Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (53 page)

Riding along with my dad, meeting people, I picked up the ability to do people and to bullshit. He knows everybody for a hundred miles around and can buy and sell livestock at the best price. I can still meet someone and, just like he does, pick up and go with it right away—have a best friend within five minutes and forget their name within ten. But as much as my dad can read other people and figure them out, I don’t think he’s ever been able to figure me out, and I’ve never been able to figure him out. It’s probably been like that from the minute I hit the ground. It always seems like he’s so far across the room from me, and there’s a big, invisible wall between us.

In the early eighties, things started to get really tight financially. If we didn’t get rid of the farm, we were going to lose it. So we consolidated— kept the cattle and got rid of the farm. We bucked up and went on, but it was really tough, because my family was pretty well-known. It was a small town and they were all related or knew each other somehow. All of a sudden, our finances went public. My family was devastated by that. We were a very uptight, anal-retentive German farm family that wanted things done
so it looked nice, no matter what. My family auctioneers on the side. Here we had been selling people out, and now
we
were getting sold out.

My father would stop at the local bar and stay until it closed, and Mom would sit up and wait for him. She would be so angry with him, and she’d be angry with herself for being so upset. You knew when she put a Hank Williams record on that she was waiting for him to come home. Lying in bed, seven years old, listening to Hank Williams, I knew there was trouble, that it was going to be cold, cold, cold the next day, and it was going to be my job to put her in a good mood. I spent a lot of time with her and got to hear a lot of her gripes. That probably explains some of the distance between me and my father.

I got glasses at an early age. A quiet, skinny, sandy-blond kid, I was never terribly social, and I talked to myself a lot. I started to read a year and a half before I was in kindergarten, so you could usually find me in the quietest place in the house with a book. People lived so far away that I didn’t know the kids I went to school with. I excelled in school, but I kind of kept myself separate, and would just go home at night and do my little things. The farm was a half mile from the Platte River, in a beautiful valley with rich pasture and great big cottonwood trees. I had collections of rocks and leaves, and I could tell you what every kind of plant was.

My uncles and grandparents could discipline us just like my mother and father could. Everybody and everything was community property. And everybody in town knew me as one of Stan Ruhter’s boys. I would stay at my grandparents’ in Prosser for days on end, almost every weekend. They had a big house with empty rooms where my dad and my three uncles had lived, so I had my own room there. Like my father, my grandfather was gone a lot, buying sheep in South Dakota and Wyoming. I was my grandmother’s replacement for my grandfather and her sons like I was my mother’s replacement for my father. I was the first grandchild, and males were always the center of attention, so I had the run of the place for a long time.

Grandma taught me things most guys never learned because they were too busy doing whatever with their fathers. She would buy books for me and take me to the library. She taught me how to take care of plants, how to know what’s what, how to garden. Her mail-order catalog from Gurney’s of Yankton, South Dakota, the biggest seed farm in the Midwest, came every January when it was really cold and nasty, and I was just enthralled with it. My grandmother would come down and check out my garden and give me advice. My parents’ thing was that they were going to be the perfect role-model family. So, when I was doing weird things like
planting a humongous garden at age ten, they had to find some way to explain why I was at home doing the gardening and not out farming like my brother, who was only seven. So it had to be the
best
garden there ever was.

If you were a guy, you were born to farm. You were born to be a total, typical, straight male—to play sports, to hunt, to do everything a guy was supposed to do. I knew from the beginning that I didn’t fit into that. Everybody else knew it too, so they pushed me for a long time, until I was in junior high and they realized it wasn’t going to work. The whole time, my father and I battled each other. It was a long, drawn-out warfare. If he said up, I’d say down. If he said black, I’d say white. Neither of us would ever admit that the other one could be right. I was frustrated that I couldn’t be right on his terms. I wanted to be, but I just couldn’t think like him.

