Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (46 page)

It took me years to get chickens, and when I did I got beaten for going against my dad’s wishes. I was ten or eleven, and I drove the tractor over to the neighbors who had birds, a mile or two away, picked out what I wanted and paid for them, and brought them home. I thought I could hide them. My dad didn’t want those goddamned things in his barn. They’d get in the hay and shit on everything. They were to be confined. Getting chickens was one way I could express that I didn’t always have to be who he wanted me to be, I could be independent, and I didn’t need his help with it.

The inside of the milk house had to be painted yearly to stay on grade A. When I was painting it one year, I slipped off the ladder and spilled paint on the bulk milk tank. I was afraid it might contaminate the milk, so I ran and told Dad and he told me to get some gasoline and clean it off before it dried. Well, I got to scrubbing, and when he came into the milk house I was getting light-headed because the fumes were getting strong. Then the gas water-heater came on and the whole place blew up. I had pretty bad burns on my arms, and ran out to the stock tank to put them in the cool water. I had to go to the doctor, and then the doctor didn’t
get there for another hour. My stepmother told me to be quiet. “It can’t be
that
bad.” Illness was not allowed—you had a job to do. You didn’t go to the doctor unless you were almost dead.

My mother killed herself when she was twenty-eight. She took an overdose, I think. I’ve never gotten the full story. One night Dad was crying, and I’d never seen him cry. I thought he was made of stone—this big, strong, mean guy. We said, “What’s wrong?” “Oh, your mother died.” What are you supposed to think when you’re nine years old and you don’t know this person even existed? I went to bed wondering, what the fuck just happened? My dad was very somber that whole week after he had told us. I wanted to go to the wake so bad because I wanted to see her. Looking at her face, it was so bizarre—this woman I hadn’t seen since I was an infant. By her head was a little flower arrangement my dad had purchased that said “Mother of. . .” and listed our names.

Never dare to think for yourself. Follow the herd. Don’t be different, because people will talk about you. My dad would say, “What are people going to think if you do that?” I don’t care what they think. We were told we had to at least try football one year. I quit after two weeks because the coach was such an ass. I got into canning that year in 4-H, and the other kids and their parents made fun of me. I was interested in sewing for a while, too, and I was the only boy in choir for two years. One day I went up to Grandma’s to dig up some iris to plant, and when I got back with them my dad and the hired man and Neil and Kevin were sitting around the table, and Kevin announced, “I told them why you went to Grandma’s”—like it was really femmy that I went there to get flowers. They all kind of snickered, but I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t ask for your approval when I started, and I certainly don’t care for it now.

I knew I was gay from the time I was five. I was always attracted to boys and I always wanted to be more than friends with them. I wanted them to touch me, to be sexual. About the time my mother died, Neil and I looked up homosexuality in the encyclopedia. It said something about males who engage in sexual contact with one another more than six times. So we were sitting there counting on our fingers and decided we were.

Our father’s brother lived with us until he went off to college. He was having sex with us when we were little kids, from when I was five or six. He was ten years older than me and would play little sex games when he would babysit. It wasn’t painful or, in my mind, nasty, but I was real uptight and nervous about it when we were little because I didn’t understand it. Nobody ever talked to me about my genitals, and then all of a sudden somebody’s rubbing them. It would develop a little sore, it was
painful, and who could you tell? But as I matured, it felt good. We did everything—oral, anal, fondling, masturbating. Even when he was married, he’d call us up and say, “Can you guys come out and help me with a load of rocks?” We’d go up to his place, his wife would be gone, and he’d be in the living room in his underwear wanting us to fuck him.

My brothers and I had sex together until we became adults. It was very natural for us to be sexual—it was part of our rearing and it was acceptable to us. After all, our uncle did it with us. I became sexually aggressive with my cousins and with neighbor kids. We’d be taking a pee and then start playing with each other’s penises. It was mostly fondling each other, masturbating, some anal sex. It just happened, it was never planned. We usually did it in the cow passes under the roads, or in the woods, or up in the hay barn. I had a cousin who liked to get fucked, and we had sex a lot. I’d go down to get the cows in the morning, and his bedroom was on the first floor. He’d roll over when I came in and I’d screw him, then go chase the cows home.

