Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (29 page)

I ’ve never been close to my father, but my grandfather on my father’s side was like a father to me. He was a tall man, strong and rather quiet. He usually didn’t have a lot to say, but when he did, everybody would stop to listen because it was very significant. I had a lot of respect for him and felt a great bond between the two of us. He, like some of my uncles, was
the strong yet gentle and unassuming kind of man that is now the kind of guy I’m sexually attracted to: tall, clean-cut, sleeves-rolled-up, suntanned.

My father’s side of the family tended to be less demonstrative of their feelings, but my grandfather would do something my father never did— sit down and talk to me. My grandfather always had time for me, and it felt good to touch him and to have him touch me—grab my shoulder, pat me on the head, kiss me goodnight. One time he leaned down to give me a kiss and I could feel his beard stubble on my face. I’d never been that close to a man before, and I thought, wow, that really feels good! Sleeping in my grandfather’s room one night, I was awakened when he came in to go to bed. With intense curiosity, I watched him get undressed. After that, whenever I stayed at my grandparents’, I would pretend to be asleep so I could watch my grandfather get ready for bed.

I’ve absorbed the influences of many good people in my life and made them a part of me. I’ve been influenced not only by strong, clean-washed men with rolled-up sleeves, but also by women with flour on their hands and aprons around their waists, standing behind the screen door and waving at me when I got off the school bus. I identify strongly as a man and I am not effeminate in any way, but I feel like I’m comfortably in balance with both aspects of my family in me—my masculinity, and those parts of me that feel more nurturing and caring.

Larry was born in 1950 and grew up in Gosper County, south-central Nebraska, on an irrigated crop farm near Bertrand. The oldest of four children, Larry has one brother and two sisters. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his partner, Donald Treed, where he works as a pharmacist and writer. This brief narrative describes how German Catholic farm culture shaped Larry’s identity.

WHEN I WAS thirteen or fourteen, Mom and Dad took my brother and me into one of the bedrooms at the far end of the house to tell us some of the facts of life. In this particular lecture, they told us that situations existed when two men would want each other and get together and have sex. I couldn’t imagine how two men could have sex, but they made it very clear that this was one of the most heinous things that could ever happen, within the vast realm of sins categorized by the Catholic church.

Mom was a staunch Catholic and I was very proud to be a Catholic. I enjoyed being an altar boy; I loved the rituals and the structure and the rules. It made me think I was involved with something that was good, a big family. But the church was kind of frightening, especially when I started to understand who and what I was. I was taught, as many Catholic boys were, that the only honorable reason to have sex was to have children after you were properly married. To do it for any other reason was very sinful, and any kind of masturbation was very wrong. I knew it was going to become harder and harder for me to keep in line with not sinning.

I accepted that I was gay very early on, but I didn’t really accept it. What I accepted was that it was a fact of my life. But how was I going to work around it? I knew it was something I would have to get control of and make sure that I kept under wraps. I consciously did not want to get intimate with anybody, male or female, so when I was a teenager I ate quite a bit and became quite fat. I wanted to be unattractive and sort of neuter, a sexually anonymous object.

From growing up with a very strict set of rules in the Catholic church, I thought there was a certain way people should be, even though I knew
I
wasn’t that way. In my early twenties, the people I hung around with were all heterosexual, and I did quite a bit of joking at the expense of gays. Then I fell in love with another young man, and was affected the way an adolescent might be with his first love. But there was a lot of turmoil about sinning—I would go from masturbation to confession to masturbation to confession.

“Being the oldest, I basically was the example when we were growing up, and I pretty much ruled the roost. I tended to lord it over [my brother] Pat and my sisters.”
Left
, ten-year-old Larry Ebmeier and siblings in the family’s living room. Courtesy of Larry Ebmeier.

In my mid-twenties it started to catch up with me. I would draw pictures of naked men, and one evening I wrote on one drawing that I had to feel another man’s body. I didn’t know how I was going to work it out, but it was something I just had to do. It took a few more years, but slowly I started to seek out various local agencies. There wasn’t a whole lot in Lincoln in the mid-to latter-seventies. I had my first experience when I was thirty years old, so I was a late bloomer.

After I started to come out and get acquainted with the gay community in my late twenties and early thirties, it seemed like I was the peg that didn’t fit. I wasn’t a queen; I didn’t like to dish. I always tended to feel more at home with some of my non-gay friends. I still feel that way, but less so. It was somewhat of a dilemma, because I knew I was gay but I didn’t enjoy the banter, I wasn’t into the style, I wasn’t into the things they did.

People that I’ve
come into contact with in the gay community tend to be more outgoing, more talkative, less introverted than I am. I wonder if there aren’t other people out there who are like me, more quiet and private, not like the gay mafia that you see so much of—the outgoing, outspoken, socialistic, activist, flamboyant and fast-paced, dishing, camping-it-up type of people who seem to dominate when gays come together in urban areas. I know there are a lot of people like me in the gay community, but I never meet them,—maybe because, like me, they’re at home stewing over something.

I tend to be on the liberal side of things, but it seems like so much of what goes on in the political arena with gays is a lot of blind following. I’m not a big activist, and I disagree with some of the tactics of the more outspoken gay rights groups, like Queer Nation and ACT UP. I was not behind the civil rights marches back in the sixties, nor did I burn my draft card, even though I was against the Vietnam War. I don’t think those kinds of tactics accomplish much, except for a lot of counterproductive things like rioting and bad publicity. You need some noise, but I think that quiet diplomacy and steady laboring behind the scenes is going to get a lot more done.

