The conservative icon and his hustlers

Allan Bloom met his end in a nightmare of AIDS, secrets and sex with Black teenagers

He was born in 1930, a Jew from Indiana. To look back over his life is to see a man who was constantly revealing and concealing himself.

In a 1987 interview he mentioned he’d been an unhappy child — and was asked to elaborate.

“That’s largely personal,” he replied, darting to another subject.

collage: “Toy Boy” (Twitter); Allan Bloom in 1987 (publicity photo)

As a university professor he was brilliant, elegant, outrageously colorful.

In a eulogy, a former student recalls:

“He would walk into class dressed in one of his dazzling Italian suits, carrying his elegant leather briefcase, smoking with gusto, and invariably chatting or joking with a student.… And then he would begin, to speak and to smoke, to laugh and to frown, to pace and to gesticulate, to shock and to charm, somehow all at the same time.”

When he discussed a writer he became that writer. As his close friend Werner Dannhauser recalled: “When he spoke of Plato he struck one as somebody trying to become Plato, just as later he turned Shakespearean when…