Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (54 page)

IN THE COURSE of
working on the Gay Farm Boys Project, I happened upon a book titled
Farm Boy
, by Archie Lieberman.
¹
A photographer for
Look
magazine, Lieberman became acquainted with a farm family in north-western Illinois in the mid-1950s and gained their cooperation in creating a wonderful photographic record of farm family life from that time through the 1960s. The book’s primary focus is the family’s only son: his childhood and adolescence, coming of age, marriage, fatherhood, and inheritance of the family farm.

Lieberman’s work celebrates the life of a boy who grew up to fit the mold of farm culture, to follow a conventional life path, to complete the generational cycle of family farm continuity. He managed “to be the square peg in the square hole,” as James Heckman put it in our interview. I have seen the Gay Farm Boys Project as something of a tribute to the lives of boys who come to discover that, however much they may have a sense of belonging on the farm, something fundamental in their natures makes misfits of them in farm culture. A few of the men whose life stories are presented here have remained in rural communities or have gone back to them, but most of these men have responded to their feelings of being misfits by removing themselves from the farm to the city or suburbs.

In light of this rural-to-urban migration, these men’s stories describe how their midwestern farming heritage has influenced their choices and identities as gay men, how they see themselves in relation to gay men from urban or suburban backgrounds, and how they fit into their local gay communities. For many of them, the dislocation of living in an urban culture after growing up rural was in some ways similar to that of being gay but living in a heterosexist culture; in both regards, they felt like outsiders. “Here in the city I’m kind of out of my element,” said Wayne Belden, who had lived in Chicago for about twenty years. “I just have to get on as best I can, gaining some things and losing some.”

What had these gay men lost and gained in leaving the farm communities of their childhoods and leading more urban lives? Certainly they had lost the ability to pursue farming on a day-to-day basis as either a livelihood or a way of life. To varying degrees, they had lost intimate connections that had developed during their childhoods—to their homelands, their home farms, their families and home communities. For some men,

Boy in Calf Pen,
by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Todd Moe losing these relationships with places and persons had sparked significant crises of identity.

But their losses seemed to have been tempered by important gains. Putting some distance between themselves and the farm had made it possible for many of these men to come out more readily to themselves and to their parents and other family members. And as they had distanced themselves from the rural communities of their childhoods, many of them had gained a broader perspective on their lives. Greater exposure and access to resources and role models had helped them explore and discover what it can mean to be a man beyond the confines of the traditional gender roles with which they grew up. Most of these men had achieved a reasonably comfortable acceptance of their own ways of identifying and living as gay
men. Exposure to the urban diversity of gay men’s lives had led some of them to become more comfortable with ways of being gay that differed from their own.

In the city, these men were more able to connect with others like themselves, to cultivate friendships as well as intimate and committed relationships. They were more able to develop community connections across the boundaries of sexual orientation, interweaving their lives as openly gay men with those of gay and non-gay friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and co-workers. Many of these men had benefitted from the greater range of opportunity afforded by city life in education, employment, entertainment, spirituality, and volunteer involvement. Becoming politically involved in issues related to sexual orientation had led some of these men to move beyond the “that’s just the way things are” fatalism that is often characteristic of farm culture.

What had farming communities lost and urban communities gained as many of these gay farm boys had become city men? This question acquired a particular significance for me on a recent day in early spring. Taking a break from writing, I had gone for a walk with my mate Bronze in a nearby park that is home to scores of Canada geese in the heart of Milwaukee. On the occasion of a visit to my home farm, Bronze had suggested that we take a bushel of corn back to Milwaukee to feed the geese that raise their broods in the park. As we threw handfuls of this corn to the hungry flock, it occurred to me that Bronze had found an urban outlet for the animal husbandry impulses rooted in his own farm upbringing. In addition to feeding the waterfowl, Bronze makes occasional efforts to clean up the forlorn park by collecting litter and salvaging trash cans and picnic tables that have been pushed into the pond by neighborhood vandals.

Had they felt there was a place for them in farming, some of these men would have no doubt brought to their farmwork a meticulous aptitude and commitment to animal husbandry and the “housekeeping” involved in caring for livestock. Though it is unlikely that most of them would have engaged in fieldwork with as much enthusiasm, they would have no doubt been similarly painstaking in their care of machinery, fields, and crops. Having grown up in families in which it was common for the household economy to depend on the labor of children as well as adults, it is likely that their approaches to farming would have been informed by a hardworking, persistent passion to be productive and nurturing. In their urban communities, many of these men had found outlets for these impulses in their employment as well as in family, community, church, and volunteer commitments.

In losing many of their gay sons to the cities, farming communities had lost solid citizens. In gaining these transplanted citizens, the cities had acquired some exemplary homemakers and gardeners. Many of these men tended to be homebodies, oriented more to domestic life than to social life. In their perspectives on matters of politics, gender, and sex, they leaned toward the conventional and conservative. Their views on the relation of gay people to the mainstream community were consistent with the rural preference for blending in rather than setting oneself apart. Often feeling like outsiders in their urban gay communities, they tended to see their own views as representing a sensible and pragmatic counterpoint to the more extreme positions of their city-bred peers.

