Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (50 page)

Whenever my parents went to town—and then when I got old enough to drive—I would go to the drugstore and buy
Playgirl.
I’d buy a
Playboy
with it, to make it look like I was buying one for me and one for my girlfriend. Detroit Lakes was usually where I went, because I didn’t go to school there and didn’t know anybody in the store. When I first got my driver’s license, I wouldn’t even make it all the way home before I ripped open the
Playgirl
on the side of the road. I didn’t keep too many magazines around at home because of the chances of someone finding them. After I had used one for a couple months, I would burn it. I would hide the magazines at the bottom of the garbage, so if something happened to me and I suddenly died, they wouldn’t find them. They’d just take out the garbage and they wouldn’t know any different.

Saturday night was sauna night, and as an adolescent I went by myself. I’d always take a magazine into the sauna with me because it was a perfect place to jack off. One time I forgot my magazine on a bench in the dressing area. It wasn’t until late that evening, after everyone had gone through sauna, that I realized I’d left my jack-off magazine down there. And it wasn’t just a
Playgirl
, it was an obviously gay magazine. I was mortified that someone had found it. When I went down and looked, I found that it had slipped behind the bench. If anyone saw it, no one ever mentioned a thing to me.

Paul was about my age and lived on another farm in the area. I would sit next to him on the school bus, and then we started doing things together, like going for snowmobile and horseback rides. One beautiful summer afternoon, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was painting my parents’ house and Paul came over. He asked if everyone was gone, and I said they were. Then he said, “Let’s go inside.” We went down to my bedroom in the basement and jacked each other off. Paul knew exactly what to do—led me through the whole thing—and I really liked it. I was just shocked, couldn’t believe it. I’d never had anyone touch me there before, and I was so turned on. I was thinking, “I shouldn’t be doing this, but, oh, it does feel really good! Oh, well, I’m not doing anything. I’m letting him do it all. I’m not encouraging this at all.” But when he went home, I was so guilt-ridden I was ready to tell my parents and my pastor everything that had happened. But I was so terrified, I couldn’t even bring myself to do that.

I
vowed I would never let it happen again, but Paul came over a couple of days later and the same thing happened. This continued all through high school. He would come over, or he’d invite me to go do something. He was always the one who instigated it. I thought if I didn’t instigate it, it was okay—I wasn’t really like that. But if a week had gone by and I hadn’t heard from Paul, and I was really horny, I’d get on the phone. “Do you want to go do something? Let’s go horseback riding.” If he wasn’t home, I’d want to know when he was coming back. We arranged that if I was home alone, I would call him. And whenever he went by my place, he would look at what cars were in the yard to see if maybe I was home alone. Then he’d call, and if I was alone he would come over and we could do it wherever we wanted in the house.

Paul knew where my crotch was all the time—he knew how to get me hard right away, and then give me a good blow job or jack me off. It was strictly sexual gratification on both of our parts. We never kissed. I hated his guts a lot of the time, because I was really guilted out by the whole thing. But if I hadn’t seen him for a couple weeks I’d want to call him up and have him come over. We did it just about any place we could. We’d go out in the middle of the woods on horseback or on the motorcycle. We’d go swimming at Big Basswood Lake, down the road about a mile, late at night when no one could see us. We’d soap each other up and have a really good time. In the wintertime, we’d do things in the barn loft because it was fairly warm, and if we knew no one was in the barn, we’d do it there too. One time my parents and sisters were gone for three or four days to visit relatives in North Dakota. I stayed on the farm to milk the cows and take care of everything. Paul helped me with some of the chores, and for three or four nights we slept together in my bed. We’d wake up in the middle of the night and get each other off. I felt guilty as usual, but I thought, “I’ll grow up and get married, and it’ll be okay.”

