Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (19 page)

What did I do for my midlife crisis? I changed my sexual orientation. Really, I just admitted it. If I could take a pill today and change from being gay, I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t even consider it. Up until I came out, I would have said, “Give it to me!” So I’ve come a long way. Basically I accept that this is the way I am, and it’s all right. Besides, I like men. In fact, I love them.

I’ve been involved with religion all my life, rejected it a couple times and gone back to it. I’m in a stage of rejection now. I converted to Catholicism after I got divorced, and was very sincere about it. I tried hard to lose myself in it, went to mass every day for years. That was one way I got through fifteen years of being alone. I even thought about joining the priesthood. But when I came out I realized how anti-gay the Catholic church is. Intellectually, it’s easy to reject religion, but when I get into periods of having to cope with loneliness, it’s a crunch. I’m basically a romantic, a backwards-looking one. I like the romantics, I like their philosophy. A lot of the German romantics converted to Catholicism and then committed suicide. That was my thinking for a long time.

1.
In “Consenting Adult,” a
1985 television movie based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson, a college student reveals to his parents that he is gay and a respectable family is devastated.

2.
4-H stands for Head, Heart, Hands, Health. Earlier agricultural clubs in the Midwest grew into the 4-H movement during the 1910s and 1920s. The national 4-H program was developed by the U.S. Agriculture Department to reduce the social isolation of rural youth and to instruct them in modern farming and homemaking practices as well as good citizenship. At local 4-H club meetings, members recite the 4-H pledge: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.” 4-H projects are exhibited at local, county, and state fairs. Some 4-H members show cattle or other livestock at these fairs, entering into competitions in which their animals are judged on health, appearance, carriage, etc. Junior leaders are 4-H youth who assist adult program leaders after completing several years of 4-H work.

3.
Variations on the “wear yellow and you’re a queer” theme are evident in several men’s stories. This phenomenon may be related to a meaning of the word yellow from the early decades of the twentieth century. In that era, to say that someone was yellow, or that he had a yellow streak or a yellow belly, was to say that he was cowardly, lily-livered—a contemptible, worthless person. This connotation may have been extended to the queer-baiting schoolyard jabs of adolescent males. The color pink seems to have acquired similar connotations in recent years.

4.
Throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration pursued government clean-up agendas related to those of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his associates. Individuals deemed to be communist or homosexual were denied government employment.

James was born in 1941 in east-central Indiana, where his family lived on three rented farms during his childhood. He had an older brother and has two younger sisters. James was married and is the father of two children. He lives in east-central Wisconsin, where he is retired from a career in farm livestock health.

I WAS FOUR years old when my brother Richard was killed getting off the school bus. I liked him very much, we were good buddies. One evening we had our pajamas on and were playing together. The next day he got off the school bus at home and a car hit him. From that time on, my childhood felt very lonely. Both my parents went into a state of depression. It seemed like my mother was always crying or in bed. My dad just kind of disappeared. He went out to work early in the morning, came back for meals, and went back and worked until dark. He was never much for words when things got difficult.

My brother became the perfect child in everybody’s eyes. According to my uncle Al, Richard would have been the greatest athlete, an all-star in basketball, baseball, and football. According to my dad, Richard would have been the best farmer and the hardest worker, and according to my mother he would have been such a handsome young man, the idol of every girl’s eye. My grandmother said Richard was such a good little boy, Grandma’s boy. He became an angel in everyone’s eyes, as it so often happens in old Catholic families. Because I was a survivor, I didn’t get all those praises, so I tried to emulate Richard. He had played with marbles a lot, so I tried to get into that, and he’d had a habit of chewing on his shirt collar when he played marbles, so I chewed on my shirt collar.

Several months after my brother was killed, I got quite sick with rheumatic fever. I know the thought went through my parents’ minds that they were going to lose another son. I was their only child at the time. Lying there in bed, I felt a keen closeness to them. My dad had a sad, empty look on his face, and my mother started to cry. I thought, I better pull through this for my parents, and I better behave.

My dad’s family was all German Catholic and had been farming as far back as I know. My dad was a high school dropout, but he was highly
respected in the community as a very good farmer and as being honest, hardworking, fair, and always willing to help out. When there was a need on another farm, if there was a death or illness, he was always there. That’s the way my parents were. They were very Christian people. Not that they were always saying prayers, but they were just very involved and got along with people. My mother’s family was Irish on one side and German on the other. Farming was all they were ever involved in. My mother was an outstanding cook. She baked lots of pies and cakes and was always showing them off at the county and state fairs, where she got a lot of blue ribbons and big prizes. She was a 4-H leader, very active in Extension Service and home demonstration work.
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Our farm was 250 acres, primarily a hog operation, but we had a few dairy cows and chickens and beef cattle. The land was very productive and we cropped almost all of it. With the livestock and the fieldwork, there was always a lot to do and I was involved in all of it. Saturday mornings, I hauled manure. I was up early every morning doing chores, and I really couldn’t get involved in school activities because I had to go home to feed and put bedding down for the cattle, or take care of the hogs. We housed a bunch of hogs in some buildings that didn’t have an electric water pump. Every day, before and after school, it was my job to hand-pump water for those blasted hogs. It probably took only about a half hour, but it seemed like an eternity.

