Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (31 page)

I knew that I liked being with men, but I wasn’t sure that was how I wanted to spend my life. I had been brought up believing that to lead a fulfilled and happy life you got married to a woman. I never really considered other possibilities and never considered what a profound effect it would have on me to put blinders on and try to lead a heterosexual life. In 1985, I came out to my wife. She asked me to see a psychiatrist and at that time we were trying to stay together, so I agreed. He really helped me to just decide who I was and what I wanted to do. I realized that my preference was for men and I decided that I needed to live as a gay man. My wife didn’t deal well with it, which I can understand, so we were just kind of moving on down the road to separation and divorce.

I was having a couple of drinks with an old college friend, who I later found out was also gay and married. He said, “You heard about Richard didn’t you?” I said no. “He’s dead.” I’d lost contact with Richard—my old choir tour roommate—quite a while before that, and it turns out he died from AIDS. That spurred me to quit living a lie. I decided that night that I was going to set a date to get out of my marriage. A couple of months after that I moved out and started coming out.

There’s things I probably would do differently but I’m not going to see that time again so why bother thinking about it? I tend to do something and not look back, which I inherited pretty well from a grandmother of mine. I’m still attracted to women once in a while, but I haven’t acted on that in a long time. I guess I’m happy preferring men. I do admit to being a little envious of, let’s say, a flaming queen growing up in East Overshoe, Iowa. He knows that he’s going to get out of town after high school and that he’s going to wind up in Minneapolis or New York or wherever. People like that seem to have things a little more predestined. Having come from the other side of it, where things were so nebulous for so long, I would rather have had them clear-cut. If I would have fallen in love with a guy when I was sixteen, maybe it would have saved me a lot of trouble. The thing I mainly learned is to be flexible—to roll with the punches.

There are things you can’t control and there are things you can. Everybody’s life has some winter in it and you can’t control that, but you can control what you do about it.

A part of me would really like to farm, but I’d have to do it on my own terms. If I had the wherewithal, I would go back to more traditional farming, such as using horses for certain things. I can envision myself doing organic farming, and I would explore the possibilities of truck farming, with the metropolitan areas of Kansas City and Omaha relatively close. In the area where I was raised, the old patterns of farming are disappearing year by year. You don’t see nearly as much pasture and livestock. All you see is corn and soybeans anymore. I don’t like the direction that farming has taken, the increased industrialization and reliance on corporate power and corporate structure. Bigger farms might mean more production, but the cost in human lives is far too great to be a good thing.

We’ve lost a lot of the independence of small communities such as the one I come from. For the most part, they continue on a blind descent into some kind of modern hell. The patterns of rural life have disintegrated into a cheap imitation of suburban life. The kids are involved in the same shit that the urban and suburban kids are. They don’t have much of a sense of community anymore. They lose their grocery store, they become just a collection of old people living off what years they have left and wondering what their kids are up to a thousand miles away. There’s a center of life that has disappeared, and I’m not sure what anybody can do about it anymore. Bring in some Amish? I tend to be a romantic, I guess. The Amish have a good way of life in many ways, and a lot of people could learn a lot of things from societies like that. I admire them, although I recognize that Amish culture can be oppressive to nonconformists.

You wouldn’t have to scratch far on me to find out that I grew up on a farm. There are a lot of inferiority complexes bred into rural people and I have them too, but I think growing up on a farm is an advantage in a lot of ways. I tend to be phlegmatic, and I’m not too impressed by things that impress people who grew up in suburbs and cities. I tend to be real cautious and conservative, not politically but in a sense of not desiring to change radically. I’m pretty old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I’ve always kind of admired village eccentrics and cranks, and I think I’d make a good one. If I did go back it would probably be in the guise of Old Man Scherz. I’d show up at school board meetings and give them hell and speak against censorship. Why aren’t you letting them read
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
anymore? I’d probably start going to church again, just to be a pain
in the ass. You have to find your frontiers wherever they exist, and if it’s a Bible study group, it’s a Bible study group.

