Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (9 page)

The veil was drawn back from homosexuality in two novels published in 1948—Truman Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms
²
and Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar
:
³
To the extent that mainstream publications gave these works any notice, their reviews ranged from disagreeable to hostile. The Kinsey report on American male sexual behavior, also published in 1948, was not so easily ignored.
⁴
The report stated that homosexual activity was much more common than generally believed, that very few individuals were exclusively homo- or hetero- in their sexual nature, and that many individuals had a mix of both homo- and heterosexual experience. Kinsey’s findings challenged America’s ability to sustain the denial, silence, and ignorance surrounding homosexuality, but even in the face of scientific evidence the facade of America’s Victorian/Puritan sexual code did not crumble. The Kinsey report astonished, appalled, and fascinated millions without seeming to enlighten very many.

Throughout the 1950s, the efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Eisenhower administration to expel Communists, sex perverts, and other undesirables from influential positions captured headlines and spawned localized witch-hunts around the country. In the face of these oppressive attitudes, today’s organized gay rights movement got started in the 1950s and early 1960s, but it was an exclusively urban phenomenon with very limited reach.

The tenor of prevailing notions about homosexuality was both reflected in, and reinforced by, the mass media. National mass-market
periodicals gave minimal coverage to the topic. In 1959,
Time
presented a psychiatrist’s view that the homosexual is a “psychic masochist,” a glutton for punishment whose “distorted pleasures feed on the allure of danger.”
⁵
The gist of a 1960 article in
Newsweek
, “To Punish or Pity?,” is conveyed effectively by the title.
⁶
Newsweek
reported in 1961 that the number of homosexuals in the military was increasing. “These people are sick, they need treatment. They can be cured if they want to be,” a psychotherapist stated. From a preventive perspective, he advocated school-based psychiatric treatment on the premise that homosexuals could be spotted as early as seven years of age.
⁷

For many of the men whose stories are presented here, coming of age between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s meant bearing a burden of unequivocally negative feelings toward their emerging selves. Some carried this burden for decades, others for only a short time. For more than half of them, this negativity was shouldered in tandem with the expectations and responsibilities of marriage and parenting. Those who managed to avoid marriage were faced with the task of creating a meaningful life focus and identity apart from mainstream conventions and often without the example of role models that were acceptable to them.

Henry Bauer’s tale of psychoanalytic misadventure is emblematic of coming of age during this era. So is Cornelius Utz’s account of coming out to himself in his seventies, after thirty-five years of marriage. Robert Peters’ reminiscences are snapshots from the life of a naive adolescent male on a poor backwoods farm in the late 1930s. In light of the oppressiveness of this period, the diversity of experience in this group of stories is notable. For example, Jim Cross and Dennis Lindholm were born within two years of each other and both grew up in Iowa farm families, but that is about the extent of their similarity. Jim came to grips with being gay in his early twenties and with relatively little pain; Dennis came out in his mid-forties and with much trauma.

In the face of a debilitating lack of self-confidence, John Beutel struggled to achieve a sense of self-worth through his work as a teacher. For Ronald Schoen, being able to help a gay student through the uncertainties, fears, and isolation of his rural teenage years has been greatly rewarding. Myron Turk winces at seeing a nephew in the midst of a painful adolescence similar to his own. Norm Reed, who hoped that marriage and religion would banish his homosexual feelings, continues to adhere to the fundamentalist beliefs of the church that ostracized him. In contrast to Harry Beckner’s light-hearted account of growing up gay, James Heckman’s suicide attempt is a reminder that many gay farm boys who were fated to come of age in this era did not make it to the next.

1.
Robert C. Reinhart. 1982.
A History of Shadows.
New York: Avon.

2.
Truman Capote. 1948.
Other Voices, Other Rooms.
New York: Random House.

3.
Gore Vidal. 1948.
The City and the Pillar.
New York: Dutton.

4.
Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. 1948.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.

5.
“The Strange World.”
Time:
November 9, 1959, p. 66.

6.
“To Punish or Pity?”
Newsweek:
July 11, 1960, p. 78.

7.
“One Soldier in 25?”
Newsweek:
May 15, 1961, pp. 92, 94.

Cornelius was born in 1909 in Buchanan county, northwestern Missouri, on a small farm about five miles south of the city of South St. Joseph, where his father was a horse and mule trader. Cornelius was the youngest of eleven children—eight boys and three girls. He was married for thirty-five years, is the father of two children, and had a career in social work. He lives in a retirement community in Cleveland, Ohio.

I AM DEEPLY saddened by the sociocultural pressure that’s put on homosexual people. We’re human beings and it just happens that the genes worked this way for us. I didn’t learn this until I was practically eighty years old. Internalized homophobia affected my whole life in a sadly deleterious way. I couldn’t happily be myself because I thought if people knew me they wouldn’t accept me. I was afraid I would reveal my homosexuality, so I put the damper on all kinds of self-expression. I wanted to be liked, so I went out of my way to please people. I wanted to like myself, but I couldn’t quite allow myself to do it. This damned internalized homophobia is just godawful, it’s tragic, and it took me a long time to overcome it. I really feel good about myself and I think I’m a very lovable person, but I still struggle with it every once in a while.

When I decided to come out, I did it with a bang, and the heaviest weight descended from my shoulders. I never felt so free—released from a burden that had been with me all my life. With this release of creative energy, I have gotten tremendous satisfaction out of everything I’ve done, from writing to teaching to playing bridge and creating artwork. I get great accolades for the fiber artworks I produce, and I’m very proud of them. Hell of a long time I had to wait to get those kinds of satisfactions, but thank god they came. I’ve had a productive life and a good life, basically, but I weep sometimes at how much better it could have been had I not been so inhibited, had I had the freedom to put all of myself into learning my profession and creating my early artwork. I feel incredibly grateful that I finally learned to love myself enough so that here in my twilight years I can get tremendous satisfaction out of my artwork and my wonderful relationships.

