Farm Boys

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FARMBOYS
Lives of Gay Men from
the Rural Midwest

Collected and edited by

Will Fellows

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

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 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53711

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Copyright © 1996, 1998

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved

9 8

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fellows, Will.
Farm boys: lives of gay men from the rural Midwest /
Will Fellows.
352 pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-299-15080-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-299-15084-4 (paper: alk. paper)
1. Gay men-Middle West-Case studies. 2. Farmers-
Middle West-Case studies. 1. Title.
HQ76.2.U52M534 1996
305.38'9664-dc20 96-6058

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Whatever actually happens to a man
is wonderfully trivial and insignificant,
-even to death itself, I imagine.
-Henry David Thoreau

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CONTENTS

Preface IX
Acknowledgments Xlll
How These Stories Were Discovered xv
Farming Glossary xxvii

Introduction 3

PART 1: Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Introduction 31
Cornelius Utz, Missouri 34
Robert Peters, Wisconsin 47
Henry Bauer, Minnesota 59
Harry Beckner, Nebraska 68
Jim Cross, Iowa 76
Dennis Lindholm, Iowa 84
James Heckman, Indiana 93
John Beutel, Wisconsin 103
Myron Turk, Wisconsin 112
Norm Reed, Ohio 115
Ronald Schoen, Minnesota 124

PART 2: Coming ofAge Between the Mid-1960s

and Mid-1970s
Introduction 129
David Foster, Wisconsin 132
Doug Edwards, Indiana 143
Bill Troxell, Indiana 154
Larry Ebmeier, Nebraska 156
Vll

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Vlll Contents

Martin Scherz, Nebraska 160

Richard Kilmer, Wisconsin 170
Heinz Koenig, Wisconsin 180
Tom Rygh, Wisconsin 182
Dale Hesterman, Ohio 191
Frank Morse, Wisconsin 199
Mark Vanderbeek, Nebraska 202
Everett Cooper, Indiana 206
John Berg, Minnesota 215

PART 3: Coming of Age Between the Mid-1970s

and Mid-1980s

Introduction 221
David Campbell, Ohio 224
Jahred Boyd, Minnesota 228
Steve Gay, Wisconsin 231
Rick Noss, Iowa 234
Richard Hopkins, Indiana 243
Lon Mickelsen, Minnesota 251
Steven Preston, Wisconsin 260
Connie Sanders, Illinois 269
Randy Fleer, Nebraska 281
Ken Yliniemi, Minnesota 284
Clark Williams, Wisconsin 292
Joe Shulka, Wisconsin 294
Todd Ruhter, Nebraska 304

Afterword 311
Postscript 317

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PREFACE

This work is about the lives of gay men who grew up on farms in the mid-
western United States during the twentieth century. I have done this
work in the interest of promoting a fuller appreciation of the varied ori-
gins of, and perspectives within, the population of gay men in the U.S. I
hope that the reader will find these plain-spoken narratives to be engag-
ing and illuminating in their candor, insight, and sense of humor. It is also
my hope that this work will be of value to individuals who are exploring
issues related to sexual and gender identity.
These men describe how they perceived and responded to a variety of
conditions that existed in many of the farm communities and families of
their boyhoods: rigid gender roles, social isolation, ethnic homogeneity,
suspicion of the unfamiliar, racism, religious conservatism, sexual prud-
ishness, and limited access to information. While none of these conditions
is unique to farm culture, they operate in a distinctive synergy in that set-
ting.
They also have a lasting impact. More than just boyhood memories,
these stories describe the long-term influences that many of these men
believe their upbringings have had on the course and character of their
lives. How has their farming heritage influenced their choices and identi-
ties as gay men? How do they see themselves in relation to gay men from
urban or suburban backgrounds? How do they fit into their local gay
communities? Inherent in these stories are the very different experiences
and perspectives of men who came of age in earlier decades of this cen-
tury and those who came of age in more recent decades-especially in the
1970s and 1980s.
In preparing these narratives from interviews, I have seen myself as
something of a midwife, listening to men who had something to say and
delivering their experiences and perspectives to the reader in their own
distinct voices. If! had believed that soliciting contributions from profes-
sional writers would have yielded as diverse a cross-section of gay "farm