One day Dad was milking and I was washing cows for him. The man who did milk testing was there and was talking about how he was just disgusted by one of his neighbor’s children who had had sex with another boy. He said to my dad, “What would you do with that kind of shit in your house?” My dad just shook his head. “Oh, that’s just sick,” was written all over his face. I thought, if you don’t try it, you’ll never know, Daddy.

I dated three or four girls throughout high school, one very steadily. I enjoyed the emotional part of our relationship a lot more than I enjoyed the sexual. The genitals of women, and their breasts, were just repulsive to me, but I kept at it and kept trying. Neil and I talked with each other about men we were attracted to, but we both denied it a lot and fought it and tried to go straight. When Neil got a woman pregnant and married her right out of high school, he made it real clear to me. “I’m not gay anymore, and we’re not going to be sexual anymore because I’m straight now, and I’m married.”

I was very out my senior year of high school. I decided that if I was going to be my own person, I had to be honest with myself. And I think maybe I was making it known to get other people’s reactions. I took a lot of shit from the other boys about it, and would get into knock-down, dragout fist fights in the middle of the classroom with those little assholes. They’d call me a name, I’d smack them in the face, and all hell would break loose, but I didn’t care. It only made me stronger. It made me think, “I am so glad I do not have to stay in this one-horse town for the rest of my life. I get to leave here, and I have their permission because they don’t want me here.” I didn’t have to worry about what anybody thought. It was safe past the town limits—”on the other side,” as I always called it— where people didn’t
know me and I could be who I was.

At seventeen, I was going to the bars in Madison, and I had quite a circle of gay friends. My stepmother was supportive about my coming out, which encouraged me to find out who I was. Without her, there would’ve been a lot more fumbling and confusion. But then she turned around and told everybody in town I was going to the gay bars, and would ridicule me behind my back. If you can’t say it to my face, say it to my back, bitch.

The godawfulest day of my life was when I had just turned sixteen and went to the driver’s license place with my dad. Driving there, he said, “This is going to be your last fuckin’ chance to get this goddamned license this summer, so you’d better not fuck up on the test.” When I showed him that I got my license, he said, “Oh, thank God!” and onward home we went. He was so derogatory. I look the most like my mother, and when I would cry he would say, “You look just like your goddamned mother.” I thought, “Good. At least I don’t look like you, you asshole.”

My dad would fly off the handle and beat me, punch me—I would be so bruised up. I remember wanting him dead—wanting him to suffer a bad, painful death. I went with him one day to pick up a bull. He was being a real smart-ass, and got in the cattle trailer and whacked the bull on the nose with a crowbar. The bull went ape and nailed him, just smashed the shit out of him, and I couldn’t do anything. This two-thousand-pound bull was goring my dad, and all these memories came back of wanting him dead. He was very badly hurt, and on the way home he said, “What were you going to do? Stand there and let the son of a bitch kill me?” And I thought, “You perfect fucking asshole, yes, I should’ve.” I have never been afraid to swear. That was part of my survival, growing up. I couldn’t hit him back; all I had was my sassy little mouth.

One of my summer jobs was to cut hay. It was a big, hot bitch of a day, and I got there at eight in the morning and didn’t quit until 3:30 when I finally cut the last windrow. It was a forty-acre piece that would never end— full of dead furrows and rocks that broke teeth out of the haybine. I was hot and thirsty and tired, but I was proud that I had gotten it done and I thought Dad would be happy. When I got to the gate, he was coming up the hill. Looking around at the field, he said, “How in the hell am I supposed to bale this, the way you’ve cut it?” We got into a huge argument and he jumped up on the tractor and started hitting me. It was never civil or calm, it was always explosive. Everything escalated into, “My God, how could you do something so fucking dumb?” I left, moved out that day. I was seventeen years old, suicidal, and to get out of there was saving my
life. I wanted to be independent of him, to never have to rely on him for anything. And I never wanted to look at a farm again.

