Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (26 page)

On summer nights it was almost dark before our chores were done and my oldest brother would drive us down to Cedar Lake. On a hot night it
felt wonderful to jump into the lake. We would meet other farm boys there, and we had a big tractor inner tube with all our names painted on it. I painted my name close to Rick’s, a cute neighbor boy. There were some very romantic nights out there, as it got dark and the crickets were chirping. When I was old enough to swim out to the raft, we would stand around there and get really close. I would go home and fantasize about Rick. I’d kind of wish I were a girl and that he would love me and I could just hold him and kiss him. Once my younger brother said, “David has a crush on Randy.” Randy was a neighbor boy who was in high school. If I was in the garden or mowing the lawn when he drove past our place, he’d toot the horn of his hot rod. That just made my nipples hard—I mean, that he would bother. He was just a doll, a heartthrob. In the yearbook it said, “Handsome is as handsome does.”

My dad rented out a barn to a man who wanted to raise pigs. Paul was a slob and he smelled like pigs, but he was young and he was always shirtless, and he had a gorgeous, black, hairy chest. I had a real bad crush on him. I think my brothers knew that too. Once in a while I’d be helping my dad milk cows and Paul would stop over in his junky car with a 500-gallon drum barrel of whey to feed the pigs. He’d come in the barn and sit there and scratch his chest and spit in the gutter. It was just so erotic to me, I wanted to grab that guy and pull him into a corner someplace.

I was jacking off before my teens, before anything could come out. My older brother asked me once, “Dave, when you do it, does that white stuff come out?” I looked at him curiously and said no. I imagine he was a little worried, but when it finally happened to me at least I knew I wasn’t going to die. I usually jacked off in bed at night and would catch the white stuff in a handkerchief; we all had to keep one under our pillow. One day as Mom was ironing she said, “Boys, whatever you’re doing to the white hankies, please stop. I can’t get the stains out.” So we all started keeping red and blue farmer hankies under our pillows.

Skipper was a beautiful German Shepherd. When he was just a pup, I would take him in the clubhouse and lock the door. Then I’d get naked and lay him on my crotch. He would lick my cock, and when I shot my load he would lick that up, too. Skipper and I played like that all the while he was growing up. When he got a little older I would play around with his cock. He would be standing over me as I lay naked, and squirt his semen in my crotch. It was clear and watery and very pungent. I would jack off at the same time and he would lick everything up, which saved me a lot of trouble. We did this a lot up in the barn among the bales of hay, even in winter. One day Skipper was hit by a vehicle on the highway and his
back was broken. I wept as Dad took him up the lane for a ride in the truck, along with a deer rifle and a shovel.

The easiest sex on the farm was blow jobs from the calves. They’re always ready when you are. The best blow jobs were from newborns. They were very gentle, but they’re born with teeth on their lower jaw. Sometimes I would put two fingers over their teeth. Butch was a Hereford bull, just a darling, with big brown eyes and a white curly head. He was my favorite pet, and all the while he was growing up I played with him secretly. I let him suck my cock when he was little. When I would come in his mouth he probably thought, “Well, finally this teat is putting out.” Butch grew into a beautiful, handsome bull. Before running around with the heifers, he was kept in a stanchion. He was used to me touching him all over, so he never kicked when I fondled his balls. They were heavy and solid, and soft as velvet when I rubbed them against my cheek. I would stroke his belly where I could feel his cock still inside him. When a little bright pink carrot came out of the hole in the middle of his belly, I grabbed it. It was wet and hot, grew to be about twenty-four inches long, and increased in thickness to about two inches. I was stroking the length of it with both hands when he shot his clear, watery semen. It all happened very quickly. Then I would go around to the front of him and rub my hands on his nose. He would roll his upper lip back, hold his head high, and make heavy breathing sounds.

Sunday afternoons when I was home alone I did risky things. My older brothers had left home already, and my folks and younger brothers had gone to visit relatives. One Sunday, I walked into the barn and called, “Butchie,” and he came walking in from outside almost immediately. I’d heard lots of stories about how bulls can take a mean turn without warning. I put some ground feed in his manger, then hopped over the fence, walked behind him, and fondled his balls. He kept right on eating, so I went all the way with him, jacking him off. I would go in the pen with Butch whenever I got a chance. I would take all my clothes off, except for my shoes and socks, and ride him like a horse. One day, before getting his rocks off, he turned around and started to nose around with my cock, then put his big, wet nose on my chest and started to lift his front legs. He wanted to mount me! I yelled at him and got the hell out of there. He could have killed me. Soon after that, Butch was moved to another farm to run among the heifers and breed them when they came into heat.

