Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (11 page)

I couldn’t keep up my correspondence with Ted because I felt I would have to explain it to my wife, so I just quit writing and didn’t give him any explanation. He continued exchanging Christmas cards with one of my sisters, and every so often she would report to me what he was doing— that he was in the army in World War II, that he had moved from Philadelphia to Boulder. After my wife died in 1978, I got Ted’s address from my
sister and wrote him the kind of a letter you write to somebody thirty-five years later. I said I would love to hear from him if he felt like it. He wrote an incredibly nice letter back, inviting me to come and see him.

When I went to Boulder for a weekend to visit with Ted, I said I wanted to apologize for how I had terminated our relationship. He said, “Don’t think a thing about it. I knew you were trying to get over it, but I knew you were queer and would always be queer.” He said that it was in the genes and I couldn’t get it out. We had better sex on that visit than we’d had thirty-five years before. I visited him twice after that long interval of nothing, and we had a wonderful visit each time, highly meaningful and exhilarating. I fantasied going out there and living with him the rest of our lives, but I don’t think he wanted that, and I probably wouldn’t have done it. He died a couple of years ago, so that’s wiped out and washed up.

After my wife died, I decided to see what I could find out about the gay community, so I went to the baths on the west side in Cleveland. This was before the AIDS scare. While I was there I found out about Integrity and went to their next meeting.
²
One member of the group told me about somebody he had met who he thought really needed to talk to me—a fellow named Dave who was married and had a couple of kids. He gave me Dave’s phone number at work, and eventually we met for lunch and talked. He was not happy and he and his wife hadn’t had sex for years. I appreciated the struggle he was going through. He was still living with his wife, who was extraordinarily homophobic, and he didn’t have enough sense to keep quiet about his gayness with her.

To seal our beginning friendship, Dave and I hugged and had a nice deep French kiss. I got a letter from him saying he wanted to see me again, that he had been so excited as a result of our kiss that he had to go to a public restroom and jack it off. So we met again and had incredibly beautiful sex with each other—the best sex with any man I had ever had. He began writing me love letters, and he was the first man I ever allowed myself to really feel love for. We had a sustained relationship for several weeks and then suddenly he got anxious and tried to break it off. I was disappointed and saddened.

Dave and I came together a number of times after that and they were pleasant encounters, but his restraint affected my ability to put myself quite as freely into the sexual relationship. We were incredibly compatible otherwise. He appreciated my artwork, he was a cultured person, we liked a lot of the same things. He played with the idea of getting a divorce and setting up housekeeping with me, and I said if he did I’d come out of the closet. But I finally wrote Dave a letter, saying that I felt he was treating me like a prostitute the last few times, and that I didn’t want to continue
that kind of relationship. He wrote back and said, “I loved you very much, and I still do, but I can’t give up my relationship with my family. I’ve decided that’s the way it has to be. I was afraid that if I kept seeing you I would lose control of myself, and lose my job and my family.” As sad as it was, it was a beautiful experience, because it left me free to love other men. I don’t hold back feelings of love as I always did before, when I was trying to avoid being a homosexual. I feel a lot of love for other men, whether I have sex with them or not.

In 1979 I joined the Unitarian Universalists for Lesbian and Gay Concerns. Two years later I was one of the organizing members of our local chapter, but I was snug in the closet and insisted on confidentiality outside our meetings. In 1985 I attended a continental UULGC meeting in San Diego. Both the gay and straight members of the First Unitarian Church there were incredibly loving, accepting, and supportive. In that atmosphere I began to love myself enough to decide I would be who I was, and I determined to come out of the closet, come hell or high water. I had not yet gotten a foothold in the gay community and had been fearful that in coming out I might lose my straight friends and then would be bereft. With my newfound confidence as a result of learning to love myself, I felt that if my straight friends weren’t still my friends after I came out, they hadn’t been my friends before.