I’m turning out to be just like my father was—in my temper, my ability to filter facts so I don’t give out too much information about myself, my inability to communicate how I feel. I’ve become this big stoic man around the house who just works a lot and doesn’t come home, who pays the bills and ignores everything else. My family’s not an emotional family, not physically expressive at all. We can’t get past a handshake. Like the Germans who never smile in their pictures, we just kind of sit around with grim faces. A horrible way to live, but I still lapse into it if I don’t think about it.

Since my father stopped drinking in 1985, ‘86, he and I are starting to get along a little better. He just turned fifty and he’s starting to realize he can’t be on top of everything forever. Now we talk, and he listens to what I say and agrees with me occasionally. He calls to ask for advice, and we talk about cattle prices, the weather, who’s got a new pickup. I ask him for advice, which is a change for me, and he tells me—or says he doesn’t know, which is new for him. He’s mellowed, and I don’t feel like I’m in competition or trying to prove anything to him anymore, so I can learn things a lot easier. For years I couldn’t figure out how to do things, because he told me I had to.

I don’t feel the need to talk to my mother as much as I used to. I try to keep it down to once a month. She probably thinks things are getting more distant, but I think things are just moderating after all these years. I used to talk to her a lot more simply because I felt I had to, to make her feel good about herself when she felt lonely and double-burdened. My mother is the ultimate farm wife. She can pull a calf, muck through mud, load fifty head of cattle on a truck, stand in five-degree weather for hours. Since conception, she taught me how to ride a horse. She would take me to horse shows and leave me in the playpen on the shady side of the horse trailer while she rode. She can cowboy with the best of them, she’s tougher
than nails, and she still manages to dress up and go out. If I had to have a wife, that would be the kind I’d want.

I’m not out with my family. There’s really no point, and financially it would be stupid. All the money I make, beyond what it takes for me to live, I send home to put into cattle and investments there. The money goes into one account and pays for everything, so I have a share in the deal, but no legal recourse. I’m in the will, but I’m not legally in the partnership. So I sure don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize what I’ve spent seven years working for. I don’t know if my parents would do anything, but I would be scared to find out. And I’m not really big on telling them too much about what’s going on in my life in the first place. My mother knows something is up, and I think she always has, but she has never asked. They’re very appearance-oriented, and as long as they don’t actually know it, it’s not real.

If you want to educate somebody, tell them you’re gay. But there’s a time to tell people, when they’re able to learn. My parents aren’t ready to know this yet. They’re just figuring out where
they
are at age fifty and forty-eight. I wouldn’t want to infringe on that to save my life. Whenever they’re ready to hear, which may never happen, they can hear. I don’t have any problem with telling them. I haven’t done anything else they’ve expected me to do. But even if I thought they might be ready, I’m not sure I trust my judgment enough, considering what they have of mine financially, and how they could really hurt me. They are the keystone of my physical safety and my ability to interact in the community where I grew up.

There will come a time, when my father is done working, that I’ll have the option to go home. I’ll have half of what he has, if I don’t screw it up. I wonder what he would do if he knew. The whole thing with my family has always been, if it’s wrong, don’t tell anybody, and make sure it’s not wrong in the first place. To make sure I never told anybody at home would be the ultimate damage control for them, because for anybody there to find out would theoretically destroy the business for them and destroy the way they’re treated in town. I understand and respect that, and I don’t want to push them too hard, but I also want them to make sure that if they can’t deal with it, they don’t force me to tell them. So we kind of have a little standoff.

Tony and I beat the bejeebers out of each other for the first fifteen years, but we’ve gotten to be pretty close. He’ll come down and see me, or I’ll go see him, or we’ll go to Denver or Lincoln together. Sometimes we rodeo together. It’s frustrating, because rodeo is a straight world, but it’s fun. I’ve gotten involved with gay rodeo; there’s one in Kansas, and they’re starting one here in Omaha. When I first heard about it, I thought,

Yes, all right! I’d
love to meet somebody in a gay rodeo. Then I realized that a lot of people were doing it as just a humorous sideline. I’m learning to get into that, but it makes my teeth itch a little bit. If rodeo’s not done traditionally, the way I’m used to it, I shy away from it. Where I grew up, rodeo was serious stuff—fun, but not campy fun. Everybody who was worth anything rodeoed. If you were a cowboy, you were cool. We always said, “Cowboy is as cowboy does.” It isn’t necessarily a big hat and big boots. It’s what you do and how you think. I have a little fetish for straight cowboys.

