Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (48 page)

As a young child I saw
Cinderella
, with Lesley Ann Warren. I was just enchanted—with her, but also with the prince. I was very concerned about whether I would grow up to be handsome like the prince, perhaps because I was very drawn to him—wanting to be like him and wanting to have him. I had crushes on men who were authority figures—my minister, several teachers. When I got into high school, I started having crushes on other boys my age.

In a religious magazine for kids called
Campus Life
, a guy wrote a column about dating and sex, and every once in a while he would respond to a letter about gays. He would give advice like, “It’s a wrong way to live your life, but God loves people that feel this way.” I was fourteen or fifteen, and that’s when I started realizing, “Yeah, this is more than just a passing fancy. This is really the way I am.” That’s when I started acknowledging in my prayers that I desired other boys, and asking God to help me not to lust after them.

On a school trip to St. Louis we went to a shopping mall, and I wound up in the gay novels section of a bookstore. I was fascinated, but it bothered me because I thought people shouldn’t really be reading about homosexuality, except as a problem to be solved. One book, with a picture of two young men on the cover, was described as “one of the best homosexual love stories ever written.” I could hardly tear myself away from it, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy it.

“Sometimes I feel that I was this person sort of planted on the farm. I always felt sort of outside of them all—the farm kids and even the other kids at school.” Connie Sanders on his home farm as a preschooler. Courtesy of Connie Sanders.

My masturbation fantasies were always about a man and a woman. That was how I got around feeling guilty. Once when I was in college, I worked up the nerve to buy a
Playgirl.
I had two orgasms in the car in the parking lot and another one while I was driving. Throughout college, I remained celibate, telling myself that although I had these feelings, I could never act on them.

After graduating from college, I went to Urbana to work in the library at the University of Illinois. It was a few months before I realized there was a gay community there. I resisted exploring it for a long time, but my life seemed really empty and depressing, so one night I went to a discussion at the student union about safe sex. I thought I could hide in the crowd, but there were five people there that I knew from campus, including my boss and a couple of co-workers. I was amazed, and decided that since people had seen me anyway, I might as well go to the gay bar.

Connie Sanders on a visit to the farm. Courtesy of Connie Sanders.

In the bar, I was so scared that I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. I struck up a conversation with the first person I made eye contact with and we left together almost immediately. He was from out of town, about ten years older, and very melancholy. I had no interest in him, except that I had to try it, to get it out of my system. I was twenty-three when I had my first sexual experience with a man. It was just an experiment—I told him I didn’t want to be gay, which is what I believed. After him, I met another guy I had nothing in common with. He was an alcoholic and a mess emotionally, and we had a very short and awful affair.

The first time I met someone I really cared about, he was a law student at the University of Illinois who approached me in the bar. He looked like the boy-next-door and we had a light summer romance—we actually had fun together. When he broke up with me I began to understand why
people use the term “broken heart.” That’s when I realized I was no longer just experimenting.

What first allowed me to feel okay about being gay was the realization that there were gay people who were married—committed to one another and monogamous. So I decided the only way I wanted to be sexual was to be in a committed relationship. If I had sex with someone, we were automatically going to be lovers and it was going to last forever. It didn’t take long to realize that that wasn’t realistic.

Then I started just dating around and picking people up—being safe, but realizing that sometimes sex was just fun. But after living in Chicago a couple of years, I decided to give up casual sex for Lent. I tried to get through forty days and forty nights without being with anybody unless I thought it would be something significant. I sort of broke my promise once when I couldn’t resist going to an underwear party, but that was the only thing the whole time.

On Easter morning, I decided to go to church. I hadn’t been for a long time. At the coffee hour after church, I met Matt. He gave me a ride home and called me two days later. He said he’d get me up to go running if I would get him up to go to church the next week. We had a date that weekend and ended up having pretty wild sex.

Matt and I have made a beginning commitment to be monogamous and just see where it goes. We both want it to be a long-term thing, but we’re trying not to write a script. We decided to meet each other’s families before we moved in together, and it turned out to be a very positive experience. Dad took us horseback riding and we all had a good time and my parents liked Matt a lot. They’ve always liked the guys I’ve dated, but they haven’t really known who these guys have been to me.

Terry was a rough-and-tumble girl, a year or two older than me, who grew up next-door. When we were out horseback riding or camping, she’d say things like “Goddamn it!” and then she’d apologize because she knew it offended me. Terry has been living with a woman now for about thirteen years. She had a daughter when she was about fifteen. One time when I was home from college, Terry and her lover came to the Christmas program at church to see her daughter. Her lover kind of fit the stereotype of a masculine lesbian. My mother and I got into a conversation about them at home, and my mother said, “I don’t want to talk about this. You know about Terry and that woman, but we don’t talk about it.”

About a year ago, when I was home, Mom told me that Dad had been horseback riding with Terry and Joanne. I said, “Wait a minute! You mean Terry from
next-door and Joanne, the woman she’s been living with for years?” Mom said, “Yes, they had a great time,” and she just went on with the story. I know my parents know they’re lesbians. In the country, I guess, it’s the kind of thing that’s okay if you don’t talk about it—if you don’t “rub it in people’s faces.” My parents’ attitude is that God intends sex to be something within a marriage and between a man and a woman. But I’ve heard Mom say that she thinks people should have the right to live their lives the way they want to, even if she doesn’t approve of their choices.

