Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (30 page)

I did a lot of stuff like any other farm boy would do, but I was always kind of a clown and a cut-up. I liked to make a farce out of everything. I wasn’t serious when I should be serious sometimes, and I’d always screw
up. I felt like a damn fumbling idiot around farm machinery. My older brother was good at that kind of stuff, and that made me worse by comparison. When I would screw up, my dad would say, “Oh, go up to the kitchen with your mother.” I think it was his way of saying that I had to decide whether I was going to be a sissy or whether I could really help on the farm. I think fathers can somehow read that their sons are gay, before their mothers do even. They don’t see the whole picture, they just see a part that they’re afraid of, and they use a type of fear to try to steer the kid the other way. Lots of times, instead of going to the kitchen, I just went off somewhere. I had books and magazines—history and adventure stories, mostly—stashed in places around the farm, and I would go off and read.

We shared work with aunts and uncles who lived close by. An aunt and uncle lived next to us, another pair lived just up the road a half a mile, and yet another pair lived down the creek about three miles. I didn’t like fieldwork and preferred to work with livestock. I never did cultivate corn. That’s like growing up in New York City without seeing the Empire State Building. My dad would’ve had to take the time to teach me how to do it, and he’d already taught my brother, so why should he teach me when I wasn’t going to farm anyway? I think from an early age my parents had a good idea that I wasn’t going to farm, and my brother had first say of what he wanted to do, and he wanted to farm.

When we bought the farm in the early sixties, several immediate changes came about. We built a dairy parlor, with stanchions and automatic milking, and thus upgraded to grade A and increased the herd substantially. We got a central furnace—before then, we heated with a wood-burning stove and an oil burner—and we got a refrigerator. We had been using a canister made out of galvanized tin, called a “coolerator,” that we lowered into the ground to keep things cool. And we didn’t have a television till the sixties sometime. I was twelve years old when they bought that place, and that was about the same time I had my first wet dream. I knew I was living through some big changes, both internally and externally, and was always impressed that things coincided like that.

We were real poor until the sixties, so we did a lot of hunting and fishing and ate a lot of game—squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, quail, and also deer once in a great while. I hunted birds and small game, but not real enthusiastically. An uncle of mine shot a dog that I was very attached to, and killed the pups. My brother and my father were accomplices. That was a traumatic experience and it was just senseless. There was a lot of violence, which I think was one of the reasons why I knew that I wouldn’t be farming. I saw a lot of wanton brutality—like whacking animals on the head
with whatever was on hand, to drive them. And I wasn’t too old before I found out where the cattle were heading when we would load them onto a truck. At an early age, I came to associate Omaha with death, so I didn’t want to go to Omaha. I thought I was never coming back.

There was a period when I was in third or fourth grade where I shunned people as much as I could. I would not go to football games with the family. I’d scream and kick and hold onto things to not go. I guess I was really feeling my loner oats. If I had my preferences when I was growing up, I would rather have been with an older person. I grew up with old relatives around all the time, and was always interested in hearing their stories. I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandfather. He lived close to the school, so I would run over there after school was out. We would putz around in his garden, and he would take me down into the cellar and show me the wine he was making, and sometimes we’d sample it. He taught me how to swear, which I always loved him for.

At family gatherings, I would talk with great aunts and great uncles, of whom I had many on both sides of the family. I would ask them about what they did when they were little, and how they did things, and why were we related to them? In high school, I spent a lot of time with my Great Aunt Sophie. I had a deep sense of being rooted in that place and was real interested in family history, so I asked her lots of questions. She had known her grandparents pretty well—my great-great grandparents—so she was a living link with people who had settled in that area in the 1850s.

When I was nine, ten, eleven and didn’t have to do stuff at home, I would walk the two miles into town, go into the taverns where the old men were playing cards, and sit and talk with them. I did this until I left home for college. I would spend Friday and Saturday nights in the company of men ranging in age from their mid-fifties to their eighties. The tavern was a community center, a gathering place for families in a European sense—a place to get something to eat, to see your neighbors, to play cards. Otto was one of my real close friends when I was growing up, even though he was an old man. He taught me a lot of little stuff that adds up—how you do something, or how you used to do something, or how you say this in the dialect that he spoke, or jokes or stories or whatever. And there were a lot of other old men that I would just sit and talk and play cards with.

I was aware of an outside world, but I didn’t pay much attention to it because it didn’t seem to matter in our little community. We were very insular. A lot of the people were from the same villages in Germany and were all related for the most part; cousins were marrying cousins way back,
but not necessarily first cousins. I don’t think we were too imbecilic. Most of the community was Lutheran. There was one Lutheran church and a small Methodist church right in the village. Out in the countryside there were six Lutheran churches, each within a couple of miles of each other. At least two of them formed because somebody couldn’t stand somebody else, so they split, and so did the congregation. It was a contentious little place in some ways.

There were family grudges that had gone on for decades. I knew of one that started around 1900, because of a fence dispute, that still went on when I was growing up. There were grudges between the different groups of Germans. The people from Hanover thought that the Frieslanders were idiots and told them so on numerous occasions. And there was a general distrust of all things from the county seat, which was a large town for that area, about 3,500 people. This town had Catholics and it had Irish and all sorts of other groups. There was distrust of a neighboring village that had a strong French population. And there was a little community of Alsatians between the French and the Germans, just like in the old countries.

There was dislike of people from the cities for the most part, and the word “nigger” was used all the time, and not with any kind of familiarity; there were no black people in our community, and maybe just two or three in the county who lived over on the river. We saw black people coming through to hunt quail and pheasant in the area once in a while, down from Omaha or up from Kansas City. When they stopped in town for lunch they would be extremely talked about by both adults and children. Lots of nigger jokes, Rufus and Liza jokes.

