Daily Inspiration Quote by Bill Condon

Kinsey, in Condon's telling, isn’t offering a permissive slogan so much as a rebuke to identity hardening into self-surveillance. The line aims at a familiar modern reflex: take what you do in bed, convert it into a label, then build a whole personal brand around the label. Condon invokes Kinsey to suggest that this move can be narrowing, even when it’s meant to be liberating. It’s an argument for appetite, contradiction, and drift - for the messy fact that desire doesn’t always behave like a political affiliation.

The subtext is quietly pointed at two audiences at once. On one side, a culture that polices “deviance” by reducing people to acts; on the other, a culture that sometimes treats naming as the final stage of self-knowledge. Condon’s phrasing (“anybody who defined themselves”) sidesteps a direct attack on queer identity while still warning against identity becoming a cage. It’s less “labels are bad” than “don’t let a label do your living for you.”

Context matters because Kinsey’s work arrived before today’s identity framework solidified; he categorized behaviors, not souls. Condon, as a director drawn to stories about sexuality and social rules, reaches for Kinsey as a patron saint of ambiguity: someone who made room for a spectrum without demanding that everyone pick a team. The line works because it reframes “freedom” not as endless self-definition, but as the right to remain unfinished.