IX

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x Preface

boys," I might have chosen to edit their writings and organize them in a
collection. In the interest of presenting a greater range oflargely unheard
voices, I have collaborated with my own group of subjects to shape auto-
biographical narratives from their interview transcripts. Because very few
of these men were writers, it is unlikely that most of these stories would
have been told unless someone had come along with a litany of questions
and a tape recorder.
Despite my efforts to let these men's words speak for them, my own
background has no doubt influenced the ways in which I have gone about
asking them to talk about their lives, as well as the ways in which I have
understood and edited their words. I was born in 1957 and grew up on a
Wisconsin dairy farm that had been in the family for more than a century.
Apart from the inevitable jolts and angst of growing up, my childhood
was one of naivety, safety, stability, and freedom. My parents expected me
to do a certain amount of housework and farmwork, but my childhood
was not consumed by endless toil or rigid expectations.
Living five miles from town, with few neighbor kids my age, I played
mostly with my two younger sisters and weathered typical fraternal ha-
rassment from my older brother. I pleased my teachers at public school
and Baptist church in town, played with my toy printing press, collected
coins, and completed 4- H projects in drama, woodworking, and nature
conservation. My feelings of rootedness and belonging were strengthened
as I researched my father's family history, tracing our tenure on the farm
back to its beginnings in the 1850s.
I chose to spend a lot of time with my paternal grandmother who lived
in the old farmhouse next door, surrounded by her beloved antiques and
books and other fine things. For several years in my teens, I operated a
small antique shop in an old poultry shed that my father helped me re-
furbish. Through high school I was essentially a sexually naive loner, feel-
ing no great inclination to date girls or to fool around with boys. I edited
the school newspaper, wrote for a local weekly paper, and spent a summer
as a foreign exchange student (feeling homesick much of the time). Com-
ing out to myself and my family between eighteen and twenty-one years
of age was relatively free of pain .
My life since leaving the farm for college has been largely urban, mid-
western, and variously fulfilling. There is much I have come to like about
city life, but I have tended to feel like an outsider in the gay communities
of the cities in which I have lived . And I have had similar feelings in rela-
tion to the larger gay "community" in the United States, as represented in
popular gay-themed books, periodicals, and movies. In an effort to gain a
better understanding of what I bring to the experience of being gay as a
result, perhaps, of my farm upbringing, I have looked for books telling

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Preface Xl

about my kind of childhood. The body ofliterature that examines the lives
of gay men has expanded greatly in recent years and has enriched my life
in many ways, but it neglects the experiences and perspectives of gay men
who grew up in farm families. Urban or suburban experiences are central
to the lives of most gay men, but they constitute only part of the story.
It is not uncommon for gay men who grew up on farms to regard their
rural roots as irrelevant or embarrassing. Those attitudes tend to be rein-
forced by the popular gay press, in which the most common representa-
tions of the rural childhood experience include a variety of farm-boy
stereotypes, fantasies, and romanticized, back-to-nature images. Charles
Silverstein described some of these popular perceptions in his 1981 book,
Man to Man: Gay Couples in America. l
City gays imagine the boys on the farm as somehow more wholesome
than themselves . Soaking up the sun while pitching a bale of hay, their
bodies taking on a bronze glow, these promising young men develop
tight muscles from manual labor and hardiness; the lines in their faces
and the callouses on their hands are the results of wind, rain, and the
warming sun. In short, they are pictured as country bumpkins with rosy
cheeks, ready to be plucked if they venture into the big city (p. 241).
In our interview, Clark Williams described his own experience with
these stereotypical perceptions.
A lot of men idealize the naive, good-looking, tanned farm boy. "Wouldn't
you love to go to bed with him? Wouldn't you love to have him, to take
him down? " I've had some guys take that kind of approach with me . I'm
supposed to be wide-eyed, naive, less intelligent, and in denial about who
I am. They'll ask me, "Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?"

The life stories presented here are not primarily those of gay men who
stayed in the rural farming communities where they grew up. A large ma-
jority of these men have left farming and rural communities, choosing to
live in or near relatively large midwestern cities. Richard Kilmer was suc-
cinct in assessing his own choice to leave.
If I had stayed on the farm , I would have never dealt with being gay. I
would have probably gotten married and had sex with men on the side. I
think a lot of gays don't leave the farm, so there's probably a lot of people
out there who are doing that. So many people there are alcoholics, and I
think that's what a lot of gays gravitate towards, to kind of deaden their
feelings .
Barney Dews grew up on a farm in East Texas in the 1960s and 1970s,
and was living in Minneapolis at the time of our interview. Although he
is not a midwesterner, his description of "a centrifugal force that slings gay

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XII Preface

people as far away as possible, to escape," is relevant to many of these

men's experiences. It seems likely that by having uprooted and distanced
themselves from the families and communities of their childhoods, these
men were able to look at their lives with more insight and clarity than
would have been possible had they stayed. As these stories reveal, their
views of growing up range widely, from bitter to beatific .

NOTE

1. Silverstein, Charles. 1981. Man to Man: Gay Couples in America. New York:
Quill.

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ACI<NOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this project was conceived as the result of conversation over
dinner with my friend Karl Wolter. Clarification and refinement of this
original idea were enhanced by conversations with many others, especially
Doug Bauder, John Berg, Fran~oise Crelerot, Joanne Csete, Carlos Dews,
Kim Karcher, Ming Liang Kwok, Lon Mickelsen, Sarah Newport, Brian
Powers, Larry Reed, Julia Salomon, Martin Scherz, Jack Siebert, and Jane
Vanderbosch. I thank all of my friends and family members for their con-
tributions to making things happen as well as they did.
Early interest in the Gay Farm Boys Project was shown by The New
Harvest Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin, the Cream City Foundation
of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and The Madison Community United. I am in-
debted to them, as I am to my friend Joanne Csete, for generous and en-
couraging financial support.
Bonnie Denmark Friedman was a superb transcriber and Jeff Kopseng
has been a dream of an illustrator. This work has been greatly improved
by the efforts of Rosalie M . Robertson and Raphael Kadushin at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, and by the encouraging editorial ddvice of
David Bergman, David Roman, and Reed Woodhouse . I thank Robert
Peters for permission to use excerpts from his book, Crunching Gravel: A
Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). I
am grateful to all of the men who agreed to be interviewed, including
those whose stories I have not been able to include in this volume.
As a 