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

Restoration drama where I teetered about in fake eighteenth-century boots with high heels and fought a duel with one of the school’s true hotties, an assessment I was lucky enough to confirm from personal experience before the year was out. I also took up debate and participated in the tournaments in which our coach entered us throughout the Midwest. The debate society was a very serious group of students who never in any way acknowledged that they might have heard of the scandalous doings of their newest member. After a meet, their enthusiastic approval was registered by a restrained “Well done,” voiced together with a pat on the back.
    The national debate organization had set “Socialized Medicine: Good or Bad?” for the topic in the school academic year 1946–47. For this they sent out a large booklet containing materials for study so that the debaters would be well prepared on the subject. It led me to a surprising minor career for the rest of my high school years: the writing of term papers for students at the State University of Iowa. I say minor career, but in fact it was a major intellectual stimulus for a teenage boy. It all began when I encountered a former City High student bemoaning the assignment that confronted her for a longish paper on socialized medicine. “Gee, I could write that for you, Dottie,” were the first words out of my mouth, and history was made. She got an A for my ten-page effort; I got ten dollars at a dollar a page. It was not long before her friends sought me out, and I set up a system: supply the topic, the relevant books from the university library, give me a week, and you would have your paper. My second masterpiece was “The Annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the First World War,” another A. The requests came thick and fast. My sainted mother, president of the school board, was sufficiently insouciant to write endless classroom excuses so that I could stay home to sit at the card table I had set up in the living room to manage my term-paper factory.
    I branched out, buying back used papers, as it were, at half price, and retyping them for someone else’s submission. I naturally charged less for these, seventy-five cents a page, as I remember, but there was little to fear. This was the era of the GI invasion of the university; general education humanities courses could have an enrollment of up to a thousand, and tired graders could only remember so much. I am sure the Declaration of Independence would have slipped through. What interested me in reviewing the grades of papers sold and bought back several times was the range. I grew to believe that teachers tend to dole out the grades that they fancy the student deserves rather than what the specific work suggests. Nothing in my later teaching career has made me think otherwise, for which reason I always tell youngsters go for the A’s at the start, then sit on your ass, and the A’s will keep rolling in. I am always amused at horrified responses to my term-paper-writing anecdote, which stress my years as a university professor, as though a seventeen-year-old boy is thinking of academic values. Those who question my willingness to practice something dishonest, if not illegal, forget that a homosexual in the forties was liable to a prison sentence if caught by the police in flagrante . Thus, for someone outside the law, the practice of paper-writing might be considered no more than a logical extension. I quickly learned how little the teaching faculty valued the papers as a genuine form of dialogue, and grew indifferent. But it did influence me in making term-paper assignments throughout my career, where I have tried as far as possible to tailor the topics precisely to the terms and values of discussion employed in the class.
    My term-paper-writing business would never have gotten off the ground if I had not started the first semester of my junior year with a course in typing. I was not the least bit prescient, but anxious