A Busman’s Holiday in the Not-So-Lonely Crowd: Business Culture, Epistolary Networks, and Itinerant Homosexuality in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

On 22 September 1946 an Iowa insurance executive named Don Hutchings wrote to his friend Stewart Howe about a recent trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where he was interviewing for a new job. While out socializing with his prospective boss and the boss’s wife, Hutchings found much of interest among what he called the “congenial and hospitable” “Madisonites”: “The vibrations about the bars were extremely fascinating as well as distracting, and I am certain one could go on a busman’s holiday with a degree of ease—I always hate myself afterwards for not having taken advantage of opportunities. Mayhaps the return engagement will be played with brighter lights ablazing.”¹ Indeed, many of Hutchings’s business trips presented him with numerous opportunities for sex with other men. On those occasions when he was unaccompanied by a prospective employer he was easily able to take advantage of those opportunities.

Hutchings was not alone. Thanks to a developing midcentury business culture that demanded extensive amounts of travel, men like Don Hutchings and his friend Stewart Howe often found themselves surrounded almost exclusively by other men, some of whom, like Hutchings and Howe, were interested in having sex with each other. That Hutchings used the expression “a busman’s holiday”—that is, a vacation doing an activity that closely resembles one’s work, the way a bus driver might take a vacation on a bus—indicates his cognizance of the degree to which his business and sexual lives were inextricably bound up in one another.

Hutchings’s experiences and countless others like them—detailed in a cache of correspondence between about fifty gay men, upon which this article is based—allow the historian a window into a version of midcentury masculinity very different from the one to which we have become accustomed.² Contemporary accounts of middle-class midcentury men—most famous among them David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, as well as Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman—tell us that white middle-class businessmen were stuck in a conformist rut of endless meetings, conferences, and general drudgery. Yet no matter how much their actual work lives might also be characterized this way, Hutchings, Howe, and their many friends and acquaintances were also having a very different set of experiences. The business culture that was the bedrock of Cold War heterosexuality and masculinity (themselves tightly entwined) was also what allowed many men to pursue vibrant queer social and sexual lives.³

While on its face this assertion flies in the face of most recent scholarship both on Cold War gender ideologies and on the persecution of gays and lesbians, it is also not all that surprising that a workforce composed almost exclusively of men—at least at the level above that of secretary—should have led to homosexual practices among at least some of its participants.⁴ Despite media representations and misguided nostalgia to the contrary, it makes sense that in an era in which men were likelier to be absent from their homes for work, some of them might have been doing something other than work during those absences. As the interstate highway system grew by leaps and bounds, as car ownership climbed steadily upward, as developments in commercial aviation made cross-country flights increasingly affordable, and as annual conferences of countless organizations increased the transience of great masses of men in cities across the country, it should not surprise us that all these developments were put to queer ends as well. And yet the stories told both of masculinity and of male homosexuality during the 1940s and 1950s are generally bound up in repression: the stultifying effect of Cold War ideologies of normalcy both for presumptively heterosexual men and for the gay men who were persecuted at the war’s end.⁵

This article uses the experiences...