Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (38 page)

Andrew became especially interested in the changes that happened to me when I went into puberty. We slept in the same bed and when I was fourteen and he was eleven we began to masturbate together—ourselves and each other. There was a lot of rivalry and antagonism between us by day, but at night it was almost as if we were lovers. There was a very definite Jacob and Esau scenario going on. My brother initiated most of this sexual activity, under cover of darkness, and we never spoke about it. We did this almost every night until I left for college.

When I was somewhere between thirteen and fifteen, we were at my grandma’s and there was a news report about gay men in a park somewhere in California. The family got all up in arms, saying “Kill the perverts,” and that kind of stuff. At that point I realized something happened between men, and it smacked of what interested me. I knew it was called Sodom and Gomorrah from the pulpit, but I really didn’t know what it was.

Until my junior year of high school, I felt really guilty about masturbation—that I was going to lose my mind or God was going to kill me or something. I began to get away from that when I had my first major crush on a guy, my best friend during my junior and senior years of high school. God, I was so madly in love with him I would’ve sold my soul. For one of our English classes we had to keep a journal, and he would let me read his. He was involved with a girl, and was having sex with her every weekend. I kept his journal till I was twenty-four years old—not because I cared what he had been doing with a girl, but because I was in love with him.

When I was sixteen, I was dating a girl and I thought I might want to kiss her. I knew Andrew had kissed girls, so I asked him—when you kiss, do you suck or blow? I don’t remember that he was really able to answer my question. But I never tried to kiss anybody else until I went off to Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois, where a girl from Pittsburgh taught me how to kiss. Dating was the thing to do, so I dated girls that first year of college. It was the first time I didn’t have to worry about my parents watching or about having to go home to milk the cows. There were a fair number of gay men at this fundamentalist college. A friend showed me a picture he had found of his roommates, ministerial students, in a sexual setting. He and I had much the same type of religious
upbringing, and when we looked at that picture we looked at each other and it was like a light went on—oh, okay, this really does happen. He and I never did anything, but I wondered if he was gay.

When I went home at Christmas that year, I was dating a black girl. I told my parents I was dating a girl. Could I bring her home sometime? Sure. During the course of the conversation it came out that she was black, and my dad went totally berserk. It upset me so much that when I went back to college I collected my things and ran away to New Mexico for six months, where I lived with my older sister. She had a television, so I would see the news and
Phil Donahue
and other shows where homosexuality was talked about. I began to put the pieces together, but I still couldn’t make a transition, so I went back to Indiana, got together with my high school sweetheart, and got married. That was what you did in that culture, and I guess subconsciously I thought getting married would validate that I was okay, and all this stuff would just kind of fall away.

Within a couple of months after my first son was born, his mother and I had a conversation in which I told her that not only was sex between us not anything like I expected, it was terrible. She wasn’t satisfied, and I wasn’t satisfied. I told her about what had gone on between my brother and me, and she was so frightened by it that we never mentioned it again. We were only nineteen, for heaven’s sake.

We went ahead and had two more children, and the whole marriage was really bad. It was crazy that we were together; all we ever did was argue. Maybe she didn’t know how to get out. And yet she was bright enough to figure out what I couldn’t. She called everyone in my family and told them, “He’s gay. That’s why I kicked him out.” It was vicious and vindictive. Other than the conversation we’d had years before, she had nothing on which to base that. I was married to her for seven years and never had sex with a guy. Whatever fantasies I had were with men, but I didn’t have anything except the masturbation experience with my brother to go on. My family believed her, so I turned around and got married again, partly, I guess, to convince them—and myself—that I wasn’t gay.

After my second wife and I were married, I found out that men meet in parks, public restrooms, and bookstores. I had heard this years before, but didn’t have enough sense to act on it. Then, driving through a park in Colorado Springs, it dawned on me—there were all these single guys driving around, there must be something going on. I started sunbathing there and a guy came running by and stopped and looked at me. I made some inane comment and we started talking. The first time we made love, it was like—this is it! This is what lovemaking is supposed to be. God, it was wonderful. We wound up falling in love with each other and had a
relationship for two-and-a-half years. I didn’t know what it meant to be in love with somebody—to eat, sleep, breathe, and think about them twenty-four hours a day. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and he was maybe thirteen years older. He was married, too.

