Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (34 page)

My older sister had a novel called
Compulsion>
a crime mystery drama, and the back cover said something about two of the main characters having some kind of homosexual involvement.
¹
I sneaked it out of her room and thumbed through it and found a couple of scenes where they stumbled into bed with each other. It described pretty basically that they had sex together. There was one other chapter which I laboriously went through and finally found where they invited a third guy into bed. He wouldn’t,
but then it described what the other two did. Every chance I got, I read those chapters over and over.

I hated high school and got involved in as little as I could—just went through the motions for the whole thing. I had this feeling of always swimming upstream, going against the grain. I was a tall kid, so I was expected to do the basketball thing in high school. We didn’t have all that sports stuff in country school, and I hated basketball, so I didn’t do it. I don’t think my father was too happy about that. Our high school was typically small-town, a lot of hoods. My first day, a guy came up to me with brass knuckles and said, “You’re about to start the worst four years of your life.” Any chance he got, he threatened me. It was really stifling.

In high school, I got reunited with my friend Jim from first grade. Once during phy. ed. we were both sitting out while the other kids were playing, and he was stroking the hair on my leg. I knew that there was stuff going on among some of the guys, both in the locker room and when they’d go home with each other. I’d had a couple invitations that I turned down because I didn’t trust them. I was afraid if we did something, they’d spread it around school. Jim and I were pretty close friends through high school, and he was always inviting me to come home with him. I’d never seen a condom before he showed me one. One day during a study hour we did this big fantasy thing, how we were going to take a boat to Europe and sleep together. I was really aroused. I was disappointed when some of these boys started drifting the other way, dating girls. My oldest sister had a book about adolescent sexuality, and the chapter on homosexuality said something about growing out of it as you get older and you date. I wasn’t upset when that didn’t happen.

There was a wooded glen in the back part of our farm, a long way from any of the neighboring farms. You had to walk up on the high hill to get there, and from the top of that hill you could see for miles. My father took us kids up there once and pointed out barns where people had killed themselves on five different farms. I spent a lot of time back there by myself. Sometimes I would take my clothes off and jerk off, fantasizing about one of the neighbor boys stumbling along and finding me in the act and joining in. A neighbor boy talked about their hired man who would have the calves suck him off. I never could figure out how he dared do that, for fear they might bite. My fantasy was to sneak down there and watch him.

By the time I was a sophomore or junior, I hated farming, I hated the rural community, I hated the bigots and the hicks, I hated having any identity with it. I was ready to go any day. Loneliness was what I was feeling— I’m the only one out here, everything is happening in Madison or Chicago. It was hard to get the free time to go anywhere, because I had to farm
seven days a week. By senior year, I had a couple of good friends that were in college in Madison, so I got a weekend away now and then to go stay with them. That was around 1970, ‘71, and there was all kinds of stuff going on there, the anti-war stuff, the pro-gay movement, and everything. I got to go to campus and see all these good-looking men, and by that time I knew what it was and I wanted it. I had a million fantasies, and I imagined living in an apartment in a city, having lots of friends, being very social, having a good job, no more smell of the farm.

College was a very liberating experience, but my father was getting into failing health, so I went back to help on the farm after college. It was really depressing at first. I was lonely, I was away from everybody I’d gotten to know, and it was back to the drudgery. Through a mutual friend, I met this guy named Jake. He was about twenty, living with his parents and farming. He called me and said he wanted me to go to Madison with him, to shop for some jewelry for his fianc^233;e. We went out for drinks afterward. He knew that I was gay, because our mutual friend had told him. But he was straight. He told me that up one side and down the other. We had a couple of drinks, and somehow we got onto the subject of our bodies. “Do you have hairy legs? Do you have a hairy chest?” I was very aroused by the conversation and I’m sure he was too, although he didn’t let on. On the way home he talked about how he wasn’t having sex with his fianc^233;e because he was a good Catholic and couldn’t do that till after marriage, but he had never done anything with a man and never would.