My parents never once sat down and told me the facts of life. But if a girl in the neighborhood would get pregnant, my parents made sure they pointed it out with comments like, “I just can’t believe it. I don’t know what she was doing. Why couldn’t she wait till she was married?” We never had any real sex education at school. I would read anything I could find about sex. I would pore through home medical books, and whenever I’d find a new term I’d look it up. I wasn’t looking for things about homosexuality, because I was trying to deny that. Even though one side of me was having fun fooling around with Paul, the other side of me was really wanting to find out how things worked heterosexually. On the farm you see how nature does it, but you don’t really know. As a little kid I asked my dad how a cow gets pregnant, and he said, “Well, the bull gets up there
and sticks his peter in there.” When I said, “No he
doesn’t,
Dad,” he got mad and said, “Well, don’t believe me then.”

My parents had me baptized and confirmed in the Apostolic Lutheran church, which is very conservative and primarily Finnish. I did everything in church I could do. I didn’t miss Sunday school and I made sure I had my lessons done. I went to Bible school, and when I got old enough I taught Bible school. All through my teenage years I was very much involved in the young people’s group at the Ponsford Community Church, where they preached born-again Christianity very strongly. I had a wonderful time at their summer camp—Camp JIM, which stands for Jesus Is Mine. A lot of people sent their kids to Camp JIM to become born again. I had so much conflict as a teenager, because Paul would come over, and then I’d go to church. The pastor emphasized making sure you came to communion with a clean heart, so I’d make sure I had confessed and asked forgiveness in a personal prayer. But that always reminded me I was a sinner.

Most kids, when they go away to college, go out and party and get drunk. Instead, I got so intensely involved in religious-oriented campus organizations I would sluff off schoolwork because I had Bible study that night. I fell in love with a guy who introduced me to some of those groups, but both of us were so involved in our religious activities there was no way anything could ever happen. I remember once giving him the biggest hug and not wanting to let go, and he wouldn’t let go either. That was the closest I’d ever been with a man emotionally, but I wouldn’t acknowledge anything about being gay connected with those feelings. After he graduated, I went up to visit him at his parents’ farm, and he said, “I think I’m going to get married.” I said, “You are? To who?” “I don’t know yet, but I’m going to get married,” and within about three months, he was married. I was crushed.

Eventually I got away from the religious groups, started dating, fell in love with this wonderful woman, and we got married when I was twenty-three. I was married for four years. My wife was the turning point in my coming out, because she had been raised very differently than I had, in a very liberal family in the city. She didn’t take any shit from anyone, and she taught me a lot about being who you are, expressing yourself, talking back to your parents. People have said that I was such a conservative thing, and that she’s the one who really brought me out and made me gay. She didn’t make me gay, but she helped me feel comfortable in being who I am. The summer of 1991 was when I really came out to everyone. I came out to myself about a year earlier and had gone to a support group at the Men’s
Center in the Twin Cities. It was safe to go there while I was married because it was not a gay organization.

I was sleeping with men while I was married, and when I got divorced I told my wife I would never expect anyone to be faithful to me. I would just expect that somewhere down the line they would probably cheat on me. That sounds really sad, but some part of me really does believe it. I’ve been seeing a lot of men and getting involved in relationships with them, and I feel like I’m walking on very unstable ground. I thought one guy I was involved with was really honest and up-front, and I found out he was cheating on me. It just ripped me apart. How do I adjust? Do I not expect honesty from now on? Do I not expect people to be faithful to me? Did I set myself up for that because I expected it to begin with?

Honesty within a relationship is very important. You talk about how you feel, what you want. Everyone changes, but that’s okay as long as you’re honest. I want more than anything else in a relationship for both of us to be happy. That means if one of us decides it’s not for him, that’s really the end of it. You want it to work and you hope it will work, and everything tells you it should, but is that reality? I think honesty and happiness are more important than long-term commitment. I don’t believe relationships should be like typical heterosexual marriages where the couple stays together just because they’re married. You should be together because you really love each other and you really want to be together, not just out of habit, because that’s all you know and you’re scared.