I want to come out to my family, although my mother has said on more than one occasion that she would rather one of her kids would die than tell her they were gay. The thing that keeps me from telling them is not that I have any guilt or bad feelings. I could quite happily go in and say, this is what I am—take it or leave it. And it’s not that I think my mother couldn’t deal with it, not even the fear that she might tell me to get out. It’s just that my mom has had so much sorrow—my brother’s alcoholism and his being in jail, and my sister Sally, who has driven her insane for more than a decade with vicious, hateful stuff. I don’t need to come out to them to validate me to me. I’m okay with who I am. But it would just crush the life out of her—one more great big sorrow—and why would I want to do that to my mother?

There are people at work I’ve come out to, but with some of the people in my family I wouldn’t be surprised if they would pick up a gun and shoot me. So I’m just playing it by ear. My dad could get real deadpan and order me out of the house, or he could beat me to a bloody pulp. He has in recent years, without even looking angry, hauled off and punched people—knocked them down and hurt them. If they all find out inadvertently, or suspect, it won’t bother me. But I know I’m going to tell my brother. He turned to drugs and alcohol when he was still in high school, and when he was in the marines he brought home pictures he took of guys in his platoon that could be described in no other way than homoerotic. And me-thinks he doth protest too much sometimes. It’s important to me to talk to him about it. He could pick up a gun and shoot me, but I don’t think he will. He may deny it outright and tell me I’m disgusting, or he may open up and say, “Yeah, let’s talk about it.”

So much of the time during junior high and high school, the pressure to conform, to be masculine, ate at me a lot. If I’d had an inordinate amount of teasing on any given day, I would get real melancholy, and would sometimes go out in the woods to cry or to fight things out inside myself. And I enjoyed riding my horse in the openness and expanse of the fields. It was almost a gift to be able to get away and think my own thoughts—to ride free and unrestrained. I often wondered if my school friends in town were ever able to get away from everything and get in touch with themselves.

And I’ve
often thought what a pity it is that my own three sons haven’t had the privilege of growing up on a farm.

This summer, my oldest son asked me how I felt about something with reference to homosexuality. I gave him my opinion, and he just looked at me kind of funny and said, “Daddy, are you gay?” I was not expecting the question, so instead of answering it I asked him, “If I were gay, would that change how you feel about me? Would that change the openness of our relationship? What would it do to you?” Next summer, I’m going to tell the boys. In the event that any of them are gay, they need to have role models, to understand that it’s okay. It’s very important that they know this as early in life as possible. And in the event that none of them are gay, maybe they’ll reevaluate the prejudices and biases they’re picking up from other people.

I have some frustration and anger about the friction between my religious upbringing and coming to grips with my sexual orientation—about being forced to be stuck in a lie, about the unfairness I’ve experienced in disentangling myself from my most recent marriage, about being thirty-five and just now coming out. And by god, I’m so sick of other people dictating. Trying to come to terms with my own sexuality, I’ve had to shed almost all of my religious beliefs; they just won’t fit with it. The farm has given me another backdrop, something else to move back to. I think of myself as a Christian deist at this point, with a real appreciation for God’s creation, as opposed to just worrying about religious practices. I believe the true religion is to be as kind as you can be to others. With so much hurt and hate in the world, why do we want to inflict more on each other?

When my second wife and I started going through the process of divorce, we told close friends and our pastor and his wife that I was gay. At no time did anybody say, “Wow, this is interesting. Tell me more about it.” They just put up walls. I have a real deep sorrow that people don’t want to know. It’s not a matter of, “Oh, I didn’t know that—that’s neat to know.” It’s, “Don’t tell me, because I don’t want my mind changed. I’m comfortable being antagonistic and prejudiced against you.” It makes me very sad that a lot of people think we’re all a bunch of perverts running around. And not only do they think that, but they
choose
to think that—they choose not to know the other side of it. I would like somehow to become politically forceful in changing that perception.

