I looked him up and found out that he was gay/bi, thanks to Seinfeld episode.
So who did he hook up with, besides his brother?
His wiki has a strange paragraph about their relationship with each other:
[quote] Cheever's older brother Fred, forced to withdraw from Dartmouth in 1926 because of the family's financial crisis, re-entered Cheever's life "when the situation was most painful and critical", as Cheever later wrote. After the 1932 crash of Kreuger & Toll, in which Frederick Cheever had invested what was left of his money, the Cheever house on Winthrop Avenue was lost to foreclosure.
[quote] The parents separated, while John and Fred took an apartment together on Beacon Hill, in Boston. In 1933, John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director of the Yaddo artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York: "The idea of leaving the city", he said, "has never been so distant or desirable." Ames denied his first application but offered him a place the following year, whereupon Cheever decided to sever his "ungainly attachment" to his brother.
I had to look up "ungainly," and it means awkward or clumsy. That's a strange way to describe his "attachment" to his brother.
Then his sexuality was described this way:
[quote] Variously described as gay, homosexual, or bisexual, Cheever had relationships with both men and women, including a short relationship with composer Ned Rorem and an affair with actress Hope Lange. Cheever's longest affair was with a student of his, Max Zimmer, who lived in the Cheever family home. Cheever's daughter, Susan, described her parents' marriage as "European", saying: "they were people who felt their feelings weren't necessarily a reason to shatter a family. They certainly hurt each other plenty but they didn't necessarily see that as a reason for divorce."
He seemed like a very talented gay/bi man, but we hardly hear about him very much.