Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (27 page)

N
OTE

1.
In the 1939 movie,
The Wizard of Oz
, Dorothy (Judy Garland) goes on a fantastic journey that begins and ends on a Kansas farm. Whether the story is viewed as a fable of being different and wanting to escape, or simply as a fascinating adventure, the annual television broadcast of this classic movie was a special event for David Foster and gay boys everywhere.

Doug was born in 1949 and grew up on a 560-acre grain and livestock farm in Hendricks County, Indiana. He grew up with three brothers, two older and one younger. Doug lives in the Indianapolis area, where he works with the state environmental agency.

MY EXPOSURE to gay life has been limited, but I’ve been around and observed enough that I’ve drawn some conclusions. One is that a lot of what people perceive as gay personality—lispy talk, faggoty manners—is affectation. Guys are that way because they’re around other people who are that way—people who, for whatever psychological reason, want to flaunt their differentness. And if anything has held us back, that has. I know some people who are naturally that way, and they’re the sweetest people, and I have no qualms whatsoever about being known as their friend and hanging around them. There are also a lot of guys who obviously behave that way out of affectation.

I’ve had a couple of boyfriends who started out acting real butch, real regular, and doing a good job of it, and when I got to know them better they slipped into that habit. One I met just a year ago seemed like a regular guy, but the more intimate we got the more he let his guard down and slipped into the lispy speech. It bugged the shit out of me. I really don’t think it was his natural way. Of course, others probably view me in much the same way. I’m accused of being butch. And to what extent this is a pose, I suppose
I’m
not in a position to judge. But this influence by association is something gay people really need to grow out of, because it does stigmatize us.

If anti-gay movements proliferate and there is a fascist backlash against homosexuals, I will become an activist and I will come out. I wouldn’t do it before that. I think it serves a better purpose to be a regular person and not rub other people’s noses in your sexuality. That’s one of the big things I have a problem with in the gay rights movement historically. That’s probably been more of an impediment than it has been a boost to progress for gay people. Homosexuality is natural for those of us who are this way. We are just as regular as anybody else, because we didn’t choose to be who we are, like a black person didn’t choose to be black. The prejudice remains, and that’s
what you have to assault frontally. But first you want to try to persuade people before you clobber them over the head and subdue them.

I don’t like this separatist way of thinking. It’s at the crux of the problem that society has in comprehending human sexuality. When you think of yourself separately, as a minority, you’ve ghettoized yourself. We are not separate. Homosexuals are a cross-section of the entire population, and the only thing that makes us any different is the fact that we have different objects of sexual passion. As long as you think of yourself as part of a separate group, I don’t think you have any right to complain when other people treat you that way. I am gay, that’s a fact of life, and I do not wish to be different from what I am. But I don’t think being gay stamps me as special in any way. That kind of self-absorption pulls us down more than it builds us up.

My dad was thirty-six when he married, so he was well into his fifties when he had his last one. I think he made a conscious effort to minimize his sons’ involvement in the farm, mainly because we were just tenant farmers. It was not a farm that would be handed down the family, so Dad didn’t want to see us nurture the idea of staying on the farm. I think it also had to do with his perception of the social and economic status of the farmer. I think he felt a little inferior by it and, like most dads, he wanted something better for his kids. So he saw to it that we all went to college and took a few steps up on the economic ladder.

Dad farmed in partnership with his brother, but Dad was the brains behind everything, and he was pretty much a man who did it his way because it could be done better his way, rather than having someone else do it and screw it up. I had kind of a reverential attitude toward my dad. In some respects, he was as close to a saint as I think I’ll ever know in this life. He was a very quiet man, extremely shy, but very intelligent, someone who could have done a lot more with what God gave him than he had the chance to. But that didn’t matter to him. I loved him in a way, but it was not a close emotional type of love. Ours was not that kind of family. My relationship with my mother was a little more difficult. She was very short-tempered, and since oftentimes Dad was in the field working when I was a little squirt, I was around home and more exposed to her. My mother was a very devout Christian, but my dad was an agnostic freethinker from a Quaker background.

We were a pretty insulated family. The folks were too absorbed in eking out a living to get out and socialize much. I was a solitary and self-sufficient child. Up to about the age of eight or nine, a lot of my time was spent building little model cities in a sandlot or somewhere where the earth was
friable. I liked building my own little world. Since we never had much money I didn’t have many toys, so I was always improvising with blocks of wood and pieces of pipe. One day I saw a doll house in a toy catalog and I thought, there you have a nice little house, you have little furniture, and you can set it on a street. So I asked for a doll house for Christmas, and Mom took me to Danner’s 5 & 10 down in Danville to look at doll houses. She didn’t act embarrassed by it, and at the time I didn’t
know
to be embarrassed by it. It’s not that I liked dolls; I liked models. My oldest brother made a big deal out of that, and for years I was ridiculed as the little brother who asked for a doll house for Christmas.

For a while I wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, so I lobbied my folks, and in my early teens I started taking voice lessons. I also started getting teased rather mercilessly by my oldest brother about this sissy activity, and after three years of it I finally just adamantly refused to go to my lessons. I really didn’t like the discipline of practicing, but deep down a lot of it had to do with being pegged as a sissy.

As a five-year-old, I had a crush on a cousin who was in the navy. One summer he was home on leave and came over to help us bale hay. Ryan was a young, good-looking man, and the first time I saw him he was in his navy uniform. When he was there, I didn’t want anyone to fool with me except him. I sat in a high window in the dairy barn where we were putting the hay in the mow, refusing to let anyone else lift me down except Ryan. That feeling for Ryan stayed with me for many years.

