Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (37 page)

I lived a totally celibate life in college, and I have a certain amount of regret about that. I was so dead-set on getting that 4.0 GPA that everything else was out of the picture. I just hammered away at it, relentlessly. I might have been dodging the issue too—kind of like I needed to resolve one issue at a time. The first issue was my career, or purpose in life, and after I got my first job I was permitted the freedom to pursue the other aspects of my life. That’s one thing that’s been out of sync in my life—the ability to juggle several things at one time.

A lot of gay people spend their lives just grazing the surface. Then there are the over-achievers, who have a subconscious need to prove their worth in society. I tend to be an over-achiever. At times it’s a blessing and at times it’s a curse, but I don’t want anyone at work to ever have reason to say, “Not only is he gay, but he doesn’t do above and beyond the call of duty.” You can call me a faggot, you can call me any slur you want to, but don’t ever call me a sluff-off or someone who doesn’t put out 110 percent. It’s definitely a trait I picked up from my father. He would say, “Count your blessings for every day you can work.”

Mark Vanderbeek, age three, and his sisters,
left,
Sandy, and Pat. Courtesy of Sandy Coorts.

Growing up in a small community, I had a strong sense of identity—the farm, the small town, the small school. I’ve heard other people say that when they realized they were gay, they felt like they must be freaks of nature. But being gay never really caused me great inner conflict, because I’ve always had a fairly strong sense of who I am. I’m an Adams kid, I go to Adams school. When I was in doubt or turmoil about something, I had those things to prop me up and tell me, “Hey, you’re okay. This issue will be resolved.”

I grew up in quite ordinary circumstances and the most “wholesome” of settings. I always knew I was gay, I’ve always been comfortable with it, and I certainly have no regrets about it. I’ve taken my lumps like everyone does, straight or gay or whatever, and I wouldn’t trade places with anyone. I’ve gotten this far to understand who I am. I would just as soon stay on track and find out what’s ahead. Despite what people in New York or Los Angeles might say, I don’t consider Nebraska the middle of nowhere. I think the Midwest is a wonderful place to be. Omaha is like a second home to me, other than Adams. It’s very much a sense-of-community type city, the focal point being Omaha, with the suburbs looking to it. I feel a little lost in Kansas City, with the core city kind of languishing and the suburbs taking over. Not having that core to identify with is kind of baffling to me.

Everett was born in 1957 in southeastern Indiana and grew up on a dairy farm in that region. He has one younger brother and three older sisters. Everett was married twice and is the father of three children. He lives with his husband in Wisconsin and works as an optician.

DADDY WAS ONLY too happy to finally have a son, but I think there was something about the gentleness of my nature that frightened him and he just pushed me away I was a model child, really responsible. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to back-talk my parents or not do something I was told. When I was quite small, my dad’s younger brother would throw me up in the air, and I was just terrified. It was a great game of teasing, and jesting between my dad and his brother, what a sissy I was. It was communicated to me very strongly that I was somehow inferior as a male.

My brother Andrew was appropriately macho. He was the hunter and the trapper, so Daddy thought he was wonderful. By the time Andrew was nine, my father had given him a real .22 rifle to hunt with. When our parents were gone, Andrew would get the loaded rifle out and keep my sisters and me just terrified, teasing us. Daddy was so approving of Andrew that nothing was ever done about it.

My earliest recollection of my father is being beaten with a belt when I was three or four. I was crunched down in a corner, trying to shrink away from him, and my mother stepped in between us and told him, “You’re not going to do this to him anymore.” I spent all of my growing-up years trying to do things which he would approve of, but none of it was ever quite enough to make him move back towards me. When my father’s raccoon-hunting cronies would come over, he would tell them about Andrew’s hunting exploits and accomplishments. There was no mention made of me—I was just an afterthought. It just wasn’t in me to be macho and tough, so Daddy couldn’t approve of me. It was appalling to me that Andrew actually took pleasure in killing animals.

Before we had real horses, Andrew and I rode stick horses. They didn’t even have heads, come to think of it. With no television, we had seen only a few cowboy shows at other people’s houses, but with that bit of
inspiration we had invented some cowboy games. There were no girls to be damsels in distress, so I would play the damsel and then play one of the cowboys as well. Andrew refused to ever be the damsel. I would put my mother’s and sisters’ discarded nylons on my head for long hair, and wrap a cloth around me for a dress. When Andrew was nine and I was about twelve, the cowboy games gave way to real live horses.

I became involved in the dairy operation because both my parents had outside jobs. A hired hand had been taking care of the milking, but he wasn’t doing it to my dad’s expectations, so he fired the guy. I could see that my parents were in a bit of a pinch, so I volunteered to do it until my dad could find somebody to take over. The entire dairy operation became my responsibility at about twelve or thirteen, and I milked the cows morning and night until after I graduated from high school. There were times we had as many as seventy head of cattle on the place, but we never milked more than maybe fifty at a time. I was out milking the cows at 5:00 every morning, and after school I got on the bus and went right home to do the milking. It was an awful lot of work, and restricted me from being involved in much at school. By the time I got to my senior year of high school, I was getting pretty tired of that much responsibility. Daddy sold the cows as soon as I went away to college because he couldn’t depend on Andrew to take care of them.

