazines in an obscenity trial when he told a federal jury in Kansas City, Kan., that the publications “would appeal to an erotic interest in sex [which he considered healthy] but not to a prurient interest.” U.S. Supreme Court guidelines at the time defined obscene as appealing to a prurient or unhealthy interest in sex.

Pomeroy is survived by his wife of 64 years, Martha Sindlinger Pomeroy; two sons, David of Spring Valley, N.Y., and John Eric of Los Angeles; a daughter, Mary Lynne of Bloomfield, Ind.; and six grandchildren.