For a long time, especially in my adolescent years, there was such a lot of guilt, and then when I was married there was a lot of resentment. Why can’t I be normal? Why did this have to happen to me? Once I was able to shed my fundamentalist beliefs, I came to realize that whether you’re
straight or gay, you’re made in the creator’s image. I’m put together pretty amazingly, and as different as I am to so many others, there’s nothing wrong or bad about the way I am. Now that I’ve stopped worrying about what if and why not, I look at the beauty of the relationship I had with the guy in Colorado Springs. I think in some ways same-sex partners are far more capable of being real in a relationship, because they understand more closely where each other is coming from. The physical love and spiritual communion I have had with other men have been far superior to what I have observed in heterosexuals.

If I could snap my fingers tomorrow and become straight, I wouldn’t do it. I’m very happy the way I am, and I want to find somebody to share that gladness with. I don’t want anybody right this minute, because I need to spend some time with myself. But if the right person came along six months or a year from now, I could see myself making a commitment to a relationship. I would like a monogamous relationship because I think it makes sense in terms of one’s health, but I would like a relationship more than I would insist on it being monogamous. I wouldn’t want a relationship that was real clingy and where I had to be constantly affirming the person. I’ve been through that with both of my marriages. But I would like to have somebody to do things with, to go to bed with at night and curl up and cuddle with. I’m real cuddly.

Born in 1957, John grew up on 300-acre mixed livestock and crop farm near New Ulm, in Brown County, south-central Minnesota. His older sister and brother were grown-ups during his childhood. John lives in northeastern Iowa and works as a librarian. This brief narrative describes how he responded to his emotional and physical attractions to other males, from grade school through high school.

WATCHING THE TV movie of
Cinderella,
with Lesley Ann Warren, I was very taken with the handsome prince and thought how lucky I would be if I were Cinderella and could land him. Sometimes when my parents weren’t around, I would get into my sister’s wardrobe and put on her bridal gown and veil, pretending I was getting married, walking down the stairs with the long gown trailing behind me. Sometimes I would go outside with my sister’s dresses on and pretend to be a woman visiting the city. I’d sit on one of the farm implements and pretend I was driving somewhere. The pole barn would be a restaurant where I’d have lunch, and then I might go to the chicken barn to visit with the girls and do some shopping.

It was typical for my mother and father and me to go for a drive on Sunday afternoons. As we drove around they would look at other farmers’ fields, chatting and listening to polka music on the car radio. My father was always very interested in seeing how his crops compared to other farmer’s crops. I would sit in the back seat, day-dreaming and waiting for the ice cream that we would stop for about mid-way through the trip.

On our drive one Sunday, when I was twelve or thirteen, my mother had to return some dishes from Ruthy and Les’s wedding that had taken place the day before. It was the first wedding I had ever gone to and I was very happy about going. Both the bride and the groom had dressed in white, and Les was stunningly handsome in his white tux. He was a farmer, so he was very sunburned. His face and hands were ruddy and his hair was slicked straight back. Watching him during the ceremony and the reception, I thought how lucky Ruthy was to have a nice man like that—a man like I wanted to have. When they left for their honeymoon, I was almost jealous that she was going to be the one with him. Sitting in the back seat
of the car, looking out the window, I was day-dreaming about what it would be like to be alone with Les. He would be driving the car and I’d be sitting right next to him, like a boyfriend and girlfriend would do.

Kevin was a couple years older than I and lived on a farm maybe ten miles away. The summer before my sophomore year in high school, I saw him doing some field work. He was shirtless and very tan. After that, I would ride my bike past his farm, hoping to see him. That fall, Kevin’s sister and I were working on a school project with two other students. I planned it so the group would meet at her house, and maybe I would get to see Kevin. After we finished with our project we were sitting around in the living room and Kevin’s mother served us bars and soda. It was harvest time and apparently Kevin had been working pretty hard that day. I was hoping he would get in from the field before I had to leave.