Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (10 page)

“The house I was born in was built of logs and we lived in that house until I was four years old—thirteen people in four rooms.” Cornelius Utz’s mother and nine of his ten siblings in front of their four-room log house, about 1905. Courtesy of Cornelius Utz.

One summer afternoon when I was five years old I was in the cow barn and George, our new hired man, approached me. He patted me on the head and placed his hand on my shoulder, then squatted and hugged me
gently. It felt good, so I let myself fall against him. We snuggled a bit, then he gently unbuttoned my pants and brought my penis out as if to help me pee, but I didn’t need to pee. Instead, my skinny little penis became erect and he fondled me a bit, producing a feeling I had never had before. I liked it, but I felt a little fear as well. George stood up and took his penis out, asking me to hold it, and I did. It was not as hard as mine, but it felt okay in my hand. I began to feel afraid, so I stopped holding his penis, returned mine to my trousers, buttoned up, and went back to the house. Not long after this, my mother told my sister and me that we should never go to the cow barn alone if George were there. Shortly thereafter, George was gone for good.

“I would also round up the sheep and bring them to the farmyard for protection from wolves and coyotes by night.” Courtesy of Cornelius Utz.

In one way or another, I had sex-play with six of my seven brothers— fondling and masturbating each other to orgasm, dry-fucking by pressing against each other. It usually occurred at night when we would be sleeping together, like it was happening in our dreams, and we never spoke about
it. I slept in my parents’ bed until I was four years old, but when we moved into the new house my oldest brother Millard and I shared a bed. He was seventeen years older than I. Some mornings, he would feel my penis and stimulate me until it got hard, but he would never let me touch his. It was very titillating in a way, but he said, “You really shouldn’t do this.” When I was older, Millard and I had some sex-play together, but I don’t think we ever came to orgasm together because “you shouldn’t do that.”

When I was five or six, I was out in a cornfield with my brother Lawrence, of whom I was quite fond. We both had to urinate, and he said, “Let me see your penis.” As he looked, it got hard and he pulled the foreskin back and cut it a little bit with his thumbnail, saying it looked like it was growing over the head of my penis. He was very tender and gentle with me, but I think that was a bit of sadism on his part. Later, when I was adolescent, Lawrence and I had a number of episodes of sex-play whenever we slept together. He sucked me, but I couldn’t suck him for any length of time—I guess because I wanted it so much that it gagged me. When I was probably thirteen, we had a black hired man. He and I had sex together a time or two, and shortly after that occurred my mother cautioned me that I should not do anything with him. I don’t know how she knew I had done anything, if she did, or whether it came to her attention that he had made out with one of my brothers.

I had suspicions, but I really denied like hell that I was “that way.” I grew up feeling that same-sex relations were immoral, and even to masturbate would cause you to have problems later. I masturbated an awful lot between twelve and sixteen or eighteen, sometimes two or three times a day. I would determine that I wasn’t going to do it again—”I’ll just do this now and I won’t do it again today or tomorrow”—but I was highly sexually stimulated and felt bad about my tremendous sex drive. There were times when I would get extraordinarily hard and almost painful erections as I was riding my horse, and there was nothing I could do to subdue them.

My father had jackasses that were bred to grade mares to produce work mules. He also had a large white stallion for breeding mares to produce grade work horses. I was never permitted to be out there when breeding was going on, and there was a high board fence around the barnyard so that you couldn’t see the breeding from the ground level, but from the window of my bedroom I could see what was going on and I would masturbate. I was highly excited by the animals. When cows are in heat they dribble something, and it would just drive me over the wall when our cows did that. It made me want to get up there and fuck them. We had an old mare who had been neutered and often when I was alone I would stick
my arm down her vagina. She didn’t seem to mind it at all. I tried to fuck her by standing on her hocks, but I wasn’t very successful.

In 1921, my father’s business failed and we lost the farm and everything. Two of my brothers who were renting a farm together let the remaining family move in with them, and we lived there for about two years. During those years, I slept a lot with my brother Lawrence and we had sex-play together. I was twelve or thirteen, and very interested in people slightly older. I was also highly stimulated by a very attractive hired hand they had. It was all I could do to keep my hands off of him. I wanted to play with his penis, and I thought it was just terrible that I had those kinds of feelings. That helped me restrain myself from acting on them.

I left the farm when I was fourteen. A sister and brother had established housekeeping in St. Joe, so we younger children lived with them and completed high school in the city. We had a coach in high school who really turned me on sexually. I loved being with him. He would shower with the rest of us and I would get a chance to see his equipment and fantasize about it. After football practice, those hunky football players would say, “How about a rubdown?” I loved doing it, and I’m sure it was sexually stimulating to them as it was to me. I became very adept at giving rubdowns.

I was highly attracted to a number of guys in high school, but I didn’t dare let it be known. To be a good, sturdy, non-sissy guy, you had to be interested in sports like football and basketball. I really tried to be an athlete because I wanted to emulate my brother Sam. He was the first and only other man in our family who went through college, and he was greatly admired by my parents for doing that. Sam called everybody and his dog a sissy that wasn’t a high-level football player. I really hated football, but I tried to play because it would make me more of a man.