We got together several times after that and nothing happened. One day he called me, and I told him my father and I had been out putting a new roof on one of the sheds. He said, “Oh, I can just see you out there without your shirt, getting all brown.” I got really horny, but he gave me these really mixed messages about being straight, and I bought it. This went on for several months until our mutual friend, who supposedly was gay, was getting married. Jake and I were both in the wedding party and had to spend the night in a motel. After the wedding, he went out and bought a bottle of sherry and brought it to our room. I was getting a little suspicious. Between the two of us, we drank the whole thing, and we started talking about each other’s bodies again. I was wearing just a T-shirt and a pair of undershorts. He had on undershorts and a long nightshirt, and I came out of the bathroom just in time to see him slipping the shorts off. Then I was really suspicious.

Jake said he wanted to see what I looked like. Would I take my undershorts off? I said I would if he would. He said he wouldn’t, but I knew he already had them off. By this time I was raring to go. I was very attracted to him, and I hadn’t done anything in months, living out on the farm.

One thing led to another, and we ended up on top of each other. He didn’t have an orgasm, but I most certainly did. Driving home the next day, we talked about it quite a bit; it was never going to happen again. He was going to get married in a year. A week later he was back at my place, and that time he did have an orgasm.

I thought that Jake wouldn’t get married, and it hurt me very much when he did. I thought that he would buck his parents and buck the church and buck society, and that he and I would farm together. Two or three weeks after he got married, I started seeing him again. His wife was working days, so he was home alone and invited me out. I would hide my car in his garage and go in the house, and he would always be conveniently in his nightshirt, just getting out of bed. This went on for seven or eight years, and we had sex every place imaginable—in the house, in the car, in the hay barn, between the corn rows, in the trees—even when his wife was around. I felt guilty about it sometimes, but I figured
he
should be worrying about it.

After Jake and I developed a relationship, being back on the farm was much better for me, but even that had some hardships. Our relationship had to be top-secret. He would always put on this super-straight act whenever we’d be out together. I kind of would too, around the small town, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to be super-conciliatory like he was. That really aggravated me, and I didn’t have any control in the situation. With a married man, your schedule revolves around his. I’d be sitting home waiting. If she’s going to be busy tonight, that means we can get together. After three or four years of that, enough was enough. I still see Jake, although not nearly as often. On some level, we still love each other and we have a very good, mellow friendship. I’ve gotten over the desperation.

My younger brother is gay and has been in a relationship for ten or twelve years. He sort of came out to me when we were both on the farm, but I don’t know that I was much help to him. I think I inherited an awful lot of my father’s genes; it’s hard for me to talk about stuff like that. But we’re pretty close. We usually talk at least once a week on the phone, and I go to visit with them quite a bit, or they come down here. We get gossipy about men that we know in common, and there have been times we’ve double-dated. When he and his lover are having problems, he’ll confide in me. We don’t do a lot together, because they’ll often do things with other couples and it gets into a Noah’s Ark syndrome—everyone’s paired off and I’m old Noah.

My mother knows about my brother and his lover, because it’s so obvious, and she has no problem with that at all. I’m sure she knows about me, but I’ve
never come out and discussed it with her, I think because it’s such a taboo to discuss anything sexual. But my mother’s very liberal and very tolerant. It wouldn’t bother her in the least. She lives downstairs and I live upstairs in the same house, so she knows various men that I’ve dated. They stay over and we sleep together, and she welcomes them in. I have a very close platonic female friend—we’ve been friends for fifteen, twenty years—and now and then my mother will ask if the two of us are ever going to get married. I think she sees me as bisexual, but I don’t really hide anything from her. We just don’t discuss it.

