Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (35 page)

We were on a big hill and could see for miles, and there wasn’t another house in sight. As far as we could see, we owned it. There was one spot in particular over by the barn, where the bank sloped down and the wind was forced up through the intersection of the bank and the overhang of the barn. On windy days you could stand there with your coat open and just lay against the wind. Behind the barn, where the bank sloped off, there were thousands of rock fossils. As long as the bull wasn’t in that field, it was fun to sit and look at those fossils. I would roam the fields and the woods with a dog I grew up with, my best friend.

Even though we could see for long distances, we could always hear cars coming before we could see them. You could hear the wind. You could hear yourself think. Nobody came that way, no one paid any attention. I miss that privacy. I felt like I was invisible wherever I went, that I could do and be and think whatever I wanted. Now, I could spend a week in my apartment and never walk out the door. It’s very much a refuge for me. That sense of freedom is kind of exciting. It pushes everybody out farther, and I can say who can come in closer.

My dad hated his factory job, but he stuck with it until he retired because he couldn’t make enough on the farm. The three of us boys all had daily
chores and helped with harvesting the crops. I hated it all. We were always land-poor, so there wasn’t much money. The house was never fixed up very well. Farming was too hard a work for too little return. My dad was not one to teach you things. He would tell you to do something, and if you did it wrong he would get disgusted. “God damn it, I should have done it myself!” We all worked in the garden, and I usually did the yardwork because I liked doing it—mowing, planting flowers, doing the trimming. My room was always neat and clean while most of my family was very cluttered, and I got great pleasure out of tidying things up. I would go through and clean the house periodically as a favor to my mom.

When I was maybe five years old, I crawled up on my mother’s lap to kiss her. She turned away and said, “Don’t ever kiss me on the lips.” I have no recollection of my mother ever kissing or embracing me, or saying she loved me. And I certainly never had any of that from my father. I had a strong sense of neglect, that my parents didn’t really care and weren’t interested in me. I was very close to my grandmother, my father’s mother, and spent lots of time with her, weekends and summers. From her I learned about touching, hugs, and kisses.

My parents never had much comment for us on what we did, but it was clear I had brains and that was a source of pride for them. They gave me a dollar when I got straight A’s. That was the only sense of uniqueness I had. I wanted so badly to be different, to stand out. Through the sixth grade I went to a country school and things were clicking along. I had all these buddies of mine from school at my sixth grade birthday party. We had those little horns with the thing that unrolls and rolls back up. All of us were standing under the light in the center of the room blowing them at once and they all shot out and got tangled up with each other, and we just laughed and laughed.

Everything fell apart in seventh grade, when we merged with other schools in the area and went to a different school, where the country kids met the city kids. I felt awkward, didn’t fit in, didn’t make friends easily. My freshman year of high school we merged again, and they put us in tracks. I went college prep and most of my elementary school friends went vocational, so we split up and I was kind of a loner. The high school was twenty-five miles away, an hour bus ride in the morning and an hour at night, so it was hard to go to many activities.

My parents didn’t go to church but they were always willing to take us, so I went regularly from probably the fifth grade on. I would go to Sunday school and vacation Bible school and all the Christmas things. Those were the only opportunities I had to socialize with other kids until my sophomore year, when I started an encounter group that a local church
was doing. The group met for six or eight weeks, and I did two years’ worth of maturing in that period. I had been very naive, unaware of what other people thought of me, unaware of puberty. The group opened me up to a lot of things, but it was devastating. I became aware that I was different from everybody else, I was a sissy, people were making fun of me, I needed to grow up. I was despondent and embarrassed about how immature and unsocialized I was.