When I was in high school, there was a parade to celebrate the village’s centennial anniversary. Among the groups in the parade was a marching corps from North Omaha, composed entirely of black kids. The parade wound around town and ended up in front of the American Legion Hall, and kids were going into the hall to use the bathroom. When a couple of black girls started to go in, the Legion commander charged up to the front door and stood with his legs spread far apart and his arms folded across his chest. “We don’t let no niggers in here.” The girls kind of shrugged and walked away, and somebody told them they could use the bathrooms at the church down the street. That’s when it really hit me that this kind of thing was for real. There had been race rebellions in Omaha in ‘67, ‘68, which I was aware of, but I really didn’t know what was going on.

It was a sexually naive community, even though it was an earthy community in a lot of ways. What one mammal does with another was all around us. You’d see a bull mounting a cow, you’d
get a feeling in your pants, and by a certain amount of rude extrapolation you could figure out that that’s what you were supposed to do too. On the other hand, you had this deep Protestant current working against it. You were taught to be a good little Lutheran and to abhor your body, even though it was supposed to be a temple.

Sexual things mystified me for a long time. When a cow would go into heat, my dad would say, “Go out and check which one of the cows is bullin’.” We had to separate them and cull the cow and keep her till a “suitcase bull” got there—an artificial inseminator. For years, I was trying to figure out what was going on. At a 4-H meeting when I was about nine, somebody was talking about barrows—gelded male hogs—and I said, “Dad, what’s a barrow?” He wouldn’t answer me. And I was agog when a couple kids were cornholing in front of everybody in the locker room in fifth or sixth grade.

My brother and I slept together till way too late—till I was about twelve and he was seventeen. He was the first person I ever had any kind of sex with, and not at my initiative. By that time I knew what a hard-on was and I had my first wet dream. I had a vague awareness that sex was something real powerful and that it was something that adults and parents in particular didn’t approve of for kids. But then I discovered that I liked it and that kind of complicated things. My brother would act as though he were sleeping, and I felt guilty because I thought I had somehow tempted him and was the one responsible for it. He never fucked me, but there was a lot of other stuff going on for a couple of years. It stopped when he went to college.

When I was about thirteen, I was kind of in love with a boy my age. We would go camping once in a while down by the pond on our place. I was really tempted to have physical contact with him, but we never did. When the weather was nice I would go to my secret spot to jack off. It was on the very back of the farm, a half mile from the house, in a little wetlands with huge old willow trees. In the middle of the trees was a large, flat stone that my grandfather had dragged out of the field. I would lie on it on my back and look up at the sky.

In high school I spent hours and wasted a lot of gasoline looking for the devil after midnight, as my Sunday school teacher put it—driving around and drinking and making out. My last year in high school, I had sex with a girlfriend from a neighboring town and enjoyed it immensely. We exercised a certain amount of caution, because my sister had become pregnant when she was in high school and my parents were mortified that there were going to be two of us who had to get married. Once or twice they said, “Now, you aren’t
going to go out and park, are you?” and I’d say I didn’t think so, thus avoiding the lie. Beyond that, they never talked about sex and we had no formal sex education in school. It was a matter of trial and error and discovery of oneself.

I knew that I was different somehow, but I didn’t ever hear anything about being gay. In high school there was queer day, where people would wear something yellow, but it was just a stupid fad because nobody knew what a queer was, really. In January, 1970, I was a freshman in college and we took off on the winter choir tour. Riding a Greyhound bus at about thirty-five degrees below zero, we hit such points as Emmetsburg and Strawberry Point, Iowa, and Albert Lea, Minnesota. I was tremendously attracted to my choir tour roommate, Richard. We slept in the same bed several times on tour and I was real tempted to initiate something, and I think that he was too, but nothing ever happened. Instead, I wandered into a drug store somewhere in northern Iowa and saw a book,
Good Times, Bad Times.
I saw the word homosexuality and picked it up. I also read a lot of Yukio Mishima in college because I was taking some Asian literature courses, and discovered the homosexual themes in Mishima.
¹
1 sublimated it to a great degree by smoking a lot of dope and dropping a lot of acid for a couple of years. Then I started drinking again.

After I got out of college, I had a rather torrid affair with a woman for a couple of years. One night I was in a bar, pretty drunk, and the bartender said, “You better not drive home—why don’t you stay at my place tonight?” I said okay, no argument at all. When he started rubbing my leg, I thought, oh, I never considered this possibility before, but now that it’s happening I think I’ll go along with it. I went to bed with him and we had a very nice time. I was drunk but I knew what I was doing. It was really enjoyable but it scared the hell out of me because I didn’t know what to think of it for sure. I was shaking like a leaf. We got together a few times after that, and then I left to go to graduate school, where I steered away from sex with men.

Roger and Bill were bachelors who lived together on a farm in our community. There weren’t many bachelors who lived together around there, and in high school I had a feeling that something was different about them. “They’re war buddies,” was the excuse. They really were war buddies, from the Korean War; one of them had rescued the other. Bill was a native of the farm where they lived and had inherited it from his parents. They had beef cattle and did some farming. They also had a ranch out in Colorado, where they spent part of the year.

When I was about twenty-five, I took off from graduate school and moved back home for the summer, the last summer I spent on the farm.

One night I was in town drinking and Roger was there. By that time, I had a pretty good idea that he was gay. We started drinking together and then he said something about going to his place. Bill was away and Roger and I ended up having sex. I saw it as kind of one last fling with a man before I got married. I was dating a woman then who would become my wife a year and a half later. Roger and I never slept together again but we saw each other often in town. He was a real good-time person. I would ask him, “So who’s gay around here?” and he would say, “You don’t want to know.” I think it meant that there were a lot of husbands around there who had been friends of his.