Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (21 page)

The farms we lived on were all mainly dairy farms. Early on, when my parents started farming on their own, they had just three kids and things went quite well. Riding into town to grind the feed with my dad, we’d sing together—”You Are My Sunshine” and “Bell Bottom Trousers.” We had a wonderful rapport and I loved being with him. He had an upbeatness and spontaneity that he lost after a while, as the family grew and times got harder. From early on, before I was in school, I was often out helping my dad do the chores in the morning. I would shake up the bedding for the cows, feed them ground feed, feed the chickens and gather the eggs. Every Saturday, we bartered our eggs for groceries in Monroe. We had work horses until I was eleven or twelve years old, and I would drive them for mowing hay, making hay, and cultivating corn.

Everybody pitched in and accomplished things together. My mother and my older brothers or I would do the milking if dad was with the threshing crew or, later on, if he was working off the farm. From early on, Mom worked jobs outside of the house for extra money. I never knew we were poor. I knew we didn’t have a lot of money, but we always had something to wear and great food on the table. No matter what, we would eat together two or three times a day. If Dad was out in the field, we waited till he got there, then we sat down.

Many evenings in the summertime the whole family would play softball after milking, and we played horseshoes and croquet a lot. Every Saturday night we took baths in a big galvanized tub on the kitchen table. Until I was in fifth or sixth grade, we didn’t have a bathroom. I was third in line to take a bath and dry off in the middle of the kitchen. Every four weeks, Dad would give us a haircut.

I loved going to country school—the individual attention, the nature walks, putting on Christmas programs. When I was in sixth and seventh grades, I got to help the teacher and I loved it, so I decided that I was
going to be a teacher. My plan was to go to Green County Normal School, the two-year teachers’ college, and then teach in a country school. However, when I was graduating from high school they were closing the country schools down.

By the time I got to high school, I wasn’t real crazy about farming. I never sluffed or got out of doing chores, but my interest was in other places. I really took to music, and my mother liked that very much. She was almost doting at times, and my father was proud too. When I did well in high school, my parents were both very pleased and supportive, which was a source of friction with my brothers. They were sort of rowdy in high school, so my being serious about school and everything was seen by them as my playing the favorite, particularly of my mother. She and I were always very close and we got along very well. There was a certain ebullience and buoyancy; everything was upbeat.

The accordion was really important to me. In my whole life, it is probably the thing that I was best at. I started lessons when I was ten, and practiced a couple of hours a day. I was just in heaven, and my parents loved to hear me play, particularly my mother. Once I was out on the back porch playing, and my mom got a phone call from the cheese factory up the road a tenth of a mile or so. They requested the “Red Raisin Polka.” In music, I could be myself and I could lose myself. My teacher said I didn’t have to practice seven days a week, but I did. Even when we were making hay all day, I would find time for playing and practicing. If I didn’t practice at least five times a week, I was almost distraught.

My aspiration was to be a professional accordionist. I entered a lot of amateur contests around south-central Wisconsin. First prize was fifty bucks, and I thought that was big bucks! For two years in high school I was state champion, and competed in the
Chicago Tribune
Chicagoland Music Festival. I played classic overtures—”The Marriage of Figaro,” “The Barber of Seville”—and Mendelssohn piano concertos and a lot of other pieces that were transcribed for accordion. During high school, I was in a pop combo, The Rhythmaires. We had an accordion, trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, bass, and percussion, and would play at school dances and community functions. We did “Moonglow” and “Ja-Da” and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

Grandma and Grandpa Beutel were educated to about eighth grade, but they had a real wisdom that probably had the greatest influence on my life. It was such a thrill when Grandpa would let me hoe in his garden, and I always mowed their lawn. Grandma would ask me to help her clean the house, and I got to sleep on their porch. I would get to help Grandpa decorate the Christmas tree, and if you know Germans, the Christmas tree is
it,
every piece of tinsel. Grandma would often say little rhyming phrases in German, then try to tell me what they meant. She always said, “A house is not a home without flowers.” I spoke German almost exclusively with my two older brothers until I was three.

“The accordion was really important to me. In my whole life, it is probably the thing that I was best at.” John Beutel in 1962, playing for company at home. Courtesy of John Beutel.

Grandma was sort of like a mother hen, but it was more than that. She and I just clicked on all cylinders together. When she wanted to send letters to my brothers in the army, she would have me sit down at the table, and I would write them for her. At times I felt a little uncomfortable doing that, but Grandma wanted it done, so that mattered. She would say, “This is what I want to say. You make it right and write it down.” One of my older brothers loved the accordion, so I made a tape and mailed it to him in Germany.

My grandpa was Prussian and had been a lieutenant in the German
cavalry, in World War I, but he was very gentle and soft-spoken. My grandmother was in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, but not really hard-core. She told me that she would get in trouble at her church women’s group, where they would spend more time planning the fall bazaar than studying the Bible. She said, “I’m not very popular there. I told them today, ‘I’m here for Bible study. You can talk about the bazaar some other time.’”

My parents were not regular churchgoers, but I was. I went to church with my grandparents when I was in the upper grades and in high school. Church was so important to me that when I was in high school I almost committed myself to being a teaching missionary. Church was a source of comfort, a place where I got positive strokes. I went to church camp in the summer until I got to high school, and then I was active in the youth fellowship. I read my Bible, I was confirmed, I tried to be a good person. That’s what I thought church was about. We belonged to a relatively conservative church, Evangelical United Brethren.