The minister took an interest in me, so I felt like there was somebody who cared. One night, I left a note for my parents and ran away. I was going to go stay with the minister and try to work things out. But he lived twenty-five miles away. I’d walk by farmhouses and mean farm dogs would start chasing me, barking and growling. I was scared to death. Finally I’d walked five miles and got out to the blacktop highway, but there was no traffic at two in the morning. It was terrible. I kept walking and walking and thought I’d never get there. So I stopped at a house, woke them up, and told them my car had run out of gas way down the road. Could I call someone to get me? I called the minister, he took me to his home, and I went to bed. The next morning he made me call my parents to tell them I was okay. My mom was real upset. She’d called my dad home from work. Of course, they wanted to know where I was. When they came to get me, the minister talked with them, tried to get them to understand that they should show me some attention, talk to me. My mom stared straight ahead and was kind of shaking, and looked like she had been crying. The only thing my father said was, “Look what you’ve done to your mother.” They took me to school, I went home at the end of the day, and it was never mentioned again. I vowed to myself never to hurt them again.

When I was sixteen, I was working at McDonald’s so I couldn’t go camping one weekend. Our family did a lot of camping together, and this was the first time I didn’t go. There was a note on my desk when I got home from school that Friday: “It’s really sad to go on this trip without you. We have always enjoyed going with you. I know you can’t .always understand, and I don’t tell you much about my feelings for you, but everybody has to guard their heart in their own way. Just know that I always love you. Mother.” I realized then that my parents did care. It was just that they couldn’t show it in ways that I needed to see or feel it. My father’s father died when he was five and his mother had to raise four boys in the Depression, so there wasn’t a lot of time to give him the things he needed. He was alcoholic in my early years, quit drinking when I was about six. My mother was raised in a very strict environment with seven younger brothers whose father had been raised in abusive foster homes.

I picked up some friends in the encounter group, but just when that
was feeling good we moved and I started my junior year at a different school, where I had trouble making friends. That summer I went to a church camp that turned out to be kind of an evangelical, quasi-fundamentalist camp. I got saved and my world turned around. I became this wonderful person. I wasn’t sulking anymore, I wasn’t prone to depression, life felt better. I made a lot of friends in a Christian youth group and became a youth leader in the church. I really had a good time my senior year of high school with my Christian friends. We would have wild prayer meetings at the house. Thirty youth would come over and we’d be on our knees whooping and yelling and all praying in loud voices at the same time. My parents would be sitting in the other room smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, wondering what the hell was going on, I’m sure. But they were just thrilled—I was a good kid, a model person in the church. I visited the shut-ins and carted them all over.

When I stayed with my grandmother, my uncles had magazines like
True Confessions
, only geared towards men. I never read the stories, but the sketches that went with the stories had very masculine men—hairy chest, shirt open or maybe off, muscular, tanned, rugged. In high school I would see guys and wish I looked like them—a tall slender guy who had gorgeous hair, the football guys, or the jocks who were good looking and very masculine. I was probably physically attracted to them but I rationalized that I just wished I looked like them. In a health book we had in the house, the section on homosexuality talked about studies that had been done, and one had found that men whose right testicle hung lower than the left were more prone to homosexuality. I looked at mine and, doggone it, the right one
was
lower than the left.

I went to a Christian college in Kentucky and was again very much a loner. Late in college I had my first awareness that maybe I was gay, but I didn’t linger on that thought. After I’d finished college, I stopped at an adult book store one night on my way to work, but I couldn’t get the nerve up to go in. A week later I got the nerve up, went straight to the rack of gay male pornography, bought a magazine, and shot right back out the door. If there was anybody else in the place I never saw them. I looked at the magazine in the car and threw it in the trash before I got home.

About four years ago I was finishing up my Ph.D. program and thinking, I am gay, I am married, I have a child. I have made my bed and I have to lie in it. A year later I was thinking, there’s a support group for people who are coming out, maybe I should check it out. Flakiest group of people I ever met! They all had some bizarre quirk about them, and after about four sessions I decided if this is being gay I think I’ll pass. A year later I had
the chance to move to San Francisco. I wanted to go and my wife didn’t. I was feeling like, this is it—do it or die, come out now or you might as well kill yourself because it’s no good living this way. I felt I couldn’t put it off any longer because it wasn’t fair to my wife for us to get out to San Francisco and for me to come out to her there. So I came out to her.