N
OTE

1.
In James Kirkwood’s 1968 novel,
Good Times, Bad Times (New
York: Fawcett), the special relationship of two boys at a private school is threatened by the headmaster, a man deeply shaken by a homosexual scandal at the school a few years earlier. Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a prolific Japanese writer. His first novel,
Confessions of a Mask
, introduced the theme of homosexuality, which recurred in many of his works.

Richard was born in 1951 and grew up on a 200-acre dairy farm near Wonewoc, a small town in Juneau County, in central Wisconsin. The third of seven children, Richard has four brothers, two older and two younger, and two younger sisters. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he works as a pharmacist and collaborates with lesbian friends in raising his son.

IF I HAD stayed on the farm, I would have never dealt with being gay. I would have probably gotten married and had sex with men on the side. I think a lot of gays don’t leave the farm, so there’s probably a lot of people out there who are doing that. So many people there are alcoholics, and I think that’s what a lot of gays gravitate towards, to kind of deaden their feelings. The mode of socializing and entertainment around there is either the church or the bars or television. There’s not much else going on. It would have been very lonely and stifling. I feel lucky that I had the ability to leave and to deal with being gay. I know how hard it was for me, and I’d been to college, I’d traveled, I’d been around people who had very different values than what I’d grown up with.

For a lot of people in the country, there’s basically a lot of hard work and not a lot of time to philosophize about their sexual identity. And there’s not a lot of resources, not a lot of people around to talk to. Nothing gave me even an inkling that there were gay people out there. Being gay was beyond most people’s comprehension. They heard little dirty rumors, but nobody would talk about it, even though probably half the families there had children who moved away who were gay or lesbian. Now it’s kind of whispered about. “So-and-so’s daughter, she’s in Madison, she’s one of
those.”
Maybe it was whispered about when I was growing up, but I never heard it. My father’s attitude is similar to a lot of people’s in those communities. Anybody can be your buddy, friend, neighbor or whatever, as long as they’re not too open about what they are. I’m really open about being gay, but my family kind of hides it from people.

“I’m nothing but a dumb farmer” has been my father’s theme throughout his life. He always had another job besides the farm; otherwise we
probably would have had a poverty-level existence. He worked as a mechanic, so it was pretty much up to my mother and brothers and sisters and me to run the farm while he worked during the day. Maybe it was from listening to my father, but I always felt there was a stigma attached to being a farm kid. Some of the kids I hung around with were from town, so I just didn’t feel with-it. I would milk the cows in the morning, and if I didn’t have time to take a shower I smelled like the barn at school, and they would make comments on that. And our clothes were a little different.

The people who lived in town seemed to be more sophisticated. They had more money and nicer things. My parents were very frugal. Other kids would talk about going to movies, but it was really uncommon for us to go to a movie. They would talk about going out to eat, but I was sixteen or seventeen before I ever ate at a nice restaurant. Once or twice a summer we would go to a drive-in for a hot dog or a hamburger, and then we’d have to share with our brothers and sisters. They’d all be divided into pieces. I couldn’t have a whole one myself because my mother knew I wouldn’t eat it all.

When we were younger, we had to do the housework because my father was at work and my mother did the milking. We took turns washing the dishes and cleaning the house. I liked doing that. When we were done, we were expected to help with finishing the milking and washing the milking equipment. As we got a little older, seven or eight, we were milking cows. That was one of my favorite jobs. Eventually we were milking thirty-five or forty cows. I felt like I could understand the cows more than anybody else could. I could kind of sense if a cow was sick; there was just something off about the way she would stand or move. Anytime my father would beat a cow, I would have trouble dealing with it.

I kept records on the cattle and was always upset that my parents weren’t more interested in keeping better records or getting registered cattle. For me, it was easy to know every calf and every cow, to know who their mother was and who their offspring were. I would say, “That cow’s mother was so-and-so, and that’s why she’s such a good cow. How do you know which ones to keep if you don’t remember who their mothers are? You want to keep the ones that are out of the good cows, not the ones from the cows that are mean or don’t milk very well.” Every year, my father would sell half of the heifers before they had their first calf. I would say to him, “Take those five heifers and hide them somewhere so the cattle buyer doesn’t see them. They’re out of your best cows. He’s going to pick your ten best ones, and you’re going to be left with the ten that are okay but not great. You’re not helping your herd by doing that.”

