My philosophy is that you must not treat the reader as if he had all eternity to read your blessed books. In the classroom, his concern for both style and substance has led him beyond the traditional sources of intellectual history. Robinson's students examine novels and music along with the more usual political and philosophical treatises. A 1962 Yale graduate with a Harvard PhD, he has won plenty of teaching awards and academic honors during his 32 years at Stanford, building an international reputation as a scholar of Freud and the history of music. And then there's sex.
Students have a similar take.
He's fascinated by sex and is a constant, funny critic of puritanism. Robinson began to think about writing Gay Lives soon after finishing a fourth work, Freud and His Critics, in 1993. Fidelio in 1996, then spent a year on sabbatical at the Stanford Humanities Center working on the new manuscript. Robinson recalls doing all his reading for the book stretched out on a couch in the campus home he shares with his longtime partner, Steve Dunatov, a financial analyst at the Medical School. He doubts he'll ever write a book about his own romantic life.