Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (47 page)

I’m very open with my family and have made it clear what my relationship with Hank is. Take me or leave me. I’ve been through enough with them that I don’t have time for that shit. My dad has said, “What are
you going to do when you get old? You’re going to be alone. You won’t have any kids.” He’s got three kids and we all resent him. Ain’t it great to have kids?

My brother Neil is also gay, and he is the only family I feel like I could count on if I really needed some emotional support. Kevin’s so different from me and Neil—he’s like my dad. He doesn’t talk about anything but what’s on the surface—hunting, crops, what cow is testing highest this year, the new bull that’s out from this or that company. A typical conversation with Kevin: “How are you and your wife doing?” “We separated.” “Oh, what caused that?” “Well, I was hunting all the time, and she didn’t like that I was gone.” End of conversation.

My dad looked down on dairy farmers who were grade B, and it was like a big joke to him if a farmer had trouble. “Did you see so-and-so tipped a wagon over? What a stupid damned thing to do.” I was raised to be real negative and critical of what other people did, and to judge them if they weren’t successful. There was always competition—your animals have to be better than the neighbor’s, and you have to have all purebreds. Throw out the old. Newer means better and more important and richer. “I’ve got new self-unloading wagons to fill the silo with. Zoellers are using their old machinery, and they’re beating it into the ground. They must not have the money.”

You’re on your own in this world. My dad really made that clear. If I was going to survive, it was up to me. Dad didn’t care about us in the way a father should. He was more worried about what Joe Blow over the hill had, and what they were doing, and what sports their kids were in, and why weren’t
we
doing as well? Shit, we were good students and we helped him. I feel like I have to work every day not to be like my dad. When I’m upset, I tend to go immediately for the negative. Now I think, slow down and start thinking rationally. I’m a sensible, logical person who can figure this out without losing my cool. I was taught to react now, react quick, and then it’s over with. And after he’d beat me bloody, he’d smile and say, “What’s for supper?” “Hey, what do you want for supper, Dad?”—as I’m wiping my eyes and my wounds and thinking, “Get me the hell out of here.” I always wanted his approval but always hated him because of it.

How is it that some people grow up with all this baggage and actually are productive adults, and others just never can cope? They’re in the bottle or trashed on something all the time. Somehow you either cope or you give up. I guess if you’re a fighter or a survivor, you manage—because you want better, you want to improve your life, you want to be happy. I really
feel good about my life and where it’s at right now. Some of the anger will never go away, but I’m not looking for a quick fix.

I believe God created me, so therefore he must love me. If I am a sinner, then he will forgive me. I believe in an afterlife, and that I will go to heaven. What do you want from your life, what will make you happy? Can you find your happiness within without destroying yourself getting there? A lot of people are destroyed. My mother is an example of that. Will it make you happy to walk through the woods and hear the birds sing? That’s as close to God as I will ever be.

Connie was born in 1962 and grew up with three older brothers and two younger sisters on a farm in Franklin County, southern Illinois. They farmed about 120 acres, on which they grew corn, wheat, soybeans, and hay, and raised beef cattle, hogs, and chickens. Connie’s father worked full-time as a coal miner. Connie lives in Chicago, where he teaches in a college.

MY MOTHER CALLED last night and was telling me about all these people she knew who were sick or dying. I told her I had just come from visiting a very sick friend at the hospital. She asked what was wrong, and I said, “He has pneumonia, and I think he has AIDS—actually, I know he has AIDS, and he knows it too.” And my mother said, “Oh, that’s really sad.” Her tone made me think that she meant it was sad that people do that to themselves. She said, “How do you know him?” and I said, “He’s a friend. I’m better friends with his friend Gary.” I didn’t allow myself to go ahead and say, “Actually, Gary and Kurt are lovers, and I’ve been friends with Gary for years, and they’ve been such a support for each other, and Gary’s being so strong and so nurturing right now, and I don’t know what Kurt would do without Gary being there.” I wanted to say all those things, but I didn’t.

