My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey by Charles Rowan Beye Page A

met and hooked up with plenty of gay men here and there on the sidewalks of New York, but as far as negotiating the bars and the gay scene, I seemed to be a failure. As luck would have it, a case of gonorrhea forced me back to Iowa, back where I knew doctors who would give me discreet treatment, and where I could go back to the university. There were plenty of sympathetic doctors and clinics in New York, obviously, so I must have wanted to go home. The noble experiment was over. “Noble” I say with irony, thinking of all the brilliant gay youngsters who came to the city and stayed to make a name for themselves. Was I a simpleminded wimp or was this the way it was supposed to be? To this day I cannot decide.
    Back home the doctor who treated me required that I give up sex for six months, and so I turned all my energies to study. At this point my intellectual self had been formed from my extensive reading as an invalided youth, the many classic films I saw in the MoMA film series shown at the State University of Iowa throughout my earlier teen years, and the rigor and discipline of researching and writing on all conceivable subjects for college-level term papers. I enrolled in Intensive Ancient Greek, which with doubled class hours and extended assignments brought the student enough mastery to move into second-year coursework after one term. And why Greek? I had hated Latin in high school, although I did well enough in it. The previous summer, however, in shopping at registration for courses I discovered something worth only two credits called The Love Poems of Horace and Catullus. It sounded like an easy A, and I enrolled. The instructor that summer was intellectually seductive enough that I followed him into Intensive Greek and thereafter into courses in the literature of Greek, and from there I went on to be a classics major. That was the summer term of 1949. Almost half a century later I was to retire from my endowed chair as Distinguished Professor of Classics at the City University of New York, author of six or seven books and maybe fifty articles, mostly on the subject of ancient Greek literature or the civilization. I had found my life’s work; what is more, I had found in me a passion, an obsession, really, that for years rivaled what riveted me to another human being. I guess I might say that it was the Great Love Affair of my life. And, having sympathetically listened to so many young people flounder about trying to figure out what interests them, I am deeply grateful that I found a life’s calling, and so early on. Perhaps it made me narrow in some ways, because it wasn’t until I retired that I really started to study other matters in some detail, European history or economics, for example. But for decades my absorption in the study of antiquity, particularly ancient Greek literature, gave me real coherence and purpose.
    I ran across Dottie, my initial term-paper client, who introduced me to a male couple. Dottie’s friends were the first two men whom I had ever encountered who were committed to each other and obviously in love. Somehow I had lived in this small town all my life and never fully recognized that there must be a pool of potential lovers on the one hand and a place where they congregated on the other. These sweet guys recognized me for the naïf I was, and promised to take me to the gay bar that sat on the street bordering the campus. For over two years I had been a regular at the bar next door, owned and run by a father of a high school friend, but somehow never noticed that a very different clientele was patronizing its neighbor. I suppose they wouldn’t serve minors, so I never entered. It wasn’t exactly a gay bar, but rather the bar where the university’s students of drama, writing, and music congregated, which tended to include the gay population as well. So it was a bar in which one could wave one’s hands, flit about, in general behave as differently as possible from the patrons of