Charles rowan beye biography examples

Lets Get Married. Falling in Love with Love. Be Nice to Each Other. Someday My Prince Will Come. The places that employed him should sue for his using university property to carry out his affairs with students. He uses hate speech against multiple groups. He broke all academic ethical and moral standards. He should be ashamed. Instead he praises himself.

Yes, this is true insight into the mind of gays and academics Author 28 books followers. A curious perspective from a man who had relationships with other men in the '50s and through the present day. He acknowledges himself as oversexed, and, despite this assessment which could be an entry point to understanding others, since it posits itself in relation to what might be considered "normally sexed"he does not manage to universalize his experiences and insights.

He didn't have a very easy road with his charles rowan beye biography examples, wives, and children, but all the same, his road was easier than that of many others, and he doesn't dwell the question of what it might have been like for others. Of the seemingly dozens of men he had sex with, he claims that all were under 30 until he finally met his husband when the two of them were middle-age and nearing retirement.

It's never explained why he always preferred younger men, whether that was a conscious or deliberate choice on his part, and why his relationship with a man in an older age bracket was the first one that ever really lasted. That he elects brevity and confidentiality about his current marriage is understandable, but, as a result, we don't learn if his current marriage is sexually monogamous, so we don't know if his prior infidelities to his two wives had to do with their female sex, his younger age, or his lifelong sexual style regardless of whether he's in a straight or gay marriage.

We hear about those prior infidelities at length -- it's what the book is about -- but we don't ever quite come to fully know what they were about, other than that the author was a gay man married to women. His repeated references to his own great wit could have benefited from a "show, don't tell" literary approach. It seemed that there was little dialogue in the book, reconstructed or otherwise, at least relative to all the dinner party activity that supposedly took place, and thus not many opportunities to demonstrate how it was that he made all these conquests.

One does not know whether to be insanely jealous or insanely relieved at not having such a vast horde of partners in crime who loom in the memory in such excruciating detail. It might be a burden, after all. Not exactly Dynasty or The Forsyte saga, but a family, nonetheless" Better Charlie's saga, a saga full of emotional torment, sexual adventures, experiments, love of learning and finally a prince charming - which very well illustrates the saying: "it's never too late"!

Being a memoir written by a professor you would expect a pompous language, quite dry, but it's definitely not the case here. I found it quite emotional, engaging and quite entertaining. I beg your pardon? Charles Lor. A book about a straight man who blows guys on the side. Certainly not 80 years of life as a gay man.

Charles rowan beye biography examples

Marketed as a "gay memoir" it is full of male-male sex, but nothing I would call "gay" in the cultural sense of the term. The author admits, the closest he's ever come to the gay community is the very few bars he's been in and where he "never felt comfortable". Never does his life intersect with the gay community, which means that we never have any insight on the evolution of gay perception, culture etc.

So it goes on for pages of tedious straighthood: a boyhood of consorting with his straight comrades who all want blowjobs from him, then two heterosexual marriages both with lots of very hot great sex, apparently, leading me to firmly believe the author is bisexual, not gay and a brilliantly successful life in academics. Everything is recounted in the most boring self-congratulatory manner you can imagine.

He's handsome and everyone wants him, and also he's brilliant and although with false modesty he likes to say he doesn't charles rowan beye biography examples why he's the star teacher of every school he goes to. In the end, he is the ultimate parasite and opportunist: When it's convenient he marries women, takes advantage of them especially his second wife, by having four children with her and then basically forcing her to abandon her career to raise them because he's sure not abandoning hisall the while cheating on her and blowing random guys, and then when it's finally OK to be gay through no activism of his own!

I read from beginning to end, and not everything is bad in this book. But be prepared to read a book about a straight man who blows guys on the side. I'll give you three stars, Charles, but with some major reservations. I will say that I was hoping to hear more about your three marriages, instead I got a long, long list of every single sexual encounter you ever had--and you had a LOT!

NOT what I was looking for. But you did lead a very full life and the funny thing is you are not afraid or ashamed of some very bad behavior which you quite unabashadly recount along with everything else. I found your tone quite nice, I must say because you sort of bounce along as if I am sitting in the room with you and you are dishing on all of your conquests.

Why didn't you spend more time describing your last marriage, the happy one with your husband? Maybe because you want to keep it private, I can understand that. But your title suggests that your main focus will be your marriages and that isn't the case. If I had known what your memoir would turn out to be I probably wouldn't have read it, but I did and well, now I know what it's like to live a long long life as a gay man in a time when gayness was still quite edgy.

I think, Charles, you are incredibly self indulgent both as a person and as a writer. You have completely lived life on your own terms. To quote a typo from the book, I may be suffering from "an access of goodwill" giving this book more than one star. I found the author's life interesting, and especially enjoyed his description of his own family, notably his stuck-in-the-Victorian-era mother.

Unfortunately, the majority of this book when not making asinine sociological comments or digressing into his Classics scholarship is an endless parade of sex scenes, each more improbable than the next. He had sex with men, women, Blacks, Hispanics, whites, students, colleagues, taxi-drivers, hitchhikers, on a boat, on a train, in a car a lot!

It's a tedious page-turner, if that's possible. It'll shock the bourgeoisie, as Flaubert would have it, and if you're not big on sympathizing with sexual predators, it might shock you. He explains at the beginning of the book the reasons for the sexually explicit content, but I thought it was superfluous. The reader gained nothing in knowing those nitty gritty details.

I felt uncomfortable with him having sexual relations with students. Breezy, easy to read, and would compel most readers under the age of, say, 50 or 60, to reconsider some of what they think they know about prejudice and sexuality in decades past. A valuable document! I think I need to stay away from autobiographies; I'm realizing that I don't like reading about people who talk about themselves as if they're the most interesting person they know.

So much of this book's tone was self-centered and arrogant, and the author's candidness seems like an excuse to create shock value. This book was little more than a blowhard keeping record of his 'scandalously' extensive sex life. At the risk of being uncharitable, nothing says "shoe-gazing memoir" like endless tales of promiscuous sex intermixed with egotistical academic puffery.

Disappointing, to say the least. Nevertheless they do marry, happily, and when Mary suddenly dies of a freak heart condition a few years later, Beye remarries and fathers four children — all along maintaining his core identity as a gay man and enjoying an abundant sex life, described in great fleshy detail here, with gay and straight men.

Beye's story is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon. While he seems to have been blessedly free of the standard sexual guilt growing up, he was also acutely aware of the cost of being different. Here, for instance, is how Beye recalls a Christmas dance his mother made him host at their house during high school:. As emotionally charged as Beye's moments of sexual self-scrutiny can be, he's downright sarcastic when talking about his public career in academia.

Now retired, Beye was a professor of ancient Greek, and he came of academic age in the era when an old boys' network of hail-fellow-well-met senior professors arranged jobs for their acolytes over martini-soaked dinners. Sloshing into one of those positions at Stanford, Beye confronts a lineup of eccentrically hostile colleagues. When he dares to pipe up at a faculty meeting, one of those colleagues, a rare elderly lady, turns to him and shouts, "Shut up, you mutt, you're new here.

Beye's memoir ends on a joyous note. Sign in with Facebook Sign in options. Join Goodreads. Combine Editions. Charles Rowan Beye Average rating: 3. Euripides. Charles Rowan Beye.