When I was seven or eight, my older brothers had some friends that would come over occasionally, and they’d usually end up having tag-team wrestling matches in the haymow. Being a little squirt and always feeling left out, I’d try to dart in and get involved. Of course, they’d always try to get me to scram, but I’d keep darting back in. I wanted to be paid attention to, and I was attracted to one of their older friends. I liked to latch onto his leg and I wanted to pull his shoe off. I wanted to see his naked foot.

One of the first sex lessons I got was when I was about eleven or twelve. The cow pasture was right next to the house, and I was looking out the window, just daydreaming, when I saw one Angus mount another. I asked Dad what they were doing, but he was preoccupied and acted like he didn’t want to be bothered. I wanted an answer. “Why are they doing that, Dad?” He said, “Well, they do that to make babies.” I said, “Is that what you and Mom do?” Snap. He lost it right there, and told me I was not to bring it up again. He was very curt, which was uncharacteristic of Dad.

The first time I knew how it was actually done was from a brother and
a neighbor kid who was much more world-wise than I was. One day they told me that the boy sticks his dick up the hole in the girl’s ass. I was incredulous. I knew girls had holes, but I didn’t know much about it. I said, “They don’t do something disgusting like that!” and for the longest time I thought, oh god, how can I ever do that when I grow up?

One day in early November of’64, just out of the blue, I suddenly realized I was gay. I was a sophomore in high school and had a crush on a guy in my class. He was the high-school jock, the best football player the school had ever had, perfect build. I’d had little crushes on teachers and never comprehended them for what they were, but this guy I became fixated on. This was about the time that
Life
magazine ran its famous article on homosexuals. It was a ground-breaking thing that was quite shocking and controversial.
Life
was one of the few magazines we took. I was inordinately interested in it, but I don’t think I realized that what they were talking about was me. One night after I went home from school and was up in my bunk bed doing lessons, it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. My attraction to this classmate, why I never seemed to have the same feelings for girls that other guys did, why I seemed like such a social misfit, why I was so miserable. Suddenly that night I knew I was homosexual, and from that day forward I knew I would never change.

I was having wet dreams and I didn’t know what they were. I was kind of ashamed of it. I would just get a hard-on during my sleep and shoot, and wouldn’t know what happened till I woke up. Later in high school, I would spirit away Havelock Ellis’s ancient tome,
The Psychology of Sex
, to my little hideout in the haymow. There was a copy of it in my uncle’s house that my dad got through a book club when he was younger. It had chapters on masturbation and homosexuality and premarital sex. And that’s where I learned about bestiality. I didn’t learn it from the animals— I learned it from Havelock Ellis.
¹

The only kind of friend that I had in high school was a fellow who was older than me, a bright fellow, also a farm kid. I got to know him through 4-H. One reason there seemed to be mutual attraction was that intellectually we were on a similar plane. But there was more to it than that; he was a particularly good-looking fellow. But he didn’t have a real sense of humor, so he wasn’t the kind of a guy that you palled around with. Our friendship was kind of a prim, intellectual palling. But there were a few times where I was aware of some sexual tension between us. Even though I wouldn’t think of it explicitly, I knew that I wanted to get in his pants, and he was probably feeling the same thing. What I wanted him to do was seduce me. At the county fair there were a couple instances of horseplay where he momentarily let his defenses down. But he came from a very
religious family, so god knows he probably didn’t have any experience either. It was the blind leading the blind.

A few other times with guys that I had some attraction to, there would be fleeting comments or gestures, but nothing that would lead to anything. God knows, if they’d tried I would’ve shut it off, because I was scared of myself as well as other people. But if someone had seduced me I could’ve been had. In junior high and high school, I often had daydreams about one of the neighbor farmers. I’d go out in the back lot sometimes when he was out in the field nearby, and I’d daydream about him seeing me, getting off the tractor, coming over, saying hi, shooting the breeze. Before you know it, I’m nailed against a rock.

I had read about wet dreams, about coming, and about masturbation, but I did not relate them all. I didn’t discover masturbating to orgasm until I was eighteen. One summer afternoon I was up in my hideout in the haymow. There was a little wood-slat chicken coop up there that I’d draped a throw rug over, and the rug just happened to have a hole in the middle of it, about two-thirds of the way down one side. Quite a few times I’d laid on my stomach on that thing and stuck my dick through the hole— didn’t whack it off, just stuck it through there because that’s what you do with it. I guess at least that much was instinctive. This one day, I must’ve been fantasizing something particularly vivid and humping away, my dick sticking through the slats of the chicken crate. I got myself so worked up that I did finally orgasm, and I instantly connected that to what happens when you have wet dreams. So I sat there and got an immediate hard-on again, and I jacked off. That’s when I discovered I could do it at will. I didn’t need to hump a chicken crate, I could just sit there and use my hand. That was wonderful. Talk about freedom, being imprisoned for so many years and finally being free.

My dad had a good friend who was a farmer in another part of the county. Along about the time I was in high school, the story got back to us that his oldest son announced that he was gay. His father, who was already being pummeled by a financial dispute in their family, was devastated. One day they found him hanging from a rafter in the barn; he’d killed himself. I was only vaguely aware of this story, even into my college days, but I began perceiving the dangerous ground I walked on. Not that my dad would have done anything like that. But it would’ve been real difficult for everybody if I’d had the courage to announce it. We simply didn’t talk about feelings, we didn’t talk about ourselves. God knows, you didn’t admit something that you weren’t quite sure of about yourself, especially if it was sexual in nature.