Come the spring of the year, I liked to fly a kite in one of the outer fields, or go down to a creek that ran through the farm. But as soon as I got home from school, if I didn’t have my clothes changed in ten minutes’ time, my mother was yelling at me to get out there on that tractor—some plowing or other fieldwork had to be done. If I was lucky I would get back to the house in time to do my homework.

In the course of eleven years of 4-H club work, I completed about 120 projects. My mother insisted on all these projects so that I would stay busy all summer. For eleven years, I showed beef cattle. I always had one or two steers at the county fair. For seven or eight years, I showed hogs. I always had a pen of barrows or gilts at the fair. For five years in a row I showed grand-champion poultry. I was in the corn project, the electric project, and forestry, and I did gardening for four or five years. I was an officer of the local 4-H club, and then got involved in the county junior leaders group. That was my biggest social outlet during junior high and high school. It was the thing to do, and it was the one time I could get to be with other groups of people. My extended family was very close-knit. We always got together for every birthday, every holiday, plus I don’t how many other times.

“I always had one or two steers at the county fair.”
Above,
James Heckman trains a beef animal for showing at the 1951 fair.
Below,
he washes the animal in preparation for showing. Courtesy of James Heckman.

“For five years in a row I showed grand-champion poultry.” James Heckman displays his 1956 grand-champion chicken. Courtesy of James Heckman.

My uncle A1 was a rather arrogant guy. He thought he was the best farmer in the neighborhood. He did it bigger and better, and always had new equipment, the best available. A1 never married. He was extremely handsome and in a lot of ways I really admired him. He had been a naval aviator in World War II and was a nut on sports. To hear him tell it, he was the greatest athlete that ever lived. I helped him out a lot on his farm, morning till night. In the summer months, we did a lot of custom hay baling. If we weren’t baling hay, there was corn to be cultivated, and then the wheat harvest started. A1 would go on tirades—calling me a sissy and yelling at me about not playing sports well enough, I would never amount to a hill of beans because I couldn’t play basketball, and I didn’t know how to drive a tractor properly. I could drive it as well as any other kid my age. Everybody said, “That’s the way A1 is.” They just let it happen. Now I
realize he was a very frustrated and miserable person. There’s not much doubt in my mind that he was a latent homosexual, and it was never possible for him to be his real self.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a gem. He was wonderful, kind, loving, gentle, and he never put any demands on me. He was Al’s father and took a lot of abuse from his own son. I used to work a lot with him. Whenever I could, I was helping my grandfather and my uncle on their farm, plus working on my parents’ farm. They were about four miles apart. I would jump at any opportunity to be with my grandfather, and we would get lots of things accomplished—fieldwork, work on the livestock. Of course, according to Al, we were doing everything wrong. Every so often, my grandfather and I would sit down and talk—just small talk, or what the weather was like. He was very good to me. When I would go to town with him, he always knew everybody on the street and had all kinds of friends.

About the sixth or seventh grade, when I was showing cattle in 4-H, I would see other guys and really wanted to be close friends with them. And I just loved to look at guys. I would go to basketball games to see those muscular players out there in short pants. I was lonely and very much wanted to be good friends with those guys. Anything sexual I just put out of my mind. I never looked at anyone naked, I didn’t touch my private parts, and I made darned sure I wore pajamas to bed.

Sometimes, when my parents were gone, I would admire my mother’s clothes and put them on—undergarments, corsets, girdles, dresses, the whole works. I would put makeup on too, and fantasize that if I could dress like this, maybe some of those guys would be attracted to me. It really turned me on; I would get an erection. In my early high school years, I had dreams about being like a woman for the purpose of attracting guys.

I had a lot of friends who were girls, and got along very well with groups of girls, but dating was very difficult. I always felt like a complete dud. But there were guys I would have given anything in the world to be with. One year, the only reason I asked a girl to the prom was because we got to double with her best friend’s boyfriend. I was just in a fog that he and I would be sitting at the same table the whole evening. He was the only person I wanted to impress that night. When I was a junior in high school, I was selected to go to Hoosier Boys State.
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I loved it because there were only guys there, so it was okay to develop friendships with them, but I could never quite do it.

From the third or fourth grade through high school, I seriously
thought about going into the priesthood. Priests were not supposed to have girlfriends—that was my defense. I would sometimes have dreams about being with a bunch of guys in a monastery and not having any undergarments on underneath my cassock. In some of the dreams I had physical contact with them. But the idea of the priesthood began to fade away, and I decided I would just have to work hard, do well in high school, go on to college, get a good job, and get myself established. Someday I’d find the right girl and fall in love. That’s what was supposed to happen.