In ways that reflected their diverse personalities, nearly all of these men seemed to believe that changing anti-gay attitudes depended on gay people being good citizens—responsible, self-reliant, productive, “regular” people. “It makes me very sad that a lot of people think we’re all a bunch of perverts running around,” Everett Cooper commented in our interview. “And not only do they think that, but they
choose
to think that— they choose not to know the other side of it. I would like somehow to become politically forceful in changing that perception.” Many of these men seemed to believe that the only way to effect this kind of progress was for gay people to go as far as they could to make their sexual orientation known to all with whom their lives intersected. However, several men saw this kind of openness as counterproductive, and inconsistent with being “regular” people.

If the prospect of staying in their rural communities had not appeared to be so incompatible with leading honest, unconstricted lives, more of these men might have made their homes in farm communities—some of them as farmers, perhaps. If they had been able to live in these places as openly gay men, they might have helped to diminish the silence, ignorance, and prejudice that surrounds homosexuality by demonstrating to their rural communities the possibilities of living fulfilling, meaningful, “wholesome” lives outside of the mainstream mold. From their homes in the often more diverse and supportive environment of the city, many of these men hoped that their efforts for social change would eventually reach the minds and hearts of those back on the farm as well.

Since the late 1980s, AIDS has prompted an unprecedented reversal in the rural-to-urban migration of gay men, as many HIV-infected men have moved back to their parents’ rural and small-town homes. “If I were HIV-positive and got sick, I’d go home,” Todd Ruhter remarked in our interview. “No matter how much they would hate the idea, they’d take care of me back there, because I’m one of theirs.”
Unlike any other force, AIDS has pushed rural midwestern communities to acknowledge that gay men’s lives are connected intimately to their own.

Many of the HIV-infected men who have returned to their home communities have found that attitudes toward homosexuality remain grounded in ignorance and prejudice. In many cases, AIDS and homosexuality have simply been lumped together in the same swaddling of silence. Perhaps the devastation of HIV will provide an opening to greater understanding and acceptance of the diversity of affectional and sexual identity. However, if the disease elicits little more than a resigned and pitying “taking care of our own” response, intolerant attitudes and beliefs will be left essentially unchanged and the tragedy of AIDS will be amplified. Will families and communities move toward truly embracing their gay sons and brothers and neighbors, more as “one of
us”
than as “one of
ours?
” Or will their response be little more than the embrace of smug samaritans extending love and support to those wayward souls who have come home to die?

Among the many things that have influenced my approach to this project has been my acquaintance with the life and writings of Willa Cather. A lesbian who grew up in rural and small-town Nebraska in the 1880s, Cather was a quintessential misfit who felt that she couldn’t live in her home state as an adult. But from the comfortable distance of the urban Northeast, she was able to write many novels and short stories based on her Nebraska childhood. Cather made frequent visits to her home-state throughout her life. In her late forties, she reflected on her life in New York City, on her Nebraska visits of earlier years, and on what compelled her to write her first Nebraska novel, O
Pioneers!
²

Before Cather got around to writing this novel, which celebrates the European settlement of Nebraska, she had written short stories related to
pioneer life in Nebraska. According to one Cather biographer, her response to her homelands in these works was one of “almost unmitigated hate and fear.... In her early stories she rendered what was hard and bleak and cruel in the state’s way of life—the collapse, for instance, of minds and bodies in the struggle with the land, the pressure of convention in the village, the imperviousness to art. . . .” Her reaction was said to be in “opposition to forces that seemed to her monstrously strong and a threat to her differentness, to the core of what she felt herself to be. To look at Nebraska otherwise, to contemplate it with some objectivity and appreciation, Willa Cather needed to go away for a long time and to achieve success.”
⁴

As freedom and distance changed Cather’s perspective, those same conditions have been important for most of the men whose stories are presented here. This is not to say that all of these men were inclined, as Cather apparently was, to look back on their childhoods objectively and with appreciation. Their recollections and assessments range from the sentimental to the severe. But like Cather, many of these men brought to their life stories the unique perspective of individuals who had gone from being misfits in their rural communities to being misfits in the more urban communities they had come to call home.

“In certain ways,” Richard Kilmer observed in our interview, “growing up on a farm and moving to the city was like being from a different country and moving to the United States.” Perhaps this conjunction of rural and urban experience, somewhat like the experience of being an international immigrant, had made it possible for many of these men to achieve richer perspectives on life than would have been afforded by either rural or urban life alone. So it seems to me. Whether I have found myself reacting to their stories by nodding my head or by shaking it, whether their words have roused me to laughter or to despair, my own life has been enriched by collaborating with these farm boys in telling about their lives.