The mid-twentieth-century traveling businessman has become an archetype: A lonely guy with a briefcase, traveling from one anonymous office to another, cut off from both deep social ties and his own deepest feelings. But, for a subset of these men, historian Nicholas L. Syrett writes, a life of business travel represented a sense of freedom that would have been impossible in earlier decades. Studying the letters of around 50 gay men, Syrett finds a hidden world of community, friendship, and sex that seem born of that particular era.
In the 1940s and ’50s, interstate highways, growing car ownership, and affordable flights turned travel into a standard part of business life, creating a unique masculine culture on the road. It’s not surprising, Syrett writes, 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.”
Many men who had sex with men in the pre-Stonewall era were deeply closeted, or else didn’t use their sexual behavior to define their identity at all. But Syrett writes that the 50 letter-writers he studied identified as gay, at least privately, and did not marry women. On the other hand, they didn’t necessarily move to big cities with visible gay communities either.
“Their primary experiences with gay culture seem to have come through travel and the connections that it fostered,” Syrett writes.