What was the importance of Alfred Kinsey's study of human sexual behavior in America?

Alfred Kinsey's study of human sexual behavior in America established the great discrepancy between public standards of sexual behavior and actual practice. It revealed an enormous diversity of sexual practices in men and women. He devised the Kinsey scale to represent a proportion of an individual's sexual behaviors with the same or other sex. He found that many people had same-sex sexual experiences, and he discovered that sexual preferences could change over the course of a person's lifetime.