Sometimes I think it makes sense to come out to my parents, and then I go home to visit and I’m back in a world that’s so completely different from the world I know now. Where I grew up, everybody was pretty much the same—white, working-class, rural, Protestant. People trusted each other, neighbors kept an eye out for each other, and the church was like an extended family, very communal and secure. But it wasn’t a place where diversity was valued. It was like homosexuality didn’t exist, except in a sermon or in a Bible verse condemning it. There was no one to talk to about things like that, at least no one I knew of.

I rode horseback every chance I got from the time I was nine years old until I was about fourteen. Sometimes I rode with friends, sometimes with Dad, but most of the time by myself. I craved the time alone in the wide-open countryside, the physical contact with my horse, the sense of independence. And I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, reading and writing in a journal, with a sense of being alone. I think that kind of experience
contributed to my being a spiritual person. I’ve had to go inside myself so much to get a sense of who I am and how I fit into the world, what’s important and what’s not.

Sometimes I feel that I was this person sort of planted on the farm. I always felt sort of outside of them all. Now that I’m in an urban environment I feel so comfortable, it’s almost like coming home. But I have a good time when I visit my parents now, when it’s just my parents and me. I dreaded it for a long time because I’d have to edit out quite a bit of my life to be with them. One of these days I’m going to stop limiting myself, and I’m going to talk to them about it.

I wasn’t as involved in the farmwork as my older brothers. I helped deliver baby lambs and calves, and my everyday chores were gathering eggs, carrying hay, and watering the cattle—sometimes by using an axe to break the ice on the pond. I liked doing things that let me get out on the tractor by myself and just go from one end of the field to the other. I would day-dream or sing—songs from church camp, songs from musicals, or songs we had sung in choir at school.

I hated picking corn. We had a corn-picker that was pulled behind the tractor, with the wagon hooked on behind it. It was a jalopy of a thing, and a hassle. I’d have to ride in the wagon, and when the corn piled up too high I’d knock it down and even it out. Before we got the corn-picker we picked corn by hand, which took forever. When I was five years old, I missed being in the big Halloween parade in town because we were out picking corn. It got late, and my dad had to get the job done. Mom said I wouldn’t be able to go because she thought I was coming down with a cold—but I was out there on that corn wagon, for god’s sake!

The next year, in first grade, I was on a float in the Halloween parade. It was supposed to be about Illinois history; there was a farmer, a minister, and an Indian. Agriculture, faith and heritage. I was the minister. I represented faith. I had a big Bible and my little black suit, and I waved at people. I really liked that, because I was a very religious kid and I enjoyed being the star. My parents were involved in the United Methodist church, and my mother especially was very religious. I was sort of the favored child with my mother, and I was the only one of the kids who ever took religion as seriously as she did.

Dad would come up behind Mother at the kitchen stove and start rubbing her neck, and she’d start giggling. They were very lovely-dovey with each other. Dad would sometimes tease Mom by putting her over his knee and spanking her while she giggled and pretended to try to stop him. They obviously wanted us to see a healthy, playful attitude about sexuality in
marriage, but they were embarrassed to talk about it, especially Dad. One time, when we were breeding rabbits, I asked him about how rabbits had babies. All he would say was, “Well, they do it just like any other animal does. The buck fucks the doe, and she has babies.”

My dad was very hard-working, he knew what his priorities were, and taking care of the family came first. He was a fairly typical farmer, bluecollar kind of father and could have a coarse sense of humor. I, being a self-righteous little kid, sometimes got offended by things he said. I liked to watch shows like
The Waltons
, but Dad was more into cowboy shows.
¹
And there was nothing worse for him than having to watch TV musicals like
Oklahoma!
or
The Sound of Music,
which I loved. Dad and I were so completely different in so many ways, we just didn’t connect. With my brothers, at least he had to do things like giving them condoms to keep them out of trouble with girls. I guess he thought I was such a goody-two-shoes, he didn’t need to bring that up with me.

Fall was my favorite time of year, but I always knew there would be a revival meeting at the church. From my infancy until I was about fourteen, I went to revival meetings every fall, where I’d hear a lot of preaching and fist-pounding about hellfire and brimstone. In high school, I started going to a holiness camp where they were into something called sanctification, which they interpreted as instantaneous perfection and holiness. I yearned for perfection, strived to attain the love of God, and had constant guilt. When I noticed my attraction to another guy at school, I would pray, “Thank you, God, for beautiful people. Help me not to be lustful.” I had gotten this prayer idea from an advice column in a Christian youth magazine.

