Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (44 page)

Farming was in me, but I was never a Future Farmer of America. I think I saw a picture of my dad I didn’t like—always having to work, never looking happy. But I felt sorry for my dad after we all moved away and he quit farming. He loved farming—I see that now—and after a man does that for years and just quits, I know it had to work on him. They leased the farm out, and he runs a farm machinery business so he still works like a dog. They still don’t give a hoot about what the house looks like. It’s not a run-down old shack, but they don’t put money into the house or vehicles or anything.

My dad and mom, my uncle and his wife, my grandmother and grandfather—their commitment to one person has really been tremendous. Commitment to the right person is what I want, but when you have two men together it’s
too easy to just chuck it all and get out. Hell, divorce is too easy for married people these days, and with two men it’s even easier. You have a fight, you move on to the next. There just doesn’t seem to be a real effort to make it work. Keith and I are hitting our eighth anniversary. There have been troubles and struggles. I feel like I don’t deserve him sometimes, because I’ve done some pretty nasty things. But the bottom line is we do love and care deeply about one another, and no matter how bad things get, that commitment remains the same. My son and daughter, twelve and nine, are here one day a week, every other weekend, and four weeks out of the year nonstop. We always do family vacations together. The kids love Keith—he is as much a father to them as I am. He is extremely successful—his drive is incredible—and his commitment to his job and to me and my family is very important to him. He will execute my will and the trust that’s all set up for the kids.

I still love horses, and the farm is still a sanctuary to me. It’s so open and free, being able to saddle a horse up and escape, get away, just get lost and ride. Sometimes you don’t realize what you have until you don’t have it anymore. I wish my kids could grow up in that environment, to learn how to care for things. They ride my horses, but it’s not the same as being there day in, day out.

Just because I’m HIV-positive doesn’t mean I’m not going to be here for a long time to come. It’s taken me a while to realize that, but I haven’t been sick, and all indicators are real good—going up, up, up. I’m healthy as a horse, I feel good, and I’m loved by a lot of people. There’s absolutely no reason to think it’s not going to continue for a long time. Down the road, I want to have five to ten acres, room for the horses and the animals, and then let Keith build a new house. I may be in the middle of beautiful Meridian-Kessler in Indianapolis right now, which is real nice, but there will be acreage in my future. I can guarantee it.

Lon was born in 1961 and grew up on a 780-acre crop farm in Mower County, southeastern Minnesota. He was the seventh often children, with three brothers and six sisters. Lon lives in Minneapolis and works in investment products marketing.

YOU HAD TO be the oldest boy in the house to become pals with Dad, the guy that he would discuss farm things with. When Ben, my next older brother, moved out of the house, I moved into his place, even at the dinner table. We’d all shift around the table. Now /was the oldest boy in the house, so all of a sudden I was pals with Dad. I didn’t have to do anything to prove myself for that spot—it was by default. It felt good that Dad was treating me like he used to treat Ben, like more of an equal, like I would understand what he was talking about.

We farmed just shy of eight hundred acres, growing soybeans, corn and oats, and peas for Green Giant. My two older brothers were more involved in the farming work than I was. We had no livestock, so there weren’t regular chores to do, but in the summer we had to do some of the cultivating and weeding. We were pretty involved in walking beans— walking up and down the rows of soybeans to pull weeds that were missed by the herbicides. Picking rock was a dirty, horrible job that seemed like an endurance test, but we were all expected to do it. The area had rich soil, but it was also pretty rocky, so about every two years we would pick up rocks off of all the fields. Year after year, the plows kept pulling up these ten, twenty, and thirty-pound rocks left by some prehistoric glacier.

My older sister liked mechanical things and wanted to be on a tractor as much as anybody, but in our family the guys helped dad in the field and the girls did the housework. Except for picking rock, which required a family effort, my sisters did not get involved much in farm chores. One of my sisters and I did a lot of gardening, partly because of our involvement in 4-H. With ten kids, the vegetable garden was a necessity, not a hobby. We were expected to maintain a good-sized garden, about a sixth of an acre. I was one of two males in my family who really liked to cook. Ours was a meat-and-potatoes family, and I liked to try things we didn’t normally have, like Oriental cooking, soufflés, and crepes. For our family, those foods were plenty exotic.

My parents were strict disciplinarians, which is a difficult thing to be with ten kids. My mother was the one who really raised us. She only called Dad in when she needed the heavy guns. Mom had a pretty gentle wooden spoon, and we were not spanked much—although there were times I would have preferred a swat rather than “a good, stiff talking-to,” as my father used to say. My mother, a devout Catholic, injected religion into the family whenever she could. When things were difficult, we would all get together and pray the rosary. From the time I was old enough to be carried along to church until I left for college, the only time I ever missed a Sunday mass was when I was sick. And not just kind of sick; you had to be really sick.

There was an old German-Scandinavian work ethic, but there was a play ethic too. We rarely worked on Sundays, and we did a lot of cookouts and other fun things together on the weekends. My grandfather was an avid golfer and bought his grandkids memberships at the local country club, so we would golf with him and my dad. We had the misfortune of living in one of the few counties in Minnesota that don’t have any natural lakes, so it was a big deal to go to a lake. A couple of Sundays each summer, we would pack up the boat and go fifty-some miles to water-ski and splash around for the day. And in early August, after the cultivating was done but before harvest, we would rent a cabin at a lake in northern Minnesota and go up for a week to water-ski, fish, canoe and just generally play in the water.