The gay community could be a lot more effective if they would stop demanding “gay rights” and start demanding “gay opportunities.” When we start talking rights, the other side always says, “Why should you have rights I don’t have?” I don’t want more rights. All I want is the same chance. I want the same chance for a job, the same chance not to be beaten up when I walk down the street, the same chance to get insurance for me and my partner.

If I had been in the heterosexual mainstream, flowing with society, I would have been the first to settle down and marry and have a family. I’m not a drifter or a rover, I’m not a free spirit who goes wandering into the mist and climbs mountains. I’m a play-by-the-rules type of person. I like the idea of having a house, a stable relationship, and a steady job.

When I went through adolescence, I was very much not a part of anything and I developed no identity. That had to come later, and it came in a confusing way and it’s still coming. Not that everybody doesn’t learn about themselves all through life, but I feel like I’m ten years behind everybody else. I’m not sorry it has turned out this way, though. Had I been heterosexual, I would not have had any reason to question who and what I am. My gut feeling is that I’m a lot more in tune with myself and other people and why they act the way they do, simply because I’ve had to be.

A large amount of my energy has always gone into wondering what others are thinking. It’s
almost a curse sometimes. I catch myself doing it and I think, don’t you have something better to do with your time? It has tended to make me very aloof and distrusting of friendly overtures by other people, gay or straight. I’m very private and guarded, so I have to rely on my own resources a lot, spiritually and otherwise.

On the other hand, it has made me settle down and be organized and do some things that were probably good for me. It has made me want to be perceived as a stable, solid citizen and a professionally upstanding person. It has made me tend to be monogamous and to put value in a household. Despite all of the negative things I’ve had to contend with, I’m generally an optimist. If you work hard enough and are organized enough and do the right things, you can make a reasonable life for yourself, which is what I feel I have done.

Martin was born in 1951 and grew up on a 160-acre farm in southeastern Nebraska with an older brother and sister A writer
;
he lives in southern Wisconsin.

WHEN I GO back home, I feel a real connection with the land—a tremendous feeling, spiritual in a way. It makes me want to go out into a field and take my shoes off and put my feet right on the dirt, establish a real physical connection with that place. I get homesick a lot, but I don’t know if I could ever go back there and live, and the place that I remember doesn’t really exist anymore. I can go back in my mind easily enough, but when I go back on short visits it doesn’t feel like home anymore. A place that was lived in up the road is now nonexistent; the trees and buildings are gone. It’s all corn. What I would like to return to really isn’t there in a lot of ways, but some of it is. I could probably be happy going back to find those pieces, but it would take a certain amount of compromising on my part, and I’m not sure I’m up to it. I feel alienated in a lot of ways, and it’s not the kind of place that would welcome me if I lived openly, the way that I would like to live. I would be shunned.

I’m sure my parents know I’m gay, but I don’t think they care to talk about it. I’m pretty sure they view it as something that’s my life and not really theirs. We’re a family that minds its own business in a very extreme way. What you do is your own business and nobody else’s—a real western kind of attitude. You don’t ask people about their money or their sex life or anything like that. You wait till they come to you for help, and then you help. I feel that way about a lot of things myself.

My sister knows, but it’s just that old “we don’t talk about that kind of thing” going on. I suspect that sometime, probably soon, I’ll be talking with her about it. Every time I see her we kind of edge up to it, and I would like to. My brother and I don’t have a whole lot of contact and our lives have always been so different. We really don’t have a lot to talk about. My parents know that I have to live my own life, and they’ve always recognized that I’m an independent son-of-a-bitch, and I’ll do what I want to anyway. I was running away from home when I was three. I wasn’t mad
about anything; I just wanted to go off. I got all the way to the top of the next hill, which was about a quarter mile. Our neighbor came over the road, stopped and asked how far I was planning to get that day, and brought me back home.

Our place was in the uplands, away from the river bottoms. It was land that was not seen as real desirable when the country was opened for settlement in 1854. The German immigrants, who came over after the Yankees had come onto the bottom lands, got what was seen as the poorer country up on the hills. A lot of the farm was grassland, with scrubby trees along the creek boundary, and some nice timber as you got closer to a larger stream—lots of oak, some hickory and wild walnut. We were on the edge of the Great Plains, so it was rather treed for Nebraska. The farm sloped down to a small creek running through the middle of the land, and there was a lot of rock here and there—limestone and glacial boulders. I spent a lot of time playing by myself down in the creek, building dams and little cities made of mud and sticks. It reinforced the idea that I was somehow alone in the world.

My father operated a bulldozer as well as farmed. During the summer he would often be bulldozing somewhere, building waterways and dams and terraces. When I was little, he was working down on the Missouri River bottoms, clearing trees, and a tree fell on him and crushed his leg. He was out of commission for about a year. We had crops in when this happened and when they were ready to be harvested, all of a sudden one day, the farm place started filling up with vehicles—cars, pickups, tractors, corn pickers. All the people from the neighborhood, from church, from wherever, came and got our crops in that year for nothing.

In the sixties we started to rent more ground as farms got larger. We raised corn, alfalfa, milo, wheat, and every once in a while we put in a crop of rye or oats. Year in, year out, we had cows to milk, and we had a lot of chores. Taking care of the calves was my main responsibility. I had to feed pigs once in a while, but I tried to let my brother do that because the hogs were noisy and I didn’t like their behavior. I liked the bovine qualities a lot more. During the summer we spent a lot of time putting up hay, and I was always assigned jobs painting, making fence, and digging russian thistles from the pasture. In the fall we would spend several weekends making wood down in the timber. We built our own sheds for calves and hogs, and in the wintertime we would build gates to use in the next year’s fencing.