When I was four or five years old, I knew there was something different about me because of the things I liked to do. One day, after my dad and I had taken the cows back to pasture, we picked a bouquet of apple blossoms. And in the spring I would go out to the woods every other day to make sure I saw the first violets. The side of a big hill where I played was covered with blue sand violets and shooting stars, and the woods were sprinkled with Dutchman’s-breeches. I thought those flowers were the most beautiful things, and I never heard my brothers talk about them. I had some dolls and a tea set and spent a lot of time playing with one of the neighbor girls. That was the subject of considerable scorn and teasing from my older brothers, but my mom seemed to think it was all right.

Our menus were set—meat, potatoes, salad, vegetable, dessert. Farm staples. I didn’t do a lot of cooking, but I liked baking and had a knack for it. I made a lot of jelly rolls and cookies, and I can’t tell you how many two-egg cakes I made. I helped a lot with the house cleaning, too. Mother was very tidy, so the house was cleaned every Saturday, whether it needed it or not. I loved to iron and we ironed everything, even the bed sheets. The stuff I did was considered girlish by my older brothers, but it never bothered me enough to keep me from doing it.

We would pick bushel baskets full of peas by 7:00 in the morning, shell them by 11:00, and have them in the freezer by early afternoon. I became the major canner and freezer, and loved helping can peaches. Mom would get two bushels of them at Brennan’s Market in Monroe, and when they got ripe we would have a peach canning afternoon. The same with chickens and tomatoes we raised. I arranged all the jars according to color so
they looked nice on the shelves. There was something about salting things away—you were able to preserve those colors for the winter. I became an excellent pickle maker. We made them in the old crocks, layered them with dill and vinegar, and soaked them in salt water for so many days. When we did our own butchering, I would saw pork chops and wrap them up for the freezer, and help my mom make sausage.

Wherever we moved, we spiffed up the place—threw some sunflower seeds along the barn and mowed the weeds and whatever grass came up. In high school I got heavily into gardening and we had huge, spectacular flower gardens. We lived along the main highway, and people would stop and ask if they could walk through the garden—we had forty or fifty kinds of annual flowers. The
Farm Journal
would occasionally have articles on flower-arranging, with little projects to do. I really got into that, to the point where I entered open-class at the county fair and won best-of-show twice. I would have twenty to thirty entries—stem specimens, arrangements for dining table and coffee table, a basket of mixed garden flowers. I was competing with about fifteen elderly ladies and one other young man.

The old ladies there thought I was a darling. It was a badge of honor, something I did really well without any training. I loved doing it and just did what came to my head. When we cleaned house on Saturday, I’d go out and gather flowers so we would have six or eight flower arrangements in the house for the weekend. If I liked an arrangement, I would make a drawing of it so that I could do it again. I was ridiculed for doing it by my older brothers and my brother just younger, but it wasn’t enough to make me quit doing it. I had the approval of my parents and my grandparents, and that held up.

Until I got to high school, I was pretty confident of myself. When I was in country school, everybody played softball, and we would play other schools. I went through elementary school being a really good ball player— I was able to hold my own in games and physical things. But adolescence kicked it out of me. Partly because of my brothers, I lost confidence in my athletic ability. Phy. ed. in high school was probably the worst punishment I ever had to endure. I felt so self-conscious and uncoordinated, and resented having to take it.

As a child, I didn’t maintain friendships for very long because we moved so much. I didn’t have very many friends in high school because I lived in the country, and at Monroe High School there were the city kids and the country kids. Even some of the teachers talked down to the country kids and were very insensitive. I had a couple shirts that I thought were really pretty, so I wore them to school, and was quite severely heckled by several
guys in my class, who gave me the nickname of Wop. I had no idea what it meant, but it really pushed me down. I was very self-conscious and had the beginnings of an inferiority complex, partly because I was from the country. I became very much a people-pleaser, to compensate for what I thought were flaws.

Neither of my parents ever spoke one word to me about sex, and there was nothing taught in school, so I ended up being really ignorant about it. I’ve heard my mother say that she felt that on the farm we learned about it from the animals. I realized that the bull was let out in the pasture with the cows at certain times, and I knew about cows being in heat, but I never really thought much about it. On occasion I saw penetration, and I helped deliver calves and would see pigs being born. That was about it—not much to go on.

In fifth or sixth grade, I was fascinated by pictures in the
World Book Encyclopedia
of statues of Greek and Roman gods. I drew pictures of them, without fig leaves, and forgot to take the drawings out of my pocket when I got home. When my mother found them, she confronted me and gave me a swat and said that I shouldn’t do that anymore. I went into puberty very early, and it was scary because I didn’t know what was happening. Hair was coming out from places that I hadn’t had hair before. The first orgasms I had were when I was sled-riding. Coming down the hill, I’d do belly flops on the sled and think, whoa, is this great! I didn’t know what it was, but I knew there was a big, uncomfortable wet spot on my long underwear.

During high school I started to see interesting magazines and books at a shop in Monroe, where we got our Sunday newspaper after church. The first time I ever read anything about homosexuality was in 1959 or 1960, in a magazine called
Sexology.
It was basically heterosexual, with questions and answers and diagrams, but it did mention homosexuality. I would go into the shop and very carefully read parts of it. There was a new one every month or two, and eventually I even bought a couple of them. Two other magazines,
Young Physique
and
Demigods
, were basically photographs of men in posing straps.
¹
1 bought a number of them. How I got the courage to do it, I don’t know. One day I bought one just before a youth fellowship meeting and sat through the meeting with the magazine hidden under my shirt. When I got home the ink was all over my stomach, but it was great. I would also buy
Playboy.
I found the nudity sensuous, not necessarily the women.