I started band in fifth grade, played the French horn and then the trumpet. In eighth grade I got into singing and it became a large part of my identity through high school and college. I was in just about every music organization there was in high school, and I was also in a rock-and-roll band that played in bars and clubs on the weekends. It was a Partridge Family sort of thing—a family of five kids that went to the same school we did. They brought in other people as they wanted to add instruments to the band. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but two of the brothers in that family were gay. I became very good friends with both of those guys— there was sort of a relaxed understanding between us. I got to know them at about the time they were coming to grips with their sexuality, probably ten years before I did.

Our farm had two large pastures, almost twenty acres, some of the best grazing land in the county. There were creeks running through both pastures, and when I was little I would go there with friends just to explore— in the creeks and the woods, along the railroad tracks, under the railroad bridges, up to the highway. You could get probably half or three-quarters of a mile from the house. I’d hike out there and sit, just to get away.

Eating Apples,
by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Lon Mickelsen

We lived very close to town, and there was a bunch of town kids that used to come down and play under one of the railroad bridges that crossed the creek. Playing “Truth or Dare” with a bunch of boys and girls, I was always more interested in seeing the boys naked. I went fishing a lot with one of the boys from town—probably the person I spent the most time with in my childhood. We spent three or four summers together, almost every day when I wasn’t doing some kind of farmwork. In my youth, he was the only friend that I had any sexual encounters with. It started when we were fishing and decided to go skinny-dipping in a pool in the creek.

From there it was “you show me, I’ll show you,” and we felt each other’s erections.
That sort of thing went on for weeks one summer, probably in the fifth or sixth grade. But in high school, he and I were almost strangers; we could hardly look at each other and rarely talked. I think a lot of that was because we were embarrassed about those past summers, and didn’t know how to deal with that as we got older and started to realize what it had been.

In my family, sexuality was governed largely by conservative Catholicism—that is, it was not discussed. When I was probably six years old and started asking enough questions about where the kittens came from, my mom had the talk with me about the birds and the bees. It was all presented in non-human terms. My mom and dad seemed to be reluctantly resigned to the idea that sex education should be taught in the schools, mostly because they didn’t want to deal with it at home. Sexuality was held in an undercurrent. You didn’t talk about it, and you certainly didn’t openly demonstrate it in any way. When boyfriends and girlfriends came over to the house, they were expected to be prim and proper in front of the family. You were expected not to sit in the car with a boyfriend or girlfriend after you got home from a date. I suppose it was the convent sort of attitude—”Sex is evil, children”—not openly announced, but understood.

I dated all the way through high school, mostly to be one of the gang. I think I was aware that I had an attraction to boys, but I was trying to stay with the flow. My last steady girlfriend was in college. I went out with her for about two-and-a-half years, and broke up with her during my senior year. One night we were talking and finally I said, “Listen, I can’t do this anymore.” She said, “What do you mean, you can’t do this?” And I thought, I don’t know what I mean. Why do I want to break up with somebody I’ve been going with for two-and-a-half years, a person I actually love? The answer was obvious, but my mouth couldn’t form the words: Because I’m not sexually attracted to her. I was dating her, but fantasizing about my male roommates.

A few months later, at home for spring break, I went for a walk down the railroad tracks one night and was sitting on the same railroad bridge that I’d played “Truth or Dare” under as a child. I was trying to figure out why I’d broken up with my girlfriend. After an hour or so, I finally came to the point of saying out loud, “I must be gay.” I couldn’t believe it, but I must be. As soon as I’d clicked that little switch, a hundred things rolled through my mind. I would have to somehow get used to it, though it seemed like it wouldn’t work either way—I couldn’t be straight, and I couldn’t be gay. How could I ever tell my parents? They could never deal
with it, because the Catholic church is against it. How could I ever meet somebody? Could I ever have a real relationship? I felt a strange, quiet panic; this was something I was going to have to carry all by myself. But I’d had enough of fighting it for fifteen or twenty years, and I was giving up. I decided to affirm it because I couldn’t fight it anymore. If I could have fought it, I would have.

I’m still coming to grips with being gay. I’ve pretty much always seen myself as a homosexual trying to appease society by pretending I wasn’t. I’ve never liked the word “gay.” It doesn’t bother me as much now, but I used to choke on that word. It seemed like a derogatory term, like black people calling each other niggers. I first went to my therapist to deal with a relationship, and in one of the first sessions he said, “We’ll deal with this relationship first, and then we’ll deal with your homophobia.” I thought, who’s he talking to? It was shocking to hear somebody say I was homophobic. To me that was something only a non-gay person could have. Then I realized you can accept who you are, but you can still be crippled by a fear of it.

Dealing with my homophobia has been an exercise in getting over avoiding being gay and making a conscious effort to tell people who I want to know about it. Part of that has to be to inform my family. But my parents are so reactionary, I don’t know if or when I will ever tell them. It just might not be worth the hassle to me. But my first experience of telling a sibling was very positive. I told my sister who’s a year older than me, as we went for a walk near my parents’ house. It was very reassuring, but I knew it would be with her, and she had kind of suspected it anyway.

One of the first people I told was my old college roommate. He’s one of the people I’d been most attracted to, and had he been gay I think we could have been very good partners. He’s married to one of my old girlfriends, a sister of the two gay brothers in the band I was in. She and I were dating when we got to college, but I became very interested in him, and so did she. She got to know him from hanging around our dorm room, and they started dating. That was terribly traumatic for me. I was losing a girlfriend, who was a true friend and a social safety net to me, and at the same time I was losing the person who I was really sexually interested in—and I was losing them to each other. But the wounds healed fast. They’ve been wonderfully supportive, and they’re still among my best friends.