The house I was born in was built of logs and we lived in that house until I was four years old—thirteen people in four rooms. My father then built a much larger house that would accommodate our family. We had a long dining table with benches on either side, six kids on one side and five on the other, father at one end and mother at the other. On Sunday mornings when I was a small child, my father would put an extra dollop of cream in his coffee, pour it in a saucer, and blow on it to cool it down, and then, with me in his lap, let me take a sip of it from the saucer. That sweet, creamy coffee tasted so good it made me tingle with pleasure. It was like sucking at my father’s breast.

We had a lovely big fireplace in the living room of the new house, with a circle of chairs around it. One day, I had injured myself while playing and felt I deserved special treatment during my recovery, so I sat in my father’s chair, the most comfortable one in the room. When he came home he was enraged that his youngest pipsqueak son would have the effrontery to be sitting in his chair, so he lifted me out of it by my ear, ignoring my injury. Crying, I started running upstairs and said, “Ain’t you got no sense?” Like a flash, he caught me at the bottom of the stairs and gave me an awful licking—the only one I ever got from him.

My mother liked to have me learn poems or speeches, and she trained me to declaim. She would listen to me go over and over a piece, and instruct me in how to make it more powerful. There were contests in the county, and I won the first prize more than once with my declamations. My father would then insist that I perform at social gatherings. It scared me to pieces to be asked by my father, out of the blue, to get up in front of all those people, but I did it. I was afraid if I didn’t deliver I’d get a whipping when I got home.

I loved it when we had company, because they related to me with great warmth. Once I cried because I couldn’t ride along when somebody in the family was taking the company back home. My mother said, “So you cry when we say you can’t go? I’ll give you something to cry about!” and she whipped me with a switch, very hard, on my behind and legs. Experiences like these deeply affected my ability to be very spontaneous about any expression of feeling. You didn’t have to get those kinds of whippings very often to begin to close up.

Surreptitiously I learned to crochet and embroider from my sisters. I was really quite good at handwork, but I wouldn’t allow my brothers to see me doing it. When I was seven or eight, my mother got a new sewing machine—an old foot-pedal type—and taught me how to work it. I loved to work that machine and would sit at it for hours, hemming sheets and
pillow cases. That was a great help to my mother, because we bought sheeting and pillow tubing by the bolt for that size family.

I learned to ride horseback when I was five or six years old, and from about age eight until twelve I was highly involved in the farm. We had a chunky little Shetland pony—just the dearest thing you could ever know— and I became so proficient that I could ride him at a gallop standing up on his rump. One of my chores was to ride the pony to the pasture and bring the cows in to be milked, then milk them and drive them down the long lane back to the pasture. I would also round up the sheep and bring them to the farmyard for protection from wolves and coyotes by night.

When we harvested wheat and oats, my oldest brother Millard drove the team that pulled the binder, a very heavy machine that cut the grain and bound it in bundles. Because the binder was so heavy, five horses or mules or some combination of the two were required to pull it, with two in front of three. Someone had to ride one of the lead horses to guide them. By the time I was eight years old, I was the chosen one since I weighed less than anyone else. It was a very exacting job. The binder cut a five- or six-foot swath of grain, and I had to guide the team so that it didn’t leave little spaces that weren’t cut. It was a pleasant enough chore for a short time, but a full day of it was hard work. I was always glad when those long, tiresome days on the horse came to an end.

With my little pony and cart, I was the water boy, wearing bib overalls, a large straw hat, and a bandanna tied about my neck to absorb perspiration. I would fill one-gallon stoneware jugs with water, put them in a burlap-lined fruit crate, and cover them with water-soaked burlap to keep them cool. I took this fresh, cold water to the men in the fields as they were loading the wagons to bring the sheaves of grain to the steam-driven threshing machine. Then I would go to the threshing machine and give the men there their water. That cold water was a godsend for those men, working in ninety-degree heat or even hotter, as it was some of those days in late July and early August. They greeted me with joy and pleasure.

My family were fairly strict Methodists, especially my father. He frowned on playing cards, dancing, smoking, and the use of alcohol. And in spite of the fact that we were eleven children, my parents had a good many inhibitions about sexuality. Anything sexual was to be controlled and denied. Once I was in the barn when a cow had a calf. It was incredibly exciting to me, but I was scared to death to let my family know that I had witnessed it, for fear I would be punished.

When I was about four years old, Rindy, our black laundress, came to our house and brought her grandson, Lester, who was about my age. He was a lively little boy and had an endless imagination of things to do. One day we ended up in the scale house, which was used as a garage for one of our buggies. He asked me to lie down, and he lay down on top of me. We had our clothes on and he was dry-fucking me. It was not unpleasant. He was quite aggressive and in control, and I was very docile in order not to displease him. I liked having kids my own age to play with and there weren’t any in the neighborhood. Suddenly Rindy appeared and saw what was happening. She picked up a bridle with long leather reins and gave Lester a whipping within an inch of his life. She didn’t say or do a thing to me, but she made it impossible for us to play together the rest of the day. After that, when Rindy and Lester came there were a lot of other kids with him, or Rindy would say, “Cornelius, why don’t you ask your mother if you can go over and visit your friend.” This younger neighbor kid had nice toys and we would play together, but there was nothing sexual at all. I think Rindy thought it would be all right if I had sex-play with other little white boys, but not with her grandson.