"Every-bit-as-good-as-gay": Restyling heterosexuality in 1940s New York

Abstract

The relationship of novelist Mary McCarthy and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, is an example of the rise and fall of a particular kind of heterosexuality in 1940s and 1950s urban America: the �nongay, every-bit-as-good-as-gay� male partner. This article describes the course of this marriage and links its unusual aspects to a resistant culture that developed at Harvard during the 1940s, inspired by the life and work of the British novelist Ronald Firbank. It traces the marriage�s failure to the developing hostility, during the 1950s, to the experimental new relationships that were part of that culture. Show more