Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (49 page)

Sometimes I still feel like a misfit, even with gay people. My values are much more liberal than the values I was brought up with, but in an urban gay environment my values make me look sort of moralistic. There’s something about camp humor, for example, that I’ve never been comfortable with. It seems like it’s easier for urban people to have a harsh, cynical sense of humor about everything. Maybe it’s a guy thing—wanting to make everything into a joke—and maybe it’s an urban gay subculture thing too, but sometimes I want to say, “Just drop all this shit and be real. Stop thinking you’re always on stage and talk to people like human beings.” Matt says I need to loosen up, but it’s hard for me to just let loose and think anything’s okay. I still see certain behaviors as healthier than others. Matt is a lot more comfortable taking people at face value, without judgment. So he helps me loosen up a little, and I help him think about things in ways he wouldn’t have before.

1.
The Waltons
(1972-81)
was a long-running television drama series that portrayed the life of a large family in rural Virginia during the 1930s and 1940s. The stories were seen through the eyes of John-Boy, the gentle and emotional eldest son and hopeful writer. Though the series was not a big hit in large cities, it was one of the most-viewed television programs in middle and rural America.

2.
Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians
(1982) by John E. Fortunato. New York: Seabury Press.

Born in 1963, Randy grew up with two older brothers on a mixed livestock and crop farm near Wayne, in Wayne County, northeastern Nebraska. He lives in the Chicago area. In this brief narrative, Randy recalls coming out—to himself, to his parents, and to a small circle of gay men in his hometown.

AS A YOUNG child, I had vivid fantasies about rough-housing with my uncles, riding on their backs and shoulders. In adolescence, I really didn’t have any thoughts about girls or boys my own age. I was interested in men. My sophomore year of high school, about the time of Anita Bryant’s big campaign, I started hearing the word “gay.”
¹
One night there was a TV show with a character telling his best friend he was gay, and I asked my mom what that meant. In her, “Okay, we’re talking about sex now” half-whisper she said, “That’s a man who loves other men instead of women.” The light bulb went on.

The summer before my junior year in high school, my parents and I went to Omaha to see a family show. During intermission, I was in the rest room relieving myself and noticed that the guy next to me was watching me. I started watching him and we ended up going into a stall and touching each other. That was my first experience and I was very excited by it.

One night, about six months later, I called Larry—a gay man in Wayne that everybody knew about. I said, “I think I’m gay, and I don’t want to be like that. I was wondering if I could talk to you about it.” I went to his apartment and we talked. He told me, “You are gay and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re not bad, and you’re going to have a fine life just as you are. You don’t have to fit the mold.” I listened to him, but deep down I didn’t believe him. When I said, “It’s not right, I’m not normal,” he said, “What is normal?” But I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be like everyone else, find that woman and get her pregnant and all that stuff.

I won a trip to Germany the summer before my senior year in high school. Up to that point, all I knew was Nebraska. Suddenly, I saw New York City, flew to Germany, spent a week at a youth hostel in Berlin and three weeks with a family in Nuremberg. While I was in Berlin, I wandered around the subway and picked up or was picked up by men on a few
occasions. How does that song go? “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Paree?”

I came out to my parents on April 2, 1980, near the end of my senior year of high school. I remember the date because I had been working up to it for a long time, and I was ready to tell them on April first, but decided April Fools’ Day was probably not a good idea. I was taking a bath in the evening, thinking of what I was going to say, and by the time I was ready my father had already gone to bed. Mom said that I could tell her and she could tell him, but I said it was something very important that I had to tell both of them.

Dad hadn’t fallen asleep yet, and I went through the usual half-hour build-up. “I’ve got something to tell you. . . . It’s important for you to know this. ... I don’t want you to think any different about me. . . . Bla-bla-bla-bla-bla.” Finally I said, “I’m gay,” and my dad said, “What did he say?” My mom said, “He said he’s homosexual, dear.” I told them I didn’t feel good about it and was trying to see if I could fix it myself. It would be two more years before I felt being gay was okay.

The summer before I started college, Larry was having a get-together with several other gay men he knew around town. Mom answered the phone when he called to invite me, and when I was getting ready to go into town that night, she stopped me and said she wanted to know who I was going to see and what I was going to be doing. I wouldn’t tell her and said that she shouldn’t worry.

That night at Larry’s, I thought, “Wow! Four men in a room, and they’re all gay!” In Wayne, where everybody knows what you do, Larry’s place was a comfortable island where we could get together and talk. In a way, it’s too bad that we could only feel safe talking there, but it was kind of exciting to get together with the girls and gossip. It was almost an underground thing, hearing them talk about some cute boy in town, or “Watch out for so-and-so—I think he’s got an idea about you.” I haven’t seen anything like it since leaving Wayne. In Lincoln there were so many more gay people around, and bars for them to go to. And in Chicago there are ghettos with blocks of businesses that cater to gays.

A guy that I became friends with in college grew up doing some hustling in Omaha on the Milk Run, the area of town where men drove their cars around. When I first met him, I was envious of all that. Now I’m glad I came of age and came out the way I did. And despite the isolation, I’m glad I grew up where I did. I had to learn so much on my own, and some of that was not so good, but in a large city you can get so immersed in gay
culture that you forget to grow up in other areas. I know a lot of gay people who almost cannot function in the heterosexual world.