Before my affairs with the bull, I was playing around with heifers and cows. When a cow stood in the gutter, it put her cunt at a perfect level to my cock. I would wash her cunt first, then just gently play with the outside of her and talk to her. When she allowed me to finger-fuck her
without stepping out of the gutter, I took the final step. After a while I could fuck her as long as I wanted and she wouldn’t step out of the gutter. Sunday afternoons in winter, when it was absolutely safe, I would get completely naked except for socks and shoes. I would stick my cock and balls inside of her, then lay my chest against her back, holding her sides with my arms.

One time, when I was in high school, I got caught in the act when my older brother walked into the barn. He just looked at me and shook his head and said very calmly, “Dave, don’t do that,” as though he had done it, too. And one time I walked in on my younger brother, who was sitting on the barn floor behind a cow that was lying down. He got up quickly and walked away from me. Anyway, I got the idea to fuck a reclining cow, so the next chance I got I cleaned her up and laid a few burlap bags on the floor behind her. If it was pretty risky, I’d leave my pants on—pull them down to my ankles and lay sideways behind her, with her tail over my hip. When I had more time, on Sundays, I’d get naked and sit behind her, straddling her with her tail over my right leg. I had a favorite cow for doing it this way; she would moan a little with each breath she took. One time I sucked one of her teats and after a bit I was getting mouthfuls of milk.

There were men that came to the farm to sell farm products—Watkins products, herbicides, petroleum products, seed corn—and I always found these men attractive. The inseminator I found attractive, the milkman I found attractive. If I was home alone when the milkman stopped in to get the milk, I would fantasize about going up to him and saying, “Would you mind if I played with your cock? Would you come in the clubhouse with me?”

When I was a junior in high school, I had a terrible crush on a very athletic senior. Kevin was adorable and much more mature than the other boys. He had a brown furry chest already. I wrote a love story about Kevin for English class, and I kind of put me in the character of the girl. It was about the prom—”The Infinite Prom”—and they were killed on their prom night in a car accident. I read it in front of my English class. I used Kevin’s first and last name, and had to build up my confidence to ask him to sign a document that gave me permission to use his name. I typed it up real nice: “I, Kevin Moore, do hereby give James McKaye, alias Dave Foster, permission to use my full name in this piece of literary work. ...” He signed it for me, so I had his autograph.

I had such a crush on Kevin that I thought I just had to have him, or I had to tell him how I felt. He obviously knew how I felt. I was just a stupid, silly queer with glasses. I didn’t go out for any sports. I was
intelligent, but not real intelligent. We had a small plot of woods with gray, smooth-barked trees. On one of them I carved, “In the midst of life, we are in death”—something I had read in a short story. I planned at one low point that I would go there and commit suicide, and they would find me by this tree. On a nearby tree I carved Kevin’s name.

They were drafting really heavily when I graduated from high school in 1966. I worked one year on the farm, but I didn’t like farming that much, so I went to work at a factory nearby and lived at home on the farm. One summer night, when I got home late, I heard familiar bellowing coming from the barn and knew my pet heifer was in heat. Heifers were skittish, but I had a favorite one that was a little older and liked standing in the gutter. I walked down to the barn. Everything was easily visible in the moonlight. She swayed her back low and swung her tail to one side. I took off all my clothes, she backed down in the gutter for me, and I had the greatest fuck from her ever.

Within less than a year I was drafted. My first lucky break was that I went to military police school instead of infantry. The next lucky break was that I was sent to Japan. I was twenty years old when I had my first experience with a man, in Japan. Guys talked about a fag bar called the Peanuts Bar, and of course I had to check that out secretly. And then it all came together, that there was more of me around than I thought. After I got back from the service, when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, I got ahold of a gay guidebook. I looked up Sheboygan and there was nothing. Milwaukee wasn’t too far, so I ventured down there. A lot of the places in the book weren’t there anymore, but I did find one, 1000 East, and they had a list of all the current bars and restaurants. Then I knew there was a whole ‘nother facet of being gay.