I’m trying to come to terms with the guilt the church put on me for being gay. I felt guilty about doing something that was wrong, and would go over and over passages in the Bible that were supposedly referring to homosexuals. I never really understood it, but I had to believe it, and I had so much conflict. My mother would watch
The 700 Club,
and a lot of their programs really denounced gays. I would watch it and think, “Thank goodness I’m not really gay—it’s just a passing thing.” Every once in a while there would be something on the news about a gay pride parade, and I’d think about “those faggots that live in the cities—I’m not like them at all. I’m not one of those.” I tried very hard to be straight—got married and did that whole route—and it didn’t work. Finally, I was able to come to terms with the fact that this is who I am and it is okay, it’s fine. I was created with just as much purpose in life as any heterosexual. I wish there was some way I could convince my parents and my sisters of that. God made me exactly who I am, and God wouldn’t make me like this just to be cruel, or to live the life religion teaches: If you’re gay, well, it’s okay, but just don’t practice at all.

Paul, my high school friend, identifies himself as gay, but he will never admit it to anyone else. I think everyone in the community knows, but no one talks about it. Paul’s life is the flip side of mine. I strove to please my parents, to work hard and to excel, and he did just the opposite. When I went away to college, Paul was still on the farm, and sometimes when I’d come home on weekends we would get together. When I started seriously dating women, I really didn’t want to see him at all, so it ended. Occasionally, Paul would call me when I was married, and I would tell my wife it was just a guy from back home. He called this summer, when I was home for my high school reunion. He had heard I was divorced, he was drunk, and he wanted me to come over to his place really bad. I told him I had a boyfriend, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t want to come over to his place because it was nothing more than just sex.

Born in 1965, Clark grew up with four brothers and sisters on a small honey and produce farm near Eau Claire, in Eau Claire County, northwestern Wisconsin. Clark’s introduction to his sexuality at rural, highway rest stops is the focus of this brief narrative.

MY PARENTS WERE pretty open about sex. It was never something to be ashamed of or to hide from. We all had “the talk,” and if we needed birth control, that was fine, we could have it. But homosexuality was never discussed. As much as my parents allowed us to explore who we were, being gay was not an option.

When I was nineteen, I was walking in downtown Eau Claire one night and a guy pulled over and said he wanted to give me a blow job. So I had my first sexual relations with a man, in his car. I told myself I would never do it again, but a couple weeks later I found myself walking down the same street, looking for the same man. I didn’t find him, but I found someone else, and that started the whole thing. Suddenly I realized there were men everywhere who were looking at me and who would have sex with me.

After I got my first blow job, I went gangbusters. The rest areas that dot the rural highways were very active if you knew where to go. There was a lot of great sex going on out there, some of it young—sixteen-and seventeen-year-old boys. But most of the guys that I’d have sex with were married. Sometimes they’d take their rings off, sometimes they wouldn’t. One time I had sex with the father of a kid I knew at school. Sometimes people my own age would come by, but for a long time my only experience was with older men. I didn’t have to do anything but lean back.

There was a very active rest area about two miles down the road from the farm. It was dangerous, not knowing if the state patrol would drive up or if my dad was going to pull over to take a piss. But I really got into that game one summer. There was always a wide variety and I was good-looking, so I never had any problems. I could do that and still date women. I never really bothered myself wondering whether or not I was gay. It was just something I was doing at the time, and I did it until I was about twenty-three.

I wish I hadn’t
had to go through all that. I wish I could have fallen in love with a boy at sixteen and had all the experiences that two sixteen-year-olds should have with each other. My first role models were the older men I was having anonymous sex with. I’m glad I was able to break away from that, because I know a lot of people don’t, and they go on and perpetuate it. I’ve always wanted to know about those men—what they thought, why they were like that, how they could do that and stay married for so many years. They’re still doing it, with someone younger than me who’s taken my place. They taught me about sex, but not once did one of them say that what we were doing was okay. It was always over quickly. They were always wary: “No, don’t give me your phone number. Let’s meet tomorrow night at 9:00.” I wonder what I would have done if one of them had said, “You really should find someone your own age, and I think I can help you do it.”