There are some gay people I would like to be associated with and some I wouldn’t. I think everyone should try to make the world a better place, live and let live, take care of and pick up after themselves, not be a burden on others. I see so many young gay men with no direction in life, who just go from one bar to another. They need some maturity, to start being responsible for themselves. It’s scary that there’s a whole generation of people like that. What’s their situation going to be in ten or fifteen years?

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1.
In 1977, Anita Bryant, evangelical singer and former Miss America, led a highly emotional and widely publicized campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida.

Ken was born in 1964 and grew up with two older sisters and two younger sisters on a small dairy farm in northwestern Minnesota, seven miles from Ponsfordy in Becker County. He lives in the Minneapolis area and works in horticulture and plant biology.

THROUGHOUT growing up, one of my goals was to please my parents, and by working hard on the farm I pleased them exceedingly. I was not a rebellious child and I tried to maintain the best relationship possible with them by doing all the right things. I thought it was just the greatest thing when the neighbors, who had a son about my age, would tell my mom they wished their son could be just like Kenny. I thought, “Wow! I must really be doing everything right.”

From the beginning, I went out to the barn with my dad and was extremely involved in the work on the farm. As a little kid I started out feeding milk to the young calves and as I got older I learned how to drive tractors. But in the back of my mind, I didn’t know if I’d be good at farming. I could handle the animal husbandry and field crops part of it, but I wasn’t very good at all the mechanical work. I was just amazed at how my dad did it, but I never really learned it from him. If he was working on something and needed help, he would ask me to help him, but I never had an interest in it and he never pushed me.

My dad became extremely allergic to cattle and hay dust. On top of that, we had a bad drought in ‘76, and hay prices were very high. He decided he wasn’t going to feed the cattle through the winter, and sold them all. Six months later, in the spring, my mother decided she wanted to start farming and asked me to help her. I was all for it, because I actually missed the cows. From that point on, my mother and I did most of the work. We were responsible for milking the cows twice a day, feeding them, and cleaning the barn. My dad had found a job in Detroit Lakes, about thirty-five miles away. He did a lot of the fieldwork, but that became a big part of my responsibility too. Putting up the hay was a never-ending summer chore.

Before I started college, I considered farming. But that was in the early ‘80s, and the farm economy was just horrible. Farms were going under left and right, and prices were very poor. In order to take over my parents’ farm, I would have had to borrow a great deal of money. When I went away to college, my mother sold all the cows. I’ve often wondered if I did the right thing. If I had stayed at home and not gone to college, I’m sure I’d be farming today. But my parents always told me I needed to do what I really wanted to do. They would have been very pleased if I had taken over the farm, but I knew farming was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

“As I got older I learned how to drive tractors . . . but I wasn’t very good at all the mechnical work. I was just amazed at how my dad did it, but I never really learned it from him.” Kenny Yliniemi looks on while his father works on mowing machinery in a hay field, about 1970. Courtesy of Ken Yliniemi.

There was a division of labor in our household: the girls were in the house and I was in the barn. I would usually get up around 5:00 or 5:30, do milking for an hour, grab a bite to eat, take a shower, and catch the school bus around 7:15. When I got home I did milking, and after supper I had homework. So it really got to be a long day. I was never encouraged to do
any of the household activities, but I liked doing those things. I would bake on occasion, and my mother was very much into canning and freezing and often needed help with that. We would can chicken, peaches, pears, and canning tomatoes was a big one in the fall. Vegetables would always be frozen. I really liked helping to pick them, clean them, cut them up, and blanch and freeze them. When I was married, I did a lot of canning and freezing. I would call up my mother and ask her, “How do I do this? What’s the recipe you use for this?” I’m sure she kind of wondered about me sometimes, but she was always very encouraging and willing to share her recipes and ideas with me.

In high school, I really wanted to do acting, but I couldn’t because of the farm. Most of the play practices took place in the evening, and there was no way I could do that because we lived twenty-one miles from Park Rapids. So I got involved in technical theater and did that all through high school. Light design was my specialty. I worked on it right after school, so the late bus would get me home in time for milking. I would have just loved to do the summer musical, but we were busy with making hay and other summertime farmwork. I envied the freedom enjoyed by the kids who lived in town.

Our community 4-H club was started my senior year of high school, and I got involved in it right away, but I wasn’t interested in doing any of the farm activities. I wanted to get into drama and speech. They had what was called “Share the Fun.” Each club in the county put on a skit and competed with each other, and one skit from the county went on to perform at the state fair. That first year, I designed the whole act and got costumes for everyone, and we made it all the way to state.

We had a Finnish sauna in the basement, and one time when I was in junior high my cousins came over to take a sauna. Two or three of them went in together. My bedroom was in the basement, so I went down and laid on the floor under my bed and tried to peer into the sauna through the cracks in the wall and watch those guys who were several years older than I was. Then they came out of the sauna and started walking around without any clothes on. They thought they had the whole basement to themselves. Oh god! There I was, a gay adolescent with those naked guys in front of me, and I couldn’t even look at them because I was so afraid they were going to find me and beat me up. When they went back in the sauna, I was so disappointed I had missed most of it.

On the school bus, all the older guys would ride in back, and I would listen to their rough and gruff conversations about women. I was intensely turned on by those guys. During junior high, my hormones were just racing, but it wasn’t
something I thought about at all. It wasn’t until I got into high school that I realized I was different from most people. It became very evident to me that I didn’t have the same interests the other guys did, and an awful lot of my friends were girls. I just didn’t relate well to guys my own age.