My mother’s experience is so drastically different from mine, on their little farm out in the middle of nowhere, where the center of her life is the little Methodist church up the road. I haven’t talked with her about being gay because I feel guilty about hurting her. I’ve always been the good kid. My older brothers got in trouble, my little sisters got in trouble, but I never got in trouble. If there’s something painful in my life, or something that would make my mother unhappy, I don’t tell her. We’re not a communicative family about a lot of things. Everything is indirect, and we don’t talk about things that make us uncomfortable.

I was in a show with a community theater in Urbana, and Mom said she wanted to come see it. I said, “Well, Mom, I don’t know,” and she said, “Oh, Connie, you know how much I love to come see your shows. What’s the show?” I told her it was
La Cage aux Folles
and she said, “Oh, I’ve heard of that. Didn’t that win a Tony award? I’d like to see it.” When I said I thought she should know what it was about, she said, “Isn’t it about a bunch of men who dress up like women and perform?” She probably got it from a talk show. She loves
Oprah Winfrey
and all those shows. I said, “Well, Mom, there’s one more thing I should tell you. The two main characters in the show are a homosexual couple, and they’re portrayed in a positive light.” She said she wanted to see it.

She came for the last performance, and during the whole show I kept thinking, “My mother’s here! What am I going to do?” The show has a lot of sexual innuendo, and we really milked that for all it was worth. I came out in crinolines and fishnet stockings, doing the can-can, and in a bird suit with nothing but a skimpy leotard and high heels and feathers. I came out in big blue pajamas and a boa, tap dancing in fishnet stockings and high heels. I also had a brief scene as a male waiter and danced in “The Masculinity Dance”—so I got to be a man too, which was sort of comforting.

A man who weighed about three hundred pounds had come to see sixteen performances of the show in various states of drag. Sometimes he’d come in full drag and sometimes he’d come in a three-piece suit. The last
night he came in a suit with a tiara, and we presented one of the boas to him at the end of the show. I wondered what Mom thought about that.

After the show, I was in the back with one of the few straight guys in the chorus, and I started to cry. He said, “What’s wrong, Connie?” and I said, “I think I just came out to my mother, and I don’t want to go out and talk to her.” He said, “Come on, let’s go meet Mom.” She was dabbing her eyes, and I thought, “Oh no, she’s upset.” But my mother’s a sucker for a happy ending, and this show had one—the two lead men dancing off into the moonlight, celebrating their love for each other. She said, “Oh, I just had the
best
time. That was so good! You know, I couldn’t figure out whether that was a man or a woman. Almost to the end of the show, I just wasn’t sure. And it took me forever to figure out which one was you.”

We had to strike the set that night, so she sat and looked through photographs and watched people. There was no way to get away from the campy comments and affectations. She just sat there soaking it all in. Every once in a while, she’d look at someone kind of funny, but she was really a good sport. I worried a little bit about coming off to her as a big drag queen, but I think she knows I just love to be a ham and to be on stage.

I’ve known people who were just sure their parents knew they were gay—they could even sort of joke with them about it. But when they directly confronted them with it, it became messy, because then their parents had to really deal with it. They couldn’t use denial anymore. My parents are probably doing major denial. With all the stuff my mother would have to deal with (did she cause it? am I going to hell?) it would be important for her to have some kind of support. I just don’t know if there are enough people there who would give her the support she needs and tell her the kinds of things she needs to hear, or if she’d be surrounded by people who were just as uninformed as she is, or more so.

My dad I’m not quite as concerned about. He sort of reacts to things according to how it affects my mom. His attitude tends to be “I hate to see your mother hurting like this.” My prediction is that he’ll be upset because my mother is, or he’ll hide his upset feelings. I can see my mother working through it, dealing with the emotional things and loving me anyway. I think my dad is a lot less flexible, less verbal, and less able to grow. I can see him saying, “It’s sick and it’s wrong.” But my parents have both surprised me many times by coming through with amazing intelligence. My mother watches a lot of television, and I think she sees more and more images of people who aren’t sick or unhappy because they’re gay. And in many ways, my dad is a very practical, sensible man. So who knows?

All through my life, I’ve been influenced by the church. An assumption of evil and rejection from God taints my perception of almost everything, and it comes out in very subtle ways. That voice in me—a former therapist called it “The Preacher”—had to do with my breakdown, it had to do with my difficulty accepting myself as gay, and even now it interferes with relationships. One of the first books I read when I was struggling to come out was
Embracing the Exile
, by a Christian psychotherapist. It was all about the spiritual journey of recognizing and embracing yourself as you are, as a gay person loved by God.
²

My favorite show when I was growing up was
The Waltons.
The show’s values comforted me, and I identified with John-Boy, the sensitive son who wanted to be a writer. He belonged there on the mountain with his family, yet he sensed that he was different and that he was often misunderstood. At times I would lay in my bedroom feeling like I was missing everything. There were boys I wanted so badly to be close to, and those were exactly the ones I avoided. I was frightened by boys who were very uninhibited and masculine and joked around about sex. I realize now that I was drawn to them, and I was afraid of giving that away, afraid I was too transparent to them. So I spent a lot of energy acting uninterested, or being shy, or thinking they shouldn’t curse the way they did.