It was preordained that I wasn’t going to farm. My family knew as well as I did that it wasn’t working for me, and I don’t think they relished the idea of having to work with me, so they just kind of hustled me out. Since then, I’ve learned how to judge livestock and how to ride and rope better. I started riding big feedlots to check the cattle, rope the sick ones, haul them out, doctor them. It was hard work but great money. I’ve worked on ranches in the sandhills in western Nebraska two summers—fixed machinery, changed tires, moved livestock, fixed fence, tore pickups apart and rebuilt them. Things I supposedly didn’t know how to do, I was able to do spontaneously and very well. I’ve realized the reason I didn’t like to do it, or wasn’t good at it, was because I didn’t want to.

I’m moving back home in about a month. My father is going in for surgery, and he’ll be incapacitated for three months. He’s got cattle to take care of, so I’m going to be the rancher I never was. We live on Big Island, about eleven miles long, three miles wide; the Platte River goes around it. It’s very swampy, so most of the work on the ranch has to be done on horses. My mother and I are going to calve out five hundred head of cattle by ourselves this winter. I’ve learned how to do all the basics of it, but I’ve never proved it on my home turf. I haven’t done that kind of physical work for years, so it’ll be tough. It’s going to be cold, and I’m sure there are going to be times when I’ll wish I hadn’t done it, but I think overall it’s going to be fun. I’ve wanted to go back anyway, to prove to myself I could do it, so I’m going to do it until May, come hell or high water. If it works out, I’ll stay longer.

When I’ve gone back home I’ve sometimes thought it must be obvious to a lot of people that I’m gay. It really wasn’t, though, because they couldn’t conceive of it; it just wasn’t an option. But now that gay people are moving back to Hastings and Grand Island and coming out, and people are starting to learn and understand more, it may be harder for me to keep my cover. But no matter what, I’m one of theirs. Even though people there are very cliquish and they know what you do and talk about you,
you really can do what you want as long as you’re their own. They’d tolerate just about anything as long as you paid your social dues and didn’t push it. If I were HIV-positive and got sick, I’d go home. No matter how much they would hate the idea, they’d take care of me back there, because I’m one of theirs.

Most of the gay people I’ve met who come from farms have ditched everything they came from. They believe they had to leave the farm if they wanted to be gay. They have never seen it as, “I’m gay, I’m from a farm, I’m proud of it and it’s still a part of my life, and I will go back there.” They think farm life is horribly boring, it’s so repressive, country music is so stupid, they all dress so dumb, they all have such bad hobbies, they’re all so fat and dumpy. But it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t any worse than life here in Omaha, or in any city. I wonder why we’re brave enough to face some of the things we put ourselves through here every day, but we can’t face the idea of living at home.

So many times I’ve felt like I’m out here on my own, a whole different breed from the people I see in the gay communities of Omaha and Lincoln. I’m always searching for the person who’s going to match me, for someone who comes from my background, is not embarrassed or intimidated by it, and is willing to make sacrifices to go back to it. I would love to have somebody significant in my life who can tolerate it, because we won’t be able to be as close there as here. Nobody’s dumb enough to be openly gay there, and it would be pushing it to live together, not because people would scorn you but because they could physically hurt you. Living together might be okay in Hastings or Grand Island, as long as you didn’t hang out too much with the neighbors.

I’m anxious to see what kind of people I meet when I go back, because now I know what I’m looking for, and I know how to spot someone else who’s gay. There used to be a gay bar in Grand Island, so it’ll be interesting to see where people are meeting, what bathrooms are cruisey. It’ll be interesting to see if there are people back there who made the choice to give up the career life or the social life to live where they wanted.