With that resolution, I came out to a friend of fifty years living in San Diego, a guy who had been in the short course in social work. It didn’t matter to him, and he said, “You’re speaking more freely now than I’ve ever seen. You don’t seem to be holding anything back now, as apparently you were before.” My niece, also there in San Diego, could tell that I was a little bit nervous as I was coming out to her at dinner. She reached across the table and grasped my hands and said, “Uncle Cornelius, you’ve always been very dear to me, and you always will be.” I thought, boy, this is not bad!

I wrote a letter to my two children and sent each of them a copy. My daughter and her husband were very accepting, and she’s very interested in my continuing reports about UULGC meetings and other things. When I have initiated the conversation with my son a couple of times, he has said, “It’s all right, but why do you have to say anything about it?” He said he couldn’t understand why I chose this, and when I said there is no choice, it’s in the genes, he said, “Well, you had a choice to give in to it.” I said, “I’m sorry, Dave, that I haven’t been able to handle this very well with you. I don’t think you’ve really understood what I’ve been trying to tell you. Maybe sometime I’ll find a way to make it clearer—I hope I can— but I may not be able to.” He’s been incredibly loving and caring and
concerned about me, but this is a struggle for him. He may be worried that he’s carrying that gene himself and that maybe his sons are too.

I don’t have a lover and probably won’t have, but I do have some people I occasionally play in the hay with. I have a lot of pen pals and some of them come to see me, so I have a love-in for two or three days. That’s the best I can do, and hope springs eternal. It’s reassuring to me at eighty-four that I can still get it off with joy. A man in Georgia has begged me to come and visit him. There’s something about the foreskin of an uncut older man that turns him on incredibly. But I feel that there should be a real feeling of love along with the sex experience. There’s an awful lot of emphasis on just getting it off. That may be pleasurable, but unless you can have a real feeling of love with your sexual partner, it doesn’t mean very much.

I’m not in the gay community that much. I used to go to the bars, but I wouldn’t put my foot inside one now because I can’t stand the smoke. I smoked and drank to take care of stress for too long. That’s why I have emphysema. And I got no fun out of being there. By the time I came out, I was so old that none of the young guys would look twice at me. They didn’t know how attractive I would be if they’d get to know me. There’s a group of older gay men that meets at somebody’s home on the west side, but I haven’t kept up with them because there was no one there who had any of the cultural or artistic interests that I do. For an ongoing relationship, those things are just as meaningful to me as sexual compatibility.

I’ve never felt comfortable in the gay community, but I have developed a pretty good tolerance for most gay people. We’re all in this together, and if we can’t love each other we’d better figure out where we’re going to find people to love. The church is my community. It was through my experience with the UULGC that I found I loved myself enough to come out. When I don’t show up at a meeting there are a lot of people who miss me, and they tell me so. I’m active on the Gay/Lesbian/Straight Task Force, which is working to combat homophobia in our church. I’m also in a men’s group at the church, and I’m very open there. I feel an incredible love for all the members of my men’s group and for people in the congregation of my church.

If I’m in a friendship that means anything to me and the person doesn’t know that I have a same-sex preference, I will mention it at some point. I haven’t really encountered any problems in being out with people that matter to me, and I’m not at a loss for friends. I’ve got my circle, both men and women. I came out to the social worker who interviewed me before I came to live here, but I haven’t mentioned it to anyone else here. I haven’t felt it would serve any special purpose. There’s a group of men here who
often eat in the dining room together. Every once in a while they’ll make denigrating statements about homosexuals, and I’ll say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with homosexuals. They’re human beings like all the rest of us.” That’s as far as I’ve gone. In spite of their homophobia, I feel a lot of love for those old bastards.

1.
The psychiatric treatment of gay men in this era is described in Peter M. Nardi, David Sanders, and Judd Marmor. 1994.
Growing Up before Stonewall: Life Stories of Some Gay Men.
New York: Routledge.

2.
Integrity, founded in 1974, is the gay and lesbian caucus of the Episcopal Church with chapters in many cities in the United States.

Robert was born in 1924, the oldest of five children, up on a poor scrub-sand farm of forty acres near Eagle River, in Vilas County, northern Wisconsin. He married and fathered four children. The author of more than thirty books of poetry, criticism, short stories, and plays, Robert retired in 1993 from teaching literature and writing at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his companion of many years, Paul Trachtenberg.

Robert Peters’ autobiographical poetry may be found in his
Poems: Selected and New, 1967-1991
(Asylum Arts, 1992). The autobiographical prose pieces that follow are excerpted from his
Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). In these excerpts, Old Crip is a rooster, Osmo Makinnen is the school bully, Lady is a cow, and Margie is Robert’s sister.

OLD CRIP DANCED on spurless legs, making deep-maw proprietary sounds. Once the hens were eating corn and chortling, he fed himself, keeping a wary eye on us.

We selected a large Rhode Island Red, one no longer laying. “Now,” Dad said. “Point the barrel at her eye; then pull the trigger slow”

An olio of feelings: I did not want to shoot. I did not want to displease Dad. Oblivious, the hen pecked at her corn.

The trigger felt like ice. My index finger seemed jointless.

“Now, do it right,” Dad warned.

The bird’s yellowish ear was a minuscule sun. Stunned, she chortled, rattled, and fell, clawed the air, stiffened, and then stilled. Dad whipped out a pocketknife and slit her throat. “Wasn’t too bad, was it?” He lifted the hen by its legs. “Nice fat one. Be good with dumplin’s.”

I plunged the bird into boiling water. The feathers loosened immediately and smelled like rancid rags. Then came the singeing and
butchering. Mom planned an early supper, complete with blueberry pie, from berries picked the previous summer.

As Easter neared, I read the Bible with increasing fervor. Whether I understood or not, each word was truth. Even the interminable “begat” verses were mines of spiritual ore. I meditated over the saccharine color prints of Jesus with lambs, of Jesus being scourged, of Jesus dying, and I began to talk to Jesus, shaping the air with my hands, imagining Him as my very own.

The circumstance resolving my struggle was my first ejaculation. I had no idea what had transpired. I woke during the night to find my belly wet. At first I thought it was blood. Without disturbing my brother, I crept from bed and found a flashlight. Where had the strange substance come from? My parents told me nothing of sexual change, and I was too naive to relate my own seminal flow to that of farm animals. My fevered psyche interpreted the incident as a warning from Jesus that I must be baptized.

I resolved to go to mass the next morning, Palm Sunday. My parents approved—though not without some hesitation that I might turn Catholic. ... I hoped to remain anonymous, so I decided to attend a later mass.

I dallied along the road, examining pools for frogs’ eggs, throwing sticks and stones into a swirl of rusty water emerging through a culvert near Mud Creek, and admiring a grove of juneberry trees loaded with blossoms. Twice I turned and started back for home.

By the time I reached St Joseph’s Catholic Church, the second mass had ended, and there was no other. Jesus, I felt, had arranged this timing for some umbrageous reason of His own, sheltering me from Catholicism. Services were about to begin at the Christ Evangelical Church across the street. On the steps were Eileen Ewald and her parents. I had had a crush on Eileen ever since she appeared in second grade and said “sugar.” It was not the word itself, but her cultured tone in saying it that struck me as special. I ached to be in love with her.

I followed Eileen into the church and sat in a pew at the very back. I was entranced by the pale oak altar with its pastel plaster crucifixion. The organ music, the first I had ever heard, was splendid. All through the sermon, by the Reverend Joseph Krubsack, I sat in a daze. Jesus had directed me here!

I lingered until Rev. Krubsack was alone and told him of my wish for
baptism. He promised to baptize me and my family on the Sunday after Easter. But I would not become a full Lutheran, he warned, until I had passed instruction.

For five dollars, my uncle hired out his team, Bill and Bess, for plowing. I was a coward near horses, and when Dad asked me to drive the team while he steered the plow I refused. Horses would suddenly shake their necks and bare their teeth.

My uncle was a hard driver. I had seen him beat Bill with a club while the horse was tied in his stall. In pain, the horse broke free and ran from the barn toward Minnow Lake, with my uncle in pursuit. I followed and saw him corner Bill, who waited docilely while my uncle, his wrath spent, grabbed the broken halter and stroked Bill’s neck with surprising gentleness.