We went to the neighbors one day when one of our heifers was missing. They said, “Well, if you can identify it, we’ll give it to you. Otherwise, it’s ours.” I said, “Well, it looks just like this . . .,” and sure enough it did. It amazed my parents that I could describe every animal to a tee, but it was just a given that I would know those things. It was the same in school. It was a given that I would get A’s and my brothers would get mediocre grades. My older brother would say I was always the favorite of my parents, that everything I did was wonderful and everything he did was not. It’s just that I really enjoyed doing the work; I really cared, and he didn’t. I was fastidious. “No, that’s not clean enough, you’ve got to clean those better. And this is a mess, you’ve got to pick this up.” I could be a little bossy about things, just a little tyrant.

If a Catholic married a Lutheran, it was a scandal. You married in your church or you didn’t marry. People were so conservative and so racist, making comments about niggers all the time. We even had a priest who would make comments about how black people were taking over the world. He wouldn’t preach it from the pulpit, but he would preach it in people’s homes. They had no experience with blacks at all, except maybe through relatives who lived in Chicago or Beloit. All my uncle would talk about was how bad the niggers were in Beloit. From six or seven on, it was sickening to me. One of my cousins would say, “Why do these people hate like that?” Everybody else seemed to be oblivious to it.

I felt like a fish out of water, because I had such different ideas and feelings about things. Why would I think it was wrong, from early on, that people made racist remarks? Maybe it was because I felt I was different and didn’t fit in. From my earliest memory, I knew I was gay, so I always had this part of me that I had to hide. I thought if people knew, they would never think I was this wonderful person, so I overcompensated by being a dutiful son—getting good grades, being polite, not drinking, doing the things I was supposed to, going to church and being the altar boy. I felt it wasn’t fair that my mother would be out working on the farm and then she would have to come in and cook the meal while everybody else sat around. So I became her helpmate, setting the table and doing those kinds of things, even as I got older.

We kids would play for hours in the woods, building dams and forts, and we had secret spots that we would go to—rocks and caves and streams. We liked to play on cliffs that overlooked the stream. It was a big drop, and we would be crawling all over them. We had a secret trail that couldn’t be seen because the trees covered it. We could duck behind the trees and there was a narrow ledge that would take us down to the stream. It felt like
kind of a magical spot. We built a little cabin on top of the cliff, under a ledge that was the cliff above it.

From fourth or fifth grade, kids were using the word queer. If you wore white sox, you were queer. Of if you wore a certain color shirt on a certain day, you were queer. But sissy was the word they would use more often. I would be called a sissy when I played with girls, but I didn’t let it bother me. My older brother used to call me the little woman when he was mad at me. “Your eyes are too big. You’re like a woman.” I think he was jealous because I was well-liked and I always did everything right. He was drinking at fifteen.

If you’re under ten or so, it’s pretty normal for a boy to be doing housework. But if you’re over ten, you’d better be out doing men’s work, driving a tractor and that kind of thing. I wasn’t real thrilled about driving tractors—it was just too overwhelming—but I liked doing the things that I could kind of daydream while doing, like raking hay. I did the harvesting work, but it was messy and smelly, with all the machinery and the fumes and the noise. I’d be covered with dirt and chaff, and it would be down my back.

In Future Farmers of America, I showed and judged cattle, and I was involved with 4-H for quite a few years. It was good for me because it was based on farm projects, but it was also social and broadened my horizons. When my younger brothers came into 4-H with me, I pushed them to do more than they would have probably done on their own. When I got selected for Badger Boys State and for Trees for Tomorrow camp, it was not because I had anybody pushing me to do it. I drove myself to do the things I did. My parents were supportive but they weren’t encouraging. Unless I did something bad, whatever I did was okay. With a little more push, I think I could have accomplished more.