I was usually a gregarious kid, very good in school, and active in band, speech team, church youth group, and other things. During my junior year, however, I started dropping out of activities and didn’t talk to my friends as much. My grades went from A’s to C’s and D’s. I was depressed and started feeling guilty about things like being in the marching band, because of the baton twirlers’ sexy outfits, or because we played “The Stripper” at some of the basketball games. When my parents talked about buying some new furniture, I told them they didn’t need it, that they should save their money and be good stewards.

My church often had altar calls during the invitational hymn at the end of the service. The minister would ask those moved by the sermon to come to the front of the church to kneel and pray, to get right with God. It was not something most people did every week. Maybe they did it once and considered themselves “saved.” I started doing it a lot. The fall of my junior year, I’d
spend whole days thinking about what I could possibly have been doing that was sinful in the past half hour, and asking God to forgive me. My parents saw how depressed and fanatical I was becoming, and Mom got upset and started crying a few times. She took me to the family doctor to get a prescription for an antidepressant, which didn’t seem to help much.

One Sunday morning when I had been praying and crying by my bed, my dad told me, “Look, your mom’s going to church and we’re going to have a talk.” Dad and I went out to the backyard and sat under a tree. He began by saying, “You’re hurting your mother, and I want it to stop. You’re a good-looking young man, it’s the fall of the year, you’ve got everything going for you—you’re smart and you’re popular. You have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get over this.” Then we actually started talking about things, and he asked me a lot of questions. “Do you have homosexual desires?” He didn’t ask it in a judgmental way, but I lied and said no. He asked me about erections and masturbation, and I told him I believed I had arrived at a spiritual plane above all that. I think that was one of his first clues that I was really fucked up.

As I got worse, I spent hours on my knees by my bed, praying and crying. I could hardly eat, and started choking on my food. I’m a diabetic, so my parents decided they had to do something. They called another farm family, because one of their sons had had a breakdown, got the name of his psychiatrist in St. Louis, and took me there to get treatment.

The hospital was a liberating experience for me. Here were all these people who were urban, educated in a different way, who didn’t measure everything by the church and by what the neighbors thought. They challenged my beliefs in ways that sometimes seemed harsh and cynical to me then, but they helped me begin to look at belief more critically. Though it was painful and terribly frightening, it helped to free me. After a few weeks I was released, and after a few more weeks I got off the medication. I had never before realized that I could be just a normal kid. Finally I was able to believe that God loved me as much as anyone, and I could stop spending so much time worrying about it.

When I was sixteen, after I got out of the hospital, I started dating girls. My parents always liked the girls I dated; they were all pretty safe choices. I became very close with a girl who was active in the church youth group. We both ended up going to the same Free Methodist college, where students had to sign a statement promising not to have sex or to drink or smoke on campus. My junior year in college, I dated a girl my parents liked very much. Karen was a Baptist girl who used a lot of makeup and was pretty in a sort of artificial way. She worked with handicapped kids and
was a very sweet, giving person—almost neurotically giving. When Karen met my family, she really won them over, so much so that everybody was upset with me when I broke up with her. I later started dating a girl who was not very physically attractive in the traditional sense. Diane was very intelligent, a math major. We watched
Masterpiece Theatre
together and talked about philosophy.

After my parents met Diane, they sat me down and told me how girls like Karen only come along once in a lifetime. My mother did this whole psychoanalytical thing about how I always rejected the things I wanted. She recalled how she had tried to buy me some cowboy boots when I was five years old, and I cried and cried in the store because I didn’t want them, I didn’t like them, and then when she brought me home, I wouldn’t take them off—I wore them and wore them. Now I was rejecting Karen, this girl they loved and thought I was in love with. Why was I doing this to myself? Why couldn’t I just give myself what I wanted? When I tried to explain what Diane and I had together, my dad said, “Don’t give me all this about intellectual and spiritual relationships. Physical attraction is very important.” I’ll be sure to remind him of that when I explain my sexuality to him.