Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (51 page)

Joe was born in 1966 and grew up on a 500-acre dairy farm near Prairie du Chien, in Crawford County, southwestern Wisconsin. He grew up with four sisters, one older and three younger. Joe lives with his partner,
Dallas Drake, in Minneapolis.

MY BEST FRIEND Mike, who lives here in the Twin Cities, I’ve known since kindergarten. There were six of us who hung together from almost the very beginning, and five of us are gay. There were also peripheral friends who liked to hang with us because we had a lot of fun together, and all of them are gay. They were all town kids, so after school they would do things together and I would want to be there, but before I got my driver’s license I had to go home on the school bus. And summers, they were lounging around the house watching cable while I was throwing bales and milking cows. But we were inseparable for most of high school, and four of us went to the same college. I had friends in college who didn’t know any straight men from Prairie du Chien. They wondered if it was something in the water. Out of a class of 138, we’ve identified thirteen men and eight women. When my mother clutches her bosom as if to say she’s the only mother who gave birth to a gay son, I say, “Mom, would you like the names of the other mothers? They all live here. Maybe you could get together and have a kaffeeklatsch or something.”

If there is a checklist to see if your kid is queer, I must have hit every one of them—all sorts of big warning signs. I was always interested in a lot of the traditional queen things—clothes, cooking, academics, music, theater. No high heels, nothing like that, but my god, my parents
must
have seen it coming. A farm boy listening to show tunes? From sixth grade, I was in various choirs—large choir, madrigal groups, solo ensemble. My four friends who happened to be queer were also in the choir group—five men with forty-five women.

I was involved in high school play productions. I had no idea then, but I’m sure the guy who directed our plays was gay. As a round teenage kid who had no clue what was going on, I was totally infatuated with him. He was six-foot-two, blond hair, green or blue eyes. One of my best images is
of him showing up for play practice one night, sweaty, in a pair of lycra running shorts and a tank shirt. He got a lot of flak because he taught English and directed plays in a jock school. I would love to meet him again, to have lunch with him and chat, because I’m sure he must have seen it in all of us; he must have known we were little fledglings just waiting for it.

My parents very much frowned upon my activities because they took me away from farmwork. They didn’t attend my concerts or plays, and that hurt. We’ve tried to work through those things, and I understand where they were and what was going on. My parents had a hard time dealing with me because I was so different from the young man they had hoped I would be. God, it’s amazing what you think when you get to be an adult. I sound like I’ve gone through the Twelve Steps, and I’m now at peace with my Higher Power. Memories of me just
screaming
at my mother come to my mind, and now I say, “We had different sensitivities and sensibilities.”

Right after my parents’ wedding, it was one child after another—five kids in six years. From a distance, we must have looked like the most perfect little traditional farm family. Mom dressed us all the same—the vogue thing to do in the seventies. She’d buy cloth by the bolt and all of us kids would have matching striped shirts and plaid pants. My maternal grandparents lived on the same farm, so we were almost like the Waltons, which we’ve always joked about—and even the Waltons had their deep, dark little secrets.

My sisters and I had rotating shifts to do weekend chores. We did the milking, cared for the cattle, and cleaned out the barns. There was always a lot to do on a day-to-day basis, and summers there was the planting of oats and corn, and baling hay. My grandfather was our hired hand, so he and Dad took care of most of it. I would help, but I think Dad saw my resistance and just kind of gave up after a while.

Dad bought the farm from his father, and as soon as he had a son he figured it was going to continue on for generations. There was a lot of disappointment and strife when I went off to college. My mother would ask me, “So, when are you going to stop this college stuff and come home and work at the farm?” The farm was seen as the place where
real
work was done; when you work, you get your hands dirty and you sweat. Mom has only a high school education, and Dad doesn’t even have that. He dropped out of school during the Depression to work the farm and support the family. I’m the first generation ever to graduate from college, and my parents wouldn’t even attend my graduation.

My father just turned seventy, my mother is forty-six. Dad grew up in the Great Depression, Mom came of age during Vietnam, so it was like Woodstock and the Waltons. I have always been much closer to my mother; we have the same perspective on a lot of things, the same sense of humor. My father and I are as different as night and day, and have been kind of distant, but we’re getting closer now. There was so much work to be done that we didn’t see each other a whole lot. When I’d get home from school, he was out working in the barn. We didn’t have a whole lot of conversation. Summers there was some, but then Dad would start talking about the Depression and the eyes would start rolling.

“I laugh hardest when I’m with my sisters. Within ten minutes we’re just screaming, tears rolling down, almost wetting ourselves.” Joe Shulka, age 5, with sisters,
center,
Krista, and Vicky. Courtesy of Joe Shulka.

At six, I was totally infatuated with other boys my age. I have a cousin, two years older, who grew up to be an absolutely stunning man. All the really good looking genes of the family just funneled their way toward him—all the tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, chiseled features. Baling hay with him was always a joy! When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I palled around with my cousin Allen. He lived on a farm adjacent to ours. I hung
with him a lot and almost idolized him, because he was thin and wiry and a lot of the things I wanted to be. I was making a real conscious effort to be more like a boy, more like I thought my father wanted me to be. I never hunted or fished until I started palling with Allen. He was a very good hunter, but I would walk around in the woods with him and purposely step on sticks to frighten squirrels, and he would get very irritated. I had then the attitude I have now: Why should you go out and kill some little forest creature when you can run down to the Piggly Wiggly and get something larger and better-tasting that doesn’t have fur on it?