I moved to Madison when I was eighteen. I was young and kind of cute and men were attracted to me. I was using drugs and drinking a lot and I slept with a lot of men and had a wonderful time. It’s lucky I didn’t get AIDS or god only knows what. For the first time I felt like a feeling person. I was free from my dad, experimenting with sexuality, and able to try anything. It got old real quick. Within the first year, I thought, I want to be involved with somebody, but all these people are flakes and they’re out for one thing and one thing only.

Was I going to follow my sexual choice or do what society wanted— get married and have a family? At that point I was suicidal, because I was so torn. If I’m straight, I’m not going to be happy. If I’m gay, I’m not going to be happy. I didn’t belong to either side. I was very confused and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I ended up living with a woman for nine months and getting her pregnant. She decided to have an abortion, and I was very glad at the time because I was nineteen and I was a mess.

My first long-term relationship was with Michael, a school-teacher. It lasted seven years. He drank too much, but that was a very small part of the problem. We didn’t have a thing in common. He didn’t want to farm, he wanted nothing to do with livestock. I would talk about wanting to get a place in the country, and that was so unappealing to him. He would’ve rather had me cut his foot off.

Hank and I have seven acres, mostly pasture for the heifers. Three acres are rented, four we own. We raise dairy heifers, breed them at fifteen months, and sell them as two-year-old fresh heifers. We like to have a milk cow to make our own cheese and butter. We produce our own eggs and chicken for eating, and raise our own pork. When we have a fresh cow, we buy some pigs and feed them out on the milk by-products until they’re about two hundred pounds, then have them butchered.

We raise our own corn and most of our own vegetables, and I’ve planted thousands of annuals throughout the yard and garden. Every year, we have a large vegetable garden and are able to give a lot of it away. We have between three and five hundred hills of potatoes every year. To share the garden with others gives me so much pleasure. God lent me this ground to grow something on, and I think God would be so happy that it’s either beautifying or providing food for someone.

I loved going to poultry shows when I was a kid, and I still do. I think I drive Hank crazy, because we’ve got to go to every show and they’re all basically the same. Runner ducks are my specialty, and I’ve won trophies and ribbons with them. We’re
also raising white leghorn banties, which I really like—they’re cute little chickens. Blue andalusians are another favorite; very few people have them. We’ve raised them for three years, keeping our lines going. We’ll start out with about twenty-five baby chicks in the spring and the number increases. “Oh, we can get twenty-five more.” By the end of last summer we had 250 chickens.

I’ve always liked to milk cows. Maybe it’s the closeness of the animal and seeing the results of massaging the udder when she lets her milk down. If you like cows, you get to know individual animals—what their moods are, when their heat is strong, when they’re sick. I’ve been an advocate of the cow’s gentle nature since I was quite young. I really preferred being with the animals to fieldwork, and I loved showing the cattle—trimming their feet, cleaning them, and getting them all sparkly white. I had a pet cow named Lily, the first heifer I’d raised and shown in the 4-H fair, and she was just a big docile old lunk. She didn’t milk worth a shit, and she was basically worthless, but she was my pet. Lily was so tame you could sit on her or curl up next to her when she was laying down. I drove my dad crazy with my carrying on if he even mentioned selling her, so old Lily hung on more years than she should have.

Hank and I always have a calf or two around. We like to watch them grow and mature and become milk cows. We recently sold a two-year-old heifer, quite a beauty. Hank felt bad that we had to sell her, but I needed the money for school. She’s got a good home, and that’s more important to us than holding onto her. I keep telling Hank we should buy a Jersey herd, about thirty cows to milk, and run a small operation to raise enough crops to feed them—under two hundred acres. That wouldn’t support us, but it would be so wonderful to be your own boss, just to have the sounds of your own voice and the cattle bellering, and the quiet.

I want to be romantic, not to be taken for granted, to be kissed a lot, to be told I’m loved. I want the country life, and he must like chickens and cattle, and baking and eating, and drinking champagne and wine. He must know how to enjoy life and not be afraid to get some shit on his shoes and some dirt under his fingernails. I want somebody who is going to be honest and monogamous and very sexual. My early experiences formed a big part of what I like now sexually, and it really stripped away my inhibitions. I enjoy sex immensely and I feel very comfortable expressing myself. Sex is one of the better parts of life, I think.