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Love with a Plato Scholar

Meanwhile, I had been dating a guy 15 years my senior for a while. Though Merrill looked like Ichabod Crane, he was a gentle and loving person.

(Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams” [1983])

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something

fade out)

I had met Merrill at a Philosophy of Education national conference in San Francisco in 1979, where he was giving the paper, “Plato on Can Sex Make Us Good?” I thought at the time that if ever there were a clue about a guy’s sexuality in an academic paper, this was it. So I introduced myself to him, but as fortune would have it, we didn’t hook up until two years later, after a protracted correspondence.

(Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams” … )

Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

fade out)

He later achieved some national recognition by writing “Diary of a Sit-In,” which describes his participation in a lunch-counter integration campaign while he was a Presbyterian minister in Knoxville, Tennessee in the early 1960s.

I may have been the first guy that ever returned to Merrill the same quality of love that he gave to me. I had gratefully settled into this relationship, but once again, for the final time, my passions were to interrupt a good thing.

(Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams” and fade out)

Hold your head up, keep your head up, movin’ on
Hold your head up, movin’ on, keep your head up, movin’ on

fade out)

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