Off the Scale
Before 1948, you were either heterosexual or homosexual — the way a light switch is either on or off.
Alfred Kinsey replaced the switch with a dial. His 0-to-6 scale, published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, plotted orientation as a continuum — exclusively heterosexual at one end, exclusively homosexual at the other, five positions between. Interviews with thousands of Americans showed people scattered across the entire range, not clustered at two poles.
The scale is crude by modern standards. It tracks behaviour, not attraction or identity — collapsing a multidimensional experience onto a single axis. Fritz Klein‘s 1978 Sexual Orientation Grid added seven dimensions and a time component, acknowledging that who you sleep with, who you fantasise about, and who you fall in love with don’t always point in the same direction.
But Kinsey’s real contribution isn’t the tool. It’s the conceptual move: replacing a binary with a continuum. The electromagnetic spectrum did the same thing for light. The autism spectrum did it for neurodevelopment. Each time, the shift reveals something uncomfortable — the people who didn’t fit the binary were always there. The measurement just couldn’t see them.
Kinsey even hinted at this within his own work. He included a category “X” for people reporting no sexual attraction at all — then placed it outside the spectrum entirely. The tool that made one invisible population visible still had its own blind spot.
Every spectrum has edges.