Two years ago, when my wife and I decided to separate, I came out to my parents and my brothers. I sent my parents a letter and they called me the day they got it. “You’re our son, you’ll always be our son, that will never change.” But it has never been discussed since. I brought it up again when my parents came to California to visit. We had stopped at McDonald’s and when I brought it up my dad said, “Well, coffee’s gone. I guess we should get back on the road.” My mom asked me when I first knew. I told her college was probably the first that I was made aware of it and didn’t suppress it so much, but I didn’t let myself be fully aware of it until two years ago. I’m hopeful my mom and I can talk some more about it.

My parents’ best friends were at my dad’s funeral. They’ve been best friends since my parents were married, and this woman is my mom’s closest friend. We received a flower arrangement from this woman’s son, but it was from the son and his roommate, a man. I said to my mom that it was odd that his roommate would send the flower arrangement, too, and she said, “Oh, he’s been with him quite a while now.” I said, “Do you think he’s gay?” and she said, “Yeah, I think he probably is. I’ve always thought that.”

I asked her if she and his mom had ever talked about it, and she said, “Oh, no. I would never bring it up in case his mom doesn’t know. I don’t want to be the one to tell her because she might not accept it. I know his father wouldn’t accept it so I figure it’s just best not to talk about it.” I said, “That’s kind of odd. Here you’ve been friends all these years and you both have a gay son and you’ve never talked about it,” and she said, “Well, it’s not my place.”

When my wife and I told my daughter we were separating, we told her I was gay. In the months leading up to that, I had bought her several kids’ books on the issue and we’d read them together and talked about gay people. She had grown up with a lot of lesbian friends of my wife, so she had no problem with me being gay, but she had a problem with the fact that her parents’ marriage ended because I was gay. The same holds for me. If I weren’t gay, I’d still be with my daughter on a daily basis. That’s been the most painful for me. If there’s anything I resent about being gay, it is that. Sometimes I sit and cry and say over and over, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

But what I did I would do over again. Congruence in life is really important to me. I do have times where it’s like
The Best Little Boy in the World;
if you could take a pill and be straight, would you? He says no way.
¹
I can’t say that all the time. I like finally being who I am, and if I think of me in this place, inside this apartment, I’m fine with who I am. But the minute I step out of here, I’m reminded that I was never one of the guys, and I think maybe if I could have taken a pill and been straight I would’ve been one of them. It’s definitely a straight person’s world out there and it would be a whole lot easier to function in it if I were straight. Or when I think of my daughter, I think maybe all this pain wouldn’t have happened. On the other hand, if I could have come out a lot earlier maybe I would never have married and I wouldn’t have had to go through all the pain of divorce and loss.

My former wife and my daughter are my strongest support system. I talk with them at least twice a week. It’s a little difficult in that I know my former wife still loves me very much. I don’t think she harbors any misconceptions about us getting back together, but I know if I find a partner it will be a second round for her. He will become my best friend and I won’t talk as much with her. I’m thinking maybe I should pull away a little bit and not share as much with her. If I do that gradually, I think it will be less painful if I find someone else.

I became very good friends with a guy I met in California, in a support group for gay men who had been married or were currently married. He and I had a lot in common, and about nine months later we had sex on the beach at night. I have never felt anything like that. It was wonderful, incredible—like circuits got plugged-in that had never been plugged-in before. For the first time in my life I felt normal. And then about a month later I met a guy who swept me off my feet. Not only was it an incredible sexual intimacy but I also felt an emotional intimacy. He told me he loved me, he loved this and that about me, and we had so much fun. He said and did all the right things. I found out a few months later he didn’t mean any of those things, but it was the first time in my life I ever felt loved in a whole way. I have no doubt about my former wife’s love for me—the depth and the greatness of it—but it never felt whole.