“The feeling always was that if I could express myself erotically I could come alive,” he confessed in his journal. The evil is anxiety, an anxiety that can take on all the shapes and colors of hopeless passion.” Unfortunately, however lucid Cheever could be at times about his condition, he was never fully able to control his anxiety and give himself over to a hopeful passion with another male (at least possibly not until the last years of his life). Homosexuality is not, as I live it, an evil. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol. … If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. As an adult, he recognized that for his younger self, “homosexuality seemed to me a lingering death. Such perpetual tension contributed to what he sardonically termed “my gin-drinking distemper”-that is, an alcoholism so extreme that he eventually suffered multiple grand mal seizures attributed to what was then called Organic Brain Syndrome.Ĭheever’s sexual anxieties became deeply rooted during adolescence. “I suffer, from time to time, the painful need for male tenderness, but I cannot perform with a man without wrecking my self-esteem,” Cheever wrote with admirable objectivity around 1968. Yet Cheever’s own drive to have sex with other men was so strong that once he discovered that the public lavatories in Grand Central Station offered around-the-clock opportunities for homosexual hook-ups, the temptation to indulge himself proved so great that he came to feel “threatened by an erotic abyss” when taking a train into or out of the city. On one occasion he was chilled to overhear her ask guests at dinner, “What is worse for a woman: to marry a man with a bad prostate or to marry a homosexual?” His concern was not for the impossible situation that his sexual conflict had created for his wife, but that their dinner guests might infer his secret from Mary’s loose talk.Ĭheever’s journals and letters reveal his disgust with the type of “offensive homosexual” increasingly in evidence on the streets of New York beginning in the late 1960’s-long-haired men in tight jeans whose very manner of walking seemed to announce their delight in “taking it up the ass.” Clearly, the lack of discretion evinced by such men concerned him more than their presumed sexual propensities. For example, his journals record innumerable arguments with, or extended periods of cold silence from, his wife, Mary, with whom he remained married for 41 years and raised three children. “I have homosexual instincts and … they are a source of painful anxiety,” he confesses in his journal “the thought of being a homosexual terrifies me.” But he seems to have been particularly worried, not that any “hint of aberrant carnality” that he might emit had already been recognized by other people, but that such information might circulate more widely and undercut his carefully constructed persona as a New England country gentleman. It bears noting that in Cheever’s mind his homosexuality was a “semi secret” and not a full-fledged one. For most of his career he found it necessary to scrutinize his work and his behavior for any evidence of “leakage” of that unspoken truth. “I WOULD NOT like to be the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semi secret,” John Cheever confided in his journal in an entry that begins by recording a quarrel with his wife Mary “about lingering glances.” He goes on to record that while traveling later that day on the night train from New York City to Boston to visit his mother during what would be her final illness, he found that the private compartment he’d booked seemed to invite “erotic misdemeanor.” He also records that, following his arrival, he flinched during his conversation with his mother when she observed that someone with whom Cheever had grown up was “a regular boy” (Cheever’s emphasis).Ĭheever’s journals reveal his fear of his own homosexuality, in particular his fear that he might betray-or that others might perceive-what he is desperate to keep hidden: that his wife follows his gaze as it lingers on other men, that he indulges in an assignation with another man in the anonymity of a private train compartment, or that his highly critical mother caustically insinuates that he’s “irregular” sexually.