The first time I had sex-play with Sam, I was on the track team in our high school. We had a track meet in Cameron, Missouri, where Sam was the coach. After the meet, he asked if I would like to stay overnight. We shared the bed where he roomed, and he initiated sex-play with me, which I welcomed. When I was in college in Columbia, he came down there on coaching business several times and spent the night with me and we would have sex-play. This was after he was married and had children. He told me that his wife was kind of nervous, like a Jersey cow.

In college, I heard about a biology professor who was homosexual. When I finally connected with him, he took me to a very lovely place in the country, a secluded and protected woodland area. We were enjoying the birds and the view when he put his arms around me, turned towards me and kissed me. That was the first time I’d ever been kissed by a man. He gave me a deep French kiss, which was highly exciting. We hugged
each other a bit and then went to his house. He lived with his mother, who was closeted in the back of the house and told never to interfere when he had guests. We went to his bedroom and disrobed and made love some more. I took his tongue in my mouth and put my tongue in his mouth. I played with his cock some, but I could never suck him without gagging. He always sucked me, and never seemed to expect me to relieve him through masturbation or anything.

He really introduced me to what it can mean to have gay sex. It was an idyllic experience. I would feel ashamed of myself, but whenever I felt horny I would call him and ask if he would be home a little later. He always said yes. To a great extent, this took care of my sexual needs throughout the rest of college. I really think he fell deeply in love with me, but I couldn’t allow myself to feel love for him, because that would make me a really full-blown “that way” person. (I didn’t become familiar with the word homosexual until I was in graduate school in social work.) I denied that I was completely male-sex-oriented.

I enjoyed being with girls, had relationships with a number of girlfriends, and did a hell of a lot of necking. I’m sure they all wanted me to fuck them, but I never could bring myself to go that far. Consciously, I was scared to death I would impregnate them and then I’d be hooked because it would only be honorable for me to marry. I wasn’t in a position to get married; I had no job, no capacity to support a family.

During my college years I carried on a correspondence with Karl, a friend from high school. It was a purely platonic relationship but I cared very much for him and he seemed to care very much for me. I asked if I could stop and visit him on my way to graduate school in New York. He was in graduate school in Philadelphia and lived in a neat little house out in the country with his roommate Ted, a biology professor. When it came time to go to bed, I was assigned a bed in the bedroom with Ted, upstairs, and Karl slept in the bedroom downstairs. Ted made a pass at me before we went to sleep and we had sex both nights I was there. The interchange was kind of electric between us, so that Ted and I developed a really wonderful relationship, and I continued to be a good friend of Karl’s.

During my years in school in New York, I would go down to Philadelphia when I could scrape up enough money to spend a weekend with them. They did wonderful things to entertain me, and Ted and I always had our reunions in the bedroom. After Karl developed a brain tumor and died, Ted would come to New York to spend weekends with me. He fell in love with me and really wanted me to make my home with him. I liked him, and I’m sure he would have supported me if need be, but I just could not allow a feeling of love.

In college, I had learned enough psychology to become more and more concerned that I was homosexual, and I had to restrain myself from telling this to my close friends. In graduate school, we deep-dished into Freudian psychology and my being queer descended on me more and more. About 1936, I decided I couldn’t live with it. I went to a female analyst—I was afraid to go to a male—and had a very comfortable interview with her. I didn’t hold back anything. She said she thought I should have analysis, and she did not think I should go to a woman. She put me in touch with a Dr. Wiggers.

When I told Dr. Wiggers about Ted, he said, “It’s up to you. I think if you continue seeing Ted you’re not going to be able to give this up. I don’t know whether you’ll be able to give it up if you
don’t
see him, but I don’t think there’s any chance of your coming through with a good heterosexual relationship if you continue seeing him.”
¹
The next time Ted came to visit, I told him that it would be our last weekend together—that I really wanted to see if I couldn’t work this out. He understood and said we could still be friends, and I said I’d love to be friends with him.

Analyses are never completed, but after five years Dr. Wiggers and I decided we were as far as we could go. I had gone six days a week for the first two years and five days a week for the rest of the time. I continued to see him from time to time to talk about things that were troubling me. He gave me a great deal of confidence in myself, and my skill as a social worker grew by leaps and bounds as a result of my analysis. I feel incredibly grateful for my treatment because it enabled me to function as well as I did throughout the rest of my life. It enabled me to have sex with a woman and enjoy it, and as a result of that I have two lovely children and four beautiful grandchildren. I feel that having children contributed inordinately to my growth and development as a person.

I met and courted my wife while I was in analysis. I no longer had the need to tell anybody I was gay, and I never discussed it with my wife. For a few years we had very good and satisfying sex, but I simply could not control the drive to have sex with men. If ever I was out of town I would pick up somebody and have a one-night stand. None of them were very pleasant experiences because I would be half-drunk. I almost became an alcoholic during my marriage, and I smoked very heavily.