I was an obese child, so physical education was the worst possible thing, just awful. Basketball was my least favorite, because we always played shirts and skins. Allen taught me how to play basketball, and I really made an effort—played every chance I got for almost a year—but I still sucked so bad. I’ve been called faggot by other boys since I was probably seven. Even my sisters would call me faggot or queer when they were pissed at me. I don’t even want to think about what kind of messed-up straight boy I would be if I had been jeered and mocked and taunted as a kid for being a faggot and a queer, and I
wasn’t.

I entered puberty late, when I was maybe a junior in high school. There’s something about the hormones that pump through you when you’re seventeen years old that just galvanize locker-room images. There was a classmate of mine in high school, Greg, whose father owned a tractor dealership, so my dad did business with his dad. I don’t know how Greg’s dad gave birth to seven sons who were just—oh my god!—every single one of them was better than the last. All of them played football, all of them played basketball, they were big, they were beefy, they were brawny. It was like they all entered puberty at seven and started shaving by the fifth grade. To this day I remember Greg’s broad and hairy chest, and his very tight blue jeans. My friend Mike, who’s a quintessential size queen, happened to see Greg naked once. I guess he was quite amply endowed.

I didn’t date at all in high school. Isolated on the farm with just the family, miles away from town, it was easy not to have to deal with a lot of that. I think my mother would have liked to see me date, because I know she had inklings. When I was twenty, she and I were having one of those bizarre conversations where you think you’re talking about the same thing, but you’re really talking about different things, but you’re answering questions based on what you
think
you’re talking about. My mother turned to me and said, “Well,
have
you?” And I assumed she meant “Have you had sex?”, and I was still a virgin, so I said, “Well, no—no, I haven’t.” Then she realized what the question I was answering was, and she said, “That’s
not
what I asked. But what do you mean you’ve never had sex? It’s fun! Live a little!” That’s not what she told her daughters.

I came to terms with being gay long before I had sex. I think that’s the way I needed to do it. Again, I found a clique of friends in college who all turned out to be gay. There was one October where thirty men came out to me. It was ridiculous! I was in a male choir in college, and the men who slept with women were definitely the minority. We did a tour of women’s colleges in the Midwest, and those poor girls didn’t get anything. We would sing and go back to our own rooms, all paired off. I’ve known a few women who
thought
they were dating me, but I’ve never dated women, and I didn’t date men until my third year in college. I thought dating was supposed to be fun, like on
The Brady Bunch.
Greg and Marcia looked like they were having a blast. Dating is a horrible, awful, vicious thing! I once defined “a date” as the two to three hours of shared activity men display in public preceding sex.

When I was twenty-one, my first lover and I went out for about a year. It would prove to be the first of several relationships that were really bad choices for me. When we started having problems, Rob started to show signs he was not going to make it easy on me when we broke up. I had pretty much decided to tell my parents I was gay, and was trying to schedule time to go home to talk with them about it. Rob beat me to the punch by just a few weeks. Out of the blue, he wrote a letter to my parents and told them in no uncertain terms
what
their son was and who
he
was. It was addressed to my father, but thank god my mother opened it. My grandmother happened to be in the house when my mother read the letter and burst into tears. They kept it from my dad for a year or two, thinking he didn’t need to know and that it would be too hard for him. It was real difficult for about six months, and there were two or three months where we didn’t speak at all. They just shut me out. We said some awful things to each other. My sisters were working on my behalf to try to open things up.

It took a year or two before my mother was able to say the word “gay.” She would always refer to it as “his lifestyle,” and when she said it she would drop her voice. She’s getting better about it, and so is Dad. He and I have not had “the talk,” even though he’s met Dallas. It’s just one of those things I don’t think my dad and I will talk about a whole lot. My parents haven’t had much exposure to people who are different, but they happen to have given birth to five very enlightened, feminist kids. And having a gay son and a lesbian daughter has kind of pushed them, kicking and screaming, into realizing there’s a lot of differences in the world.

Grandma took my being gay pretty tough, because she and my grand father had only one child, my mother, and I’m the only grandson. So there’s a limb on the family tree that’s pretty much snubbed. My dad looks at it like that, too; the family name ends with him. They may still hold near and dear to their hearts that if the right woman comes along I’ll be swayed, but I’m sorry, it’s just not going to happen. I’m a Kinsey six.
¹

I am so envious of men who came out in high school. But if I had clearly known I was gay at thirteen, I don’t know what I would have done. There was no one to turn to and the resources were just not there. God, I wish there
had
been something to hide underneath my mattress! It would have been so nice to have known at that time, because I wasn’t putting a name to how I was feeling. I wish I had known there were so many of us—that I was not alone. My friends and I were all going through this big battle that a lot of us didn’t even know we were fighting, and that we would have no clue about for years. We tried to peg feeling different on other things. It’s such a heterosexist world at that age, and sex was one subject we never talked about when we were in high school. None of us experimented with each other in high school, either. College was a different matter.

I learned about sex from the
World Book Encyclopedia
in the sixth grade. Since AIDS, I think the sexuality stuff is starting to infiltrate school systems in smaller cities. I know it is in my hometown. Whether or not it’s happening in a positive way, I don’t know. I feel so much for kids in small towns who haven’t got an outlet. It would be so much easier to come out if you felt like you had a safe place to come out to. My partner Dallas and I have done some public speaking in small towns in Minnesota. We have little cards for the Gay and Lesbian Helpline here in the Twin Cities, and we go into libraries, find the books and files that have even the vaguest of references to homosexuality, and slide these cards in them. Some kid is going to search out that book, find the card, call the 1-800 number, and talk with a friendly person who might actually say some positive, affirming gay thing to them.