In addition to working in factories, my father was a part-time pastor of a small church. Our home and church life was very fundamentalist evangelical—Church of the Nazarene. We went to church probably three times a week, and we had spring and fall revivals where we went two weeks straight every night. We had hellfire and damnation preachers who came in and thundered at us. I believed everything and took it very much to heart. Everything was so structured within the framework of right and wrong as defined by the church. We purported to love “fallen mankind,” but we really didn’t. We saw ourselves on a plane above them, and they were the riffraff who deserved to “die in a Devil’s hell,” as the evangelists put it. We were prejudiced against anyone who wasn’t Christian, to our definition. We purported to love the sinner and hate the sin, but that wasn’t reality. A favorite topic was, “He that looketh on a woman and lusteth after her in his heart has already committed adultery.” So I made good and sure that wasn’t going to happen to me.

We had no television, because it was sinful, and my dad didn’t like for us to listen to radio music. In those days, my mother was happy enough that she sang a lot of the time. I picked up on this, and from the age of four or five I would get up on an old seed separator that sat out in the barn lot and sing at the top of my lungs. We were three-quarters of a mile
from the nearest neighbor, and a few times they called and asked, “What’s that noise over there?” They couldn’t identify it as singing. They thought somebody was screaming. “Everett is out on the seed separator singing again.” Hymns were all I knew—”Rock of Ages,” “Amazing Grace.” By the time I was ten years old, I knew almost all the hymns in the book and could sing them word for word, without a book in front of me.

The first time I sang in the first grade of school, the music teacher stopped the whole class and said, “My gosh, you really know how to carry a tune, Everett.” From that day forward, nothing could stop me. I sang at civic events, at weddings and funerals, and at hootenannies. I was the first person from my high school to win the All-State Choir Award. My mother saw that I had this claim to fame, and arranged for me to take private voice lessons during my high school years. I even had a contract from a recording studio in Tennessee that was going to put me on the road. Then I made the mistake of getting married, and the rest is history.

Once when we had a calf born, Daddy said I could have it. From day one, I let April suck my hand. She grew up and had calves, and even as a cow she and I were really close. To me, the cows weren’t the numbers on their chains around their necks. They all had names and very definite personalities. If I’d be really upset, I could go out into the pasture where April was, and lie down, and just bawl my eyes out. She would look around at me like, “It’ll be okay.”

Mother would be there for me if I needed to talk. She was very aware that my father and I didn’t have a closeness, so she tried to be more to me. When I was fourteen or fifteen, she told me that Daddy was so excited when a son was finally born, but then not very long after it was almost as if he became jealous of my relationship with her. We were very close, but she wasn’t the smothery type. She would make a big deal out of my accomplishments at school—singing, playing the piano—so that I felt like there was something I had done well. A couple of times when my mother made my dad come to open house in grade school, he would tell my male teachers, “If Everett does anything wrong, be sure and give him a good paddling board, and be sure and send a note home with him and I ‘11 take care of it again when he gets home.” That just didn’t make any sense, because I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting in trouble.

My teacher in third and fourth grades was the first male teacher I had. I absolutely adored him because he was the first man who reached out to me and said, “Gosh, you’ve got it on the ball—you’re a great student, you participate well, you’re intelligent.” He said those things to me, not in so many words, but by the way he treated me. I needed that, because I was
missing it so much from Daddy. I needed a man to say, “You’re worth something.” Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened to me if that one man hadn’t given me a sense of worth.

As we got older, I became more Mother’s boy and Andrew became more Daddy’s boy. My oldest sister and I were more Mother’s children, because we were model kids. Andrew and my second sister, Sally, were the two renegades, and they were my dad’s kids. Before Andrew was born, Sally and Daddy were so close that he referred to her as his Little John. She was the tomboy of the three girls, the one who rode the tractors with him. She started calling me “queer” at about seven or eight. I had no clue what it meant, but I knew it was derogatory. My mother would become insane with anger and slap her in the mouth.

In the first grade, the school building was so archaic that the restrooms were concrete shanties at the back of the playground. I had gone to the restroom in the middle of class one day, and I heard somebody come in behind me. When I turned around, an older boy was standing there fully exposed from his waist to his knees. That was the first time I’d ever seen adult-size genitalia, and I was absolutely mesmerized. But I was scared, and when I ran out of the restroom he tried to cut me off.

I saw
Tarzan
on TV when I was seven, eight, nine and I thought his body was so beautiful, and that I’d like to touch him. Sometimes at the end of a day of baling hay, my dad and brother and I would skinny-dip in the pond to clean off before we came home. I thought Daddy was absolutely gorgeous and would like to have touched him, but I knew from what I
didn’t
hear from everybody else around me that what I was feeling was not quite normal somehow. After I went into puberty, all the boys were laughing in groups and talking about kissing girls. I had girlfriends too, but I recognized that I really would like to be holding hands with a boy. I was excited about being in gym class, because I knew we were all going to be in the shower together. But I was concerned that I might be embarrassed by an inadvertent erection.

My mother introduced us to Zane Grey novels, and I really got into them. I always found myself identifying with the heroines, wanting to be where they were, in the hero’s arms. My mother told me how disgusted she was by a book she was reading about two guys who met in the war. One introduced the other guy to his sister, and when they came home from the war, the sister and the guy got married so the two guys would be available to each other.

Andrew and I and a friend who was a year older than I found a place we called “the cave” in a very secluded woods. There was a waterfall, and
back under it was a large eroded area that had the appearance of a cave. We camped out there a few times. Where the waterfall came over, a pool had collected where we would go skinny-dipping. We played erotic games, grabbing each other. Around the time I turned thirteen, our friend introduced Andrew and me to masturbation. He didn’t let us see him masturbate; he just brought the semen over in his hand after he’d done it. We were mesmerized, just couldn’t believe it.