Before I went back to the farm, when I still lived in Madison, I’d go to bars and do a one-night stand here and there. A relationship wasn’t anything I thought about. With Jake, it was the best of both worlds. We didn’t live together, so we didn’t have to put up with each other full-time, but we got all the other benefits. Now I think I’m ready for a relationship and would like to get my hands on something like that, but I don’t know quite how to go about doing it. I have some good role models, like my brother and his lover, and two other friends who live near here, who moved up from Chicago. They’ve been together for twenty years and have just adopted a child. I would want a monogamous relationship. I’m a little bit jealous, and I would like my partner to be a little bit jealous about me, a little bit possessive. Maybe I’m too much of a romantic. Maybe I’m thinking about something that could never exist. But I’m like my grandmother in that I’m going to hang onto that ideal anyway. I’m going to aspire to it, and if I don’t find it, I don’t find it.

In some ways, I think relationships have a better chance out here than in the city. There’s not this constant bombardment. When the whole AIDS thing started, I was having my affair with Jake and we were monogamous for many years, so I completely avoided all that. I was really nervous and paranoid about getting back into mainstream sexual relations, so that further reinforced me to go into hiding. In some ways, that’s what I think I’ve done, and maybe am still doing. I live very isolated in this community, sort of hidden, kind of the way I was in high school. Many of my friends are in Madison or Chicago.

All those laborious, freezing mornings, shoveling shit, it felt like the whole rest of the world was going on out there, and there I was all alone, and nobody knew I existed, or cared. It made me patient and tolerant and gave me an ability to step back. Maybe that’s part of my Norwegian upbringing; you’ve got to suffer a little to be happy. Maybe that’s a Protestant thing, but I do kind of believe it. I don’t willingly believe it, but it seems to be a part of me.

Something about rural deprivation sort of excites me. Everything is so easy and available in the city. If you want to have sex, you can find it anywhere—in the bookstore or the bar or on the street corner. In the country it’s more of a challenge. You’re horny, and you’re looking for this other person, and when you finally find him it’s just incredible. It’s still sort of a sustaining myth for me—discovering somebody that I’ve known for a long time, and we never knew that about each other, and then something happens. I’ve developed crushes on so many men who were straight as arrows and had no interest whatsoever. After a few months of being alone, I would read all kinds of stuff into any little movement they made. Maybe it would be a store clerk that would help me try on a pair of pants. Any little touch was a big enough thread of hope to go with.

There’s a little bit of a gay community around here, but it’s really hard to network. People are very cautious. Two lesbians run a bed and breakfast in town, and there are transplanted Chicagoans looking for the rural life. I know of a couple of gay farmers who have been running farms together for years, but I don’t know how I would ever get to know them. Somebody once said that farm boys can never be one hundred percent happy. When they’re in the city, part of them will long for the country, and when they’re in the country, part of them will long for the city. I think I will always feel that split. There is life out here in the boonies—a little bit more stable, a little less revolving around heading for the bar on Friday night, a little bit more self-reliant. But it works a lot better if you’ve got a partner.

N
OTE

1.
Compulsion
is Meyer Levin’s 1956 novel (New York: Simon and Schuster) based on a 1924 Chicago murder case in which two homosexual men, Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, were found guilty of murdering Robert Franks, a fourteen-year-old boy.

Dale was born in 1954 and grew up with two brothers, one older and one younger; on two farms in east-central Ohio. The first was a 70-acre crop and dairy farm. When Dale was about ten years old, his family moved to a 300-acre farm five miles up the road, where they raised sheep, beef cattle, and pigs. Crops included hay, wheat, oats, and corn. Dale was married and is the father of one child. He lives in Ohio.

ON THE FARM, there is a different sense of life that has more depth and understanding to it. You see animals born, you see them die, you butcher a cow and that provides meat on your table—and that’s okay. When you ride on the tractor with your dad, cutting the hay in the field, and you cut into a rabbit’s nest, you feel badly about that—but it’s okay. There’s a sense of life going on, that you and I will live and die but that won’t really change anything. Seasons will still change and flowers will still bloom and die.