Love & Passion Quote by Bill Condon

Kinsey, in Condon's framing, isn't just a researcher with a clipboard; he's a would-be sanitation worker for American morality, trying to scrub sex clean of the grime of sermon and shame. The line is doing two things at once: defending Kinsey's project as modern and empirically minded, while admitting how impossible that purity is. "Overlay" is the tell. It treats culture and religion like a removable film, a distortion that can be peeled back to reveal the "real" thing underneath. That's a director talking: the fantasy of getting to the unmediated image, the unedited truth.

Condon's specific intent is to re-center Kinsey as a scientist rather than a provocateur, which matters because the public memory of Kinsey often collapses into a single headline: the guy who talked about orgasms. By insisting on "scientifically", Condon is also staging a culture-war rebuttal. The quote implies that resistance to Kinsey wasn't about method; it was about authority. Who gets to define sex: the lab or the pulpit? Data or doctrine?

The subtext is that sex is never just behavior; it's a story societies tell to manage power, gender, family, and conformity. Kinsey's attempt to strip away that story reads, to supporters, as liberation and honesty; to opponents, as vandalism of social order. Condon, as a filmmaker drawn to taboo and institutions, recognizes the drama in that collision: a man trying to quantify what a culture insists must be controlled, confessed, or punished.