Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (16 page)

Another night we had been up to the next town. He had a girlfriend there, and she had a boyfriend in the town. We were outsiders. We’d gone up to the girl’s house, and her boyfriend found out about it, so we got our hind ends chased out of town. We had a tire that was darn near flat on a gravel road, and we were just flying along to get the heck out of there and save our necks. When we got out to the farm he had to pump up the tire, and then we sat there in the car. I reached over and—he was very cooperative—unzipped his pants and took his cock out and banged him off. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Now I’ve got to go tell the priest in the morning.”

I was involved wholeheartedly in Future Farmers of America.
²
But driving the tractor through the field in the summertime, cultivating corn, it was hot, and I was so sleepy watching the corn go by. I would think, I’m not going to farm anymore. I’m going to get me a big, fancy, high-falutin’ city job. Yet, deep down inside there was that part of me that loved the farm.

My best friend and I were chosen by our FFA chapter to go to the national convention at Kansas City when I was a senior in high school. Fred, a student teacher, went with us for the week, and we all slept in the same bed. Fred must’ve read me like a book. At night, he and I would sit on the couch and talk. One night he laid his head in my lap and said, “Well, this is nice, but there’s something hard underneath.” He banged his head up and down. “Oh, it’s got to be your belt buckle. Undo your belt buckle.” So I undid my belt buckle. “There’s still something hard.” I was a minor, so he didn’t touch it. But, god, I wish he would have.

That fall I started teaching in a country school and sent Fred an invitation to the Christmas program. He said he was going to stay with me that night. I was exhilarated and didn’t know what to expect. It was colder than hell and we slept upstairs in an old farmhouse that had no heat upstairs. We had covers on till the cows came home. We talked in bed for a couple hours, and Fred said, “Let’s lay side by side so we can keep warm,” so we snuggled up real close. He slipped his hand over onto my thigh and inched over, little by little, until he touched my cock. It was harder than hell, just ready to jump up and down. I grabbed his and we had one heck of a rendezvous. That went on for several years.

One of the guys I went to high school with was a cheerleader, and when a guy was a cheerleader, he was a pussy. We both started teaching that fall right out of high school. I suggested that we stay together in a hotel in Norfolk for teachers’
convention. In the middle of the night he rolled over and his cock was hard as he rolled onto my hand. I grabbed ahold of it and started banging away on it, and about the time that he was ready to shoot, he reached over and grabbed ahold of mine. Man, did he ever thrash it! He shot his load and rolled over and went to sleep, and there I laid all primed and in trouble. But it was worth it, because I always wondered what he had.

Bill and I have been together for over seven years. We met in Carter Lake Park in Omaha, looking for tricks. I’d taken the whole day and gone to town to see how many I could do in a day. Bill and I had times together for several years before we got together. Now we’re both pretty well settled; we’re monogamous and have been since the summer we started.

One Saturday that summer, Bill was digging the septic tank hole on his piece of land. I saw his car parked there and he was down in that hole throwing dirt out. He had carved steps into the dirt, so I walked down— about ten, twelve feet. All he had on was a pair of shorts, and I yanked them down and gave him a blow job. He asked me if I wanted to get off and I said no, because I still wanted to tear around. A couple weeks later he called me up and asked if he could come see me Saturday night. He brought me a gorgeous bouquet of iris. It would’ve taken a bushel basket to hold them all. We put them in bouquets, and I asked him if he could stay all night. We’ve been together ever since. If I’d have looked for somebody high and low, I would never have found anybody as compatible.

When Bill started to live here with me, he used to say, “Why don’t you clean out the stuff from around those trees down there?” I’ve got all kinds of stuff in those trees, from treasures to junk. I said it was because I might need it someday. That was one of the things I learned: You don’t throw anything away, because if you throw it away you’re going to need it and you’ll have to buy it. In the years that Bill has lived with me, he’s used more out of those trees than I have. He’ll drag something up to the house—”You mind if I take this? You got any use for this?” In the city, if you don’t have, you don’t have. What are you going to make do with? On the farm, there’s always some way to come up with it. If it’s food, you can grow it or raise it. If it’s heat, you can go cut it down and chop it up.

