Although the Institute had an independent legal status, it was housed on the Indiana University campus, and the University managed its finances. In 1981, the Institute's name was changed to the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Kinsey's death. In 1982, the name was changed again to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in order to reflect its expanded research mission.

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The original staff was composed of the senior members of Kinsey's research team: Wardell B. Pomeroy, the first researcher Kinsey hired to conduct interviews of individuals regarding their sexual history; Paul Gebhard, a Harvard trained anthropologist; and Clyde Martin, an economist and statistician. Kinsey himself, a Professor of Zoology at the University, was the Institute's first director, a position he held until his death in 1956.

Initially, the Institute's work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through the National Research Council's Committee on Sex Research, which was headed by Robert M. Yerkes, the leading authority on primate behavior.

The Foundation was the primary sponsor of Kinsey's research from 1938 to 1954. Later the Institute's income was supplemented by the royalties from the two volumes published by the Kinsey group: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953.

Following the publication of the female volume, the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its financial support. It was being threatened by a Congressional investigation for its support of Kinsey's research.

After Kinsey's death in 1956, the Institute received substantial support from the National Institute for Mental Health, a branch of the Federal government, for a number of its research projects.

Paul Gebhard succeeded Kinsey as director of the Institute. Under Gebhard's capable leadership the Institute proceeded to publish the work initiated under Kinsey's guidance: a book on pregnancy, birth, and abortion (1958) and a study of sex offenders and the law (1965).

Subsequently, the Institute conducted pioneering studies of homosexuality and the military, the sex lives of college students (1967), and male homosexuality (1966-1969). Other significant works produced by the Kinsey Institute during the Gebhard years include Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg's Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women (1978) and Alan Bell, Martin Weinberg, and Sue Hammersmith's Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women (1981). Gebhard remained director until 1982.

Gebhard was succeeded as director of the Institute by June Reinisch. Her tenure as director was a turbulent one, marked by controversies over access to materials in the Institute's extensive archival collection of photography and film documenting sexual behavior, the role of sex research in the AIDS crisis, and the appropriateness of Reinisch's role as a syndicated sex advice columnist.

Reinisch resigned in 1993. Stephanie Sander served as interim director until 1995, when John Bancroft was appointed director.

Under Bancroft's guidance, the Institute has sought to recapture its place as the leading research institution on sexuality. It has developed extensive clinical and medical research on reproduction, gender, and sexual health.

The Institute is known for its extensive collection of materials on sexuality, including a vast library of erotica.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

Although sparse in images documenting the gay community, pre-Stonewall gay male photography blurs the boundaries between art, erotica, and social history.

The sexual revolution of post-World War II America changed sexual and gender roles profoundly.

In Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956), author, poet, translator, and librarian Jeannette Howard Foster established the groundwork for research into lesbian literature.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.

American photographer George Platt Lynes made his fame as a fashion and portrait photographer, but his greatest work may have been his dance images and male nudes.

American activist and scientist Bruce Voeller was a leader in both the gay rights movement and the fight against AIDS.

American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.