I fell in love with Keith when I had just come out. I had been futzing around with so many guys that I finally felt like there’s got to be more to life than this. We got married, exchanged rings and everything—went down to Page Jewelers at the mall and picked out the same band. We were really bold about that. We had a little ceremony by ourselves with a lobster dinner, and I wrote something up—”I promise you this and promise you that”—and it went very well. We had eight or nine years together. But I didn’t want to be committed to one man and I tried to bypass the fact that it wasn’t great sex, because I liked every other aspect of it.

I fell in love with a straight man and out of love with Keith. Jerry had a little bit of a drinking problem. The first time he came over to our house, it was a hot summer night and I had invited a bunch of the guys from work over. I had lots of beer in the fridge, so we had a party. It got to be dawn,
the robins were singing, everybody else had left, and it was just Jerry and me sitting in the kitchen. I put my hand on his and said, “Jerry, do you know that I have a terrible crush on you?” He said, “Yes, I know, and I think you’re a hell of a nice guy to party with.” I asked him to come upstairs with me. Jerry started to come over a lot and spend the night. I loved to see him, at all hours. Guys like that will go out drinking and then all of a sudden they’re alone at the end of the night. They know where to call, they know I’ve got beer in the fridge. I loved him, and I wasn’t going to say, “No, you can’t come over. It’s three in the morning and I’m here sleeping with Keith.” I wanted to see Jerry, he needed a friend, and I knew that with him in that condition I could get away with murder. Keith and I tried to work it out, living as roommates in separate bedrooms, but that worked only for a while.

Keith and I see each other every weekend; that friendship is still there. And he’s a big part of my family. They know I’m gay, but we don’t talk about it openly. If I get invited to a family function, they’ll say, “You can ask Keith too,” and he’s more excited about it than I am. He’s a very lovable sweetheart. Keith is HIV-positive. It was very heartbreaking, but that was at least eight years ago. He sees a doctor two or three times a year and he’s doing fine. He just kind of takes it in stride, and I hope he’ll continue to go on like that. He’s redoing his house, and I’m helping with that. There’s a little decorator in me, like all of us.

I get tested once a year, because I’ve been with a lot of sex partners in the course of a year, but I do play safe. Every time I pick a guy up in a straight bar and he stays overnight I think, if I had a lover I couldn’t do this. As long as I can go out and catch one and have a good time, I don’t miss having a lover. I can do exactly what I want. But I don’t know if that’s really good for a person. When you live with somebody, it’s give and take. You have to listen to their music once in a while, even if it’s solid Barbra Streisand for three hours or “The Sound of Music” twice a year, which was Keith. My aunt has been single her whole life, and she’s just a bear to get along with. I’m wondering if that will happen to me.

We always went to Sunday school and church and Bible school. I just went along with all that stuff, but I always doubted any kind of deity or afterlife. I believe that when you die you die, just like a rabbit or dog or cat— it’s just all dark. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, because you try to get more out of life. I want so much out of life. I’ve always been an adventurer. I would dream of far-off places, the Peace Corps and going to India, and urban places had an allure. I think Milwaukee is a great town. Other people would like to be away from it all, in a little house in the country or
in a cottage up north someplace. I want to be where people are—the symphony or the opera or festivals. I want to be part of it. Sometimes it bugs me to be here alone, climbing the walls. So I go out, just to be with people. I look forward to going to work, because I have good relationships with a lot of guys there.

I’ve always been a romantic. I get misty easy, and I can sit here and cry over an opera. I’m collecting videos of operas, and they’re all the same— love and death or murder or something—but I find every one of them fascinating. I’m sitting here crying as they’re belting out the songs. I’ve never been to a live opera, so I’m going to try it. It’s going to be a little difficult to go by myself, but once you’re in there and the show starts, it’s okay. A lot of things in life you don’t do because you wait too much to do it with somebody. I don’t know that any of my friends in Sheboygan would go to an opera with me, and I don’t know anybody in Milwaukee. But maybe now I will. Maybe I’ll see them, or they’ll see me. Maybe I’ll recognize somebody from the bar, and they’ll know that we both like opera, and we’ll start seeing each other. Maybe I’ll say, “Come up to Sheboygan sometime.”