Usually farm people are more down-to-earth, not pie-in-the-sky, and accept things for what they are. I always felt fortunate to be on a farm, that it was the best place to be. You’ve got a lot of freedom that you don’t have in town. I used to look at my cousins in town and think, jeez, how awful! And I still feel that way. When spring comes in town, so what? The grass gets green and you’ve got to mow it. On the farm, spring is the most
exhilarating time of the year. Everything starts to come to life, new baby animals and time to start planting.

Someday, Bill and I are going to build a house on Spencer’s Mountain, south of Missouri Valley. He would like to build it today, but I’m not ready to quit farming yet. Bill has two-and-a-half acres and has got the blueprints all drawn. It’s out in the country, so I could handle that. There’s a cemetery just west of the property, where Bill has bought three lots. That’s where we’re going to be buried someday. You can see Omaha from there. It’s about sixteen miles from Omaha, perfect and beautiful.

1.
Harry refers to an article, “Homosexuality in America,” in the June 26, 1964, issue of
Life (pp.
66-74, 76-80). The photograph he recalls, of a man leaning against a lightpost, actually showed “a policeman in tight-pants disguise wait[ing] on a Hollywood street to be solicited by homosexuals cruising by in cars.” The article, by Paul Welch and Ernest Havemann, reported on the gay world’s recent emergence from the shadows, consequent conflicts with law enforcement, and perspectives on this “affliction” from legal, religious, and scientific viewpoints.

2.
Future Farmers of America (FFA) is an organization for students in grades seven through twelve, to help them prepare for careers in farming and farming-related businesses. It was founded in 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, where the national convention is held each year. Members of local FFA chapters participate in varied activities, including livestock and crop judging competitions, and are eligible for various degrees and awards.

Jim was born in northeastern Iowa in 1938, where he and his parents and older brother lived with his grandparents on their 160-acre farm near the small town of Westgate, in Fayette County. His parents bought their own farm nearby when Jim was about four years old. Two sisters were born after that. Jim and his lover
;
George, live in Madison, Wisconsin.

WHEN I HEAR some of the stories people tell of their childhoods I think, my god, I must have been really protected. Maybe I missed something. My parents were very open, very nurturing, tried to let us have as much rein as we dared before they would pull us in if they saw us going off the deep end. They were always very supportive of us learning how to do different things. For many years I didn’t realize what good role models they were.

My mother’s mother died when she was five, so she was raised by an aunt and uncle. We lived with them when I was a young child. After that, we still saw them a great deal. They were like grandparents to me, always supporting me in whatever I wanted to do, and praising me if I did something good. They gave me a real sense of who I was, and of feeling good about myself. They were very strict people, but at the same time they were very progressive for their time.

Even after gas and electric stoves were popular, my grandmother insisted on keeping her wood-burning cookstove. My grandfather would sit by the stove, by the cob box, and I would sit on his lap and he would read to me—Mother Goose tales and other children’s stories. There were always books in the house. And Grandpa would hitch up the two-horse team to the flatbed wagon and take my brother and me down to the creek bed to get a load of sand for our sandbox. We had the hugest sandbox in the country.

When I was about four years old my father bought his own farm, where I lived until I graduated from high school. It was a smaller farm, 120 to 140 acres, two miles from my grandparents’ farm. We lived about a half mile off of the main gravel road, and the road to our place was just dirt. Certain times of the year the mud was so awful, we couldn’t go back and
forth in a car or pickup. We went on the tractor from our house down to the corner, where my father would leave the car. I always got dirty riding the tractor, and it made me mad, because then I didn’t look good when we got to town.

We had hogs and Black Angus feeder cattle and chickens running about. Washing eggs was a daily chore—if the eggs made it to the house. One day my father went out to the chicken house carrying two buckets of water. While he was there, he gathered the eggs. He had one bucket of eggs and another that still had water in it, and when he came out of the chicken house he decided he was going to throw the water out. But he didn’t pay any attention to which bucket he picked up, and there went the eggs. We were lucky enough that we got to see it happening.

We had a pot-belly stove, and my brother and I had to get wood from the basement, bring it up and pile it in the woodbox by the stove for overnight, so that we wouldn’t freeze to death. I was usually the one that helped in the house because I liked doing it and I was the youngest. My brother was enough older and stronger that he could help Dad do the outside stuff. When the first of my sisters was born, I was delegated to the house to help mother so that meals were ready when my father and brother needed to come in and eat. I was glad, because I enjoyed cooking and all of the things that go along with keeping house. I learned to appreciate a lot of the things that farm women do and most farm men take for granted.

My brother and I got along real well as young children, but we started drifting apart. I realized that I was more prone to keeping house and I enjoyed it. I think in some ways he was resentful because I was able to do that, and I still could do outside work if I wanted to or needed to. I never felt like there were real boundaries. My parents never pushed us into those slots, where a guy had to do this, a girl had to do that. It probably explains why they were very supportive and accepting, from the very beginning, when I came out to them. I think they already knew, in their hearts.

I did a lot of cooking and baking—pies, cakes, cookies, most everything, the basic stuff that farm people eat. And there was always canning. We had a very big garden and we all worked in it. My mother and I would do the canning and freezing in what they used to call a washhouse, a little shell-type building with cooking and laundry facilities that we used pretty much all summer and into the fall. A lot of cooking and canning happened in that little building.

My father was always appreciative of anything that I did to help him. If he didn’t like the way I was doing something, he would say, “I think you’d find it easier to do it this way. Let’s try it this way.” At the time I thought, oh yeah, sure. But in the long run he was usually right. Working
with my father was quite regimented and routine—you fed the cows at this time of day and you fed the pigs at this time. The long blocks of time that my mother and I spent together were a lot more spontaneous. But I was close to my father and I really admired him. He was a very hard-working person, a very simple, common person, and extremely well-liked. There wasn’t anyone that he couldn’t talk with.

My brother and I were always watching the farm animals do what they do naturally, whenever the mood strikes. And my folks were certainly aware that my brother and I were sexual and sometimes played out sexual fantasies with the neighbor kids. The first time I got caught having sex I was ten or eleven years old. It was with the neighbor girl, and we were in our hayloft and lost track of time. We were both stark naked, feeling each other and doing all those things that kids do. We were interrupted when my father came up to throw hay down for the cattle. Fortunately, he didn’t throw us down with the hay. He just told us to go in the house and behave ourselves—didn’t make a big issue of it. When we talked about it afterward, he didn’t chastise me or say that my hands would fall off if I touched that thing again. We had neighbors that would tell their kids that if they didn’t stop playing with themselves, their hands would rot, they’d go blind, all sorts of awful things.

Maybe six months later, there were two neighbor boys a year and two years older than I. The three of us were in the barn and of course we had to experiment. I was already attracted to the male gender rather than the female, and I was real curious to know what other boys looked like. I initiated it, but it was a mutual thing, they didn’t fight it. They were from a very big family and told me that they had done this kind of thing with their brothers and sisters. We were getting pretty serious, playing with each other’s genitals, when both my mother and father walked in and caught me with my pants down. They said, “Get your clothes on and go outside and play like you’re supposed to play.” I thought, what does that mean? I didn’t understand what they were saying much of the time. But they didn’t get really wild. Some parents would have started beating their kid.

I finally wised up and realized that there were lots safer places, so it happened many times after that. Our farm sat at the edge of a heavily wooded area, twelve to fifteen acres. Oftentimes we’d just hike into the woods. That was real safe, because there were lots of places where nobody would find you. We made a number of little hideaway places. We’d get a bunch of leaves and make it like a bed.