Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (15 page)

Our farm was in a valley and we had pastureland that extended into the woods on the sides of the bluffs. I was in heaven when I was in the woods; it was an escape. In the summer, it was my duty to get the cows home for milking. Frequently, they were back in the woods. I usually went early to give myself time to explore. I loved the wildf lowers I would see there. Often I would drop my pants and jack off back there, sometimes with a cow or two watching curiously. It was very erotic. I still love the southeast Minnesota forests and go hiking in them occasionally.

I have always believed that growing up on a farm builds good character. My mother and I didn’t like farming, but as a teacher of thirty-four years I always knew that the farm kids were my favorites—wholesome and decent and clean-cut. They were more honest, more down-to-earth, more reliable; they knew the value of work. In that way, I appreciate my upbringing. But I was pretty isolated.

When I was fifteen, the milkman who came to get our milk was beautiful. This is when I was really getting horny to do something with another guy. I waited every day for him to come. There I was, a fifteen-year-old kid standing around wondering how to get at this guy’s body. I couldn’t even talk to him, couldn’t think of anything to say. I just stood there, watching him, wondering if he knew why. If I had grown up in a city where I had the freedom to get downtown, to be exposed to more city influences and gay men, I might have come out a lot sooner. I feel certain that if I could have been seduced by some gentle, understanding man when I was fifteen or sixteen, I would have avoided a lot of pain.

Harry was born in his grandparents’ bedroom on their farm in northeastern Nebraska, Wayne County, in 1937. He and an older sister grew up on three rented farms in that area. Harry was an elementary school teacher for thirty-seven years, was married for twenty-seven years, and is the father of two children. He lives on an 80-acre farm in western Iowa with his partner\ Bill Hogan, where they raise cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens, and put up their own hay.

I’VE LIVED A heterosexual life, but it was a facade. In 1957, I wanted to get away from home. What do you do? I got married, which was the appropriate thing to do in that day. On the wedding night, I was wishing I was going home with a man instead of a woman. I looked at all the guys in the wedding party that were sexy as hell and I would’ve gone home with any one of them, except that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

There was an empty farm place between the two country schools where my wife and I taught, and there was another gal that taught a mile up the way. I was in hopes that I could get another guy to teach close by, and the four of us would live in that house. We two guys would sleep together, and the two women could sleep together. I thought it would’ve been just neater than hell, but it never came to be.

The first few years of being married I was fucking every night and jacking off in-between because the fucking didn’t satisfy me. I relished nights when my wife went out and I stayed home and took care of the kids. I’d get out my jug of wine and drink till I felt pretty dang good, and then I’d go to the bathtub and do all kinds of things with little toys that I’d invent, because I didn’t dare have anything around. I’d have a sex orgy with myself, and dream about other guys.

In the sixties,
Life
magazine had a story on the gay life of San Francisco. It showed guys leaning up against lightposts and trees, waiting to get a trick. I dang near wore it out reading it, thinking oh god, I wish I was in San Francisco.
¹
Some of my wife’s relatives had just gotten back from California, and several of the people they had gone out there to see were no longer couples because, as they said, “Her husband left her to live
with a guy. Can you believe it? They call it ‘gay.’” I thought, god, that’s what I am.

I was married for twenty-seven years, but I was always out playing around, having sex with men and being sexual with my wife on the side. The hardest part was saying, hey, I’m gay—I can’t live on both sides of the fence. Now I’m very open with my family and they all accept it. I’m still Dad and I’m still Grandpa, like I was when I was straight or whatever.

I’ve always been interested in guys, and it’s never been something that I felt dirty or guilty about doing. It was such a part of me that I accepted it as being natural—I did it because it was an urge, and I satisfied the urge. I assumed that everybody did it, because
I
felt so comfortable doing it. I never thought of myself as homosexual and I knew of no one that was. I read about homosexuals in health books, but I thought you had to be some kind of a fruit loop to be one. I was as normal as the next guy. I knew I liked guys, but didn’t everybody?

There were two women that lived together in our town, and they were accepted by the community. Mom said, “Well, one of them’s got to be the man.” So I realized as a kid that women did that, but there weren’t any men that I knew of. There were two guys, two miles from us, that lived together for years and died together, but as a kid I just passed that off. When Dad needed help at harvest time he told me to go get them, because they didn’t have a car. Everybody said they were brothers, but they didn’t have the same last name.

The first farm we lived on was only eighty acres and not that productive. We were very poor, so we made do with what we had—one tractor and horses. Dad said that if I did the work, then he wouldn’t have anything to keep him busy. So until I was in high school I did very little farmwork except walking through the corn and cutting out all the cocklebur, a pesky weed. I did that from the time I was big enough to carry a hoe.

House and garden and chickens were things that Dad said I could do up until I was fourteen—”Stay around the house and help your ma.” I had to help plant and take care of the garden. We never had to worry about mowing the house yard because the chickens ate all the weeds and the grass. I always had a batch of my own chickens to raise every year, from the time I was big enough to take care of them. I think I’ve raised just about every kind that they make.

My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived about two miles from us. You could stand in our door yard and see their place. I saw them almost every day. My grandmother used to say, “Learn how to sew, learn how to
cook, learn how to bake—you don’t know what that old lady that you marry is going to be like. You may have to do those things.” I did a lot of cooking. I couldn’t wait for my mom and dad to leave—in those days they didn’t go much of anywhere—so I could have the kitchen to myself and stir up something. Usually it was pies or cake or something that Mom didn’t make.

People used to just drop in to visit, which they don’t do anymore. If there wasn’t anything in the house to serve for lunch, I’d be out in the kitchen whipping up a lunch while my parents were in the living room talking with the guests. I even made ice cream and baked a cake both while they were having a chat. When they got done chatting, I’d say, “Come have lunch!” One Sunday we had a family gathering of all the aunts and uncles and cousins. I was flying around there helping serve this, that and the other thing, and one of my uncles said, “He’s going to make somebody a good wife someday,” and I thought, hmmm.

When I started high school, we moved to a farm that was 240 acres, three times the size of what we’d had. In 1950 that was a pretty good size. We had two tractors, so I got worked in real well. We always had cattle, hogs, and corn and oats. In the spring, I would take off days from school to help plow and disk and plant oats. By the time we got to planting corn, school was out. When it came harvest time, we were the only ones in the area that still had a threshing machine. My dad, two neighbors, and myself was our crew. Another guy and I would load up all the bundles, haul them over and pitch them off, then go back out and get another load. Most of the other farmers already had combines. Dad thought it was a waste to use a combine, because he wanted the straw instead of leaving it out in the field.

I preferred milking by hand, so I usually did that while somebody else used the machine. We took our cans of cream to town on Saturday night and sold it to the creameries. That was our paycheck for the week, what we bought our groceries with.

Dad was thirty-nine when I was born, so I always felt that he was an old man. He was kind of a loner and I was more outgoing, so we didn’t have a good close relationship, but we always got along. Mom and I were always real close. If I got anything at school when I was a kid, like a candy bar, I waited to share it with her when I got home. She was always so happy to have it. I took every paper home from school to show her.

My sister and I went to a country school a quarter of a mile from our house. One day when I was in kindergarten I asked the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. I wanted to go to the outhouse because I’d noticed a hole in my pants, in my crotch, and I was afraid everybody was going to see my underwear. I didn’t
go to the outhouse, I ran home. It was snowing something fierce, the wind was blowing like crazy, it was below zero, a blizzard. I didn’t put on my mittens, I didn’t button up my coat, and the snow was deep already.

When I got home, I was crying because my hand was frozen from holding my coat shut. Mom and Dad had just butchered a hog, and they were working on it in the kitchen. Mom said, “What’s the matter with you? Why are you home?” I said I had a hole in my pants, and I was afraid someone would see. Mom told Dad to go tell the teacher where I was. I stayed home because Mom said I would just run away again. She thawed out my hand in cold water, and then I got to have some cracklin’s from the fryings of the lard.

This is weird, but when I was four years old I thought it would be neat to be able to go out to the cemetery and walk around underground and play with everybody’s cock. I knew that they wouldn’t care, and I could get an assortment of them. I had never been to a cemetery, but I knew there were cocks out there and nobody would care if I played with them.

Dad was quite a sexy man. Mom did the puritanical thing, like so many women did back in those days. Sex was taboo. We’ll do it if we have to, but we aren’t going to talk about it. Dad was interested in presenting himself. I used to watch him stand in front of a mirror when he got dressed. He’d reach in his pants and make sure his cock was in just the right place so it would show. He’d see if it made the right impression on his pants, and if it didn’t he’d rearrange it.

When I was five, Dad had a friend come home from work with him for supper one night. The guy was single, and he had just gotten back from World War II, and he was cute. I went into my bedroom and arranged my cock in my pants so that it would show, hopefully, so that he would take an interest in me. Then I came out with something to show him, but he didn’t seem to notice my cock. There probably wasn’t anything
to
notice, but I went back to my room and rearranged it, got something else to show him, and came back out. I kept doing that till my mother told me to quit making a nuisance of myself and go play.

I always wondered if Dad played both sides of the fence. If my mother and sister and I were gone for some reason, he always got one of his older brothers to sleep with him. This brother was about ten years older, and he and his wife hadn’t slept together for years. I’ve been interested in sex since I was old enough to know that there was a difference, so these things made a mark on me. I thought it was a little queer.

Dad had another brother, a year or two older, that never had married. Uncle Fuzz used to come for the Fourth of July and Christmas. If he came at Christmas, he might go home by Easter, because he worked seasonal jobs for farmers. He would stay with us until he ran the battery down on the radio, then go on to the other relatives who had electricity. One of my uncles had seven or eight girls, and Uncle Fuzz would let them—or ask them to—paint his fingernails and toenails, and he’d always have a necklace or something on. No male wore a necklace in those days. I started thinking Uncle Fuzz was just a little bit queer, but it was okay as far as I was concerned.

“I always felt fortunate to be on a farm, that it was the best place to be.” Harry Beckner at age thirteen. Courtesy of Harry Beckner.

In high school you had to fit the mode or you were queer, so I played the straight line. But I wasn’t interested in girls. I wore extra-tight pants because I wanted the guys to say, “Look at his cock,” and they did. One time I was sitting in the car waiting for my sister and a guy said, “I ‘ve got to see that big thing.” He came over and stuck his hands in the window. I let him unzip my pants and take it out. Once he got it out and it got hard, he left.

My best friend and I were born on the same day. Our cocks were so identical that if you put them in a sack you couldn’t tell which was whose. I always wanted in his pants. He was of the Catholic faith and said, “If I play around, I ‘ve got to go to confession in the morning and tell them I had sex with a male, so I don’t want to.” One night he said he had to take
a leak, and I said I had to. So we got out of the car. I said, “Somebody’s coming!” and it scared the heck out of him. He got in the car and didn’t zip up, so I grabbed his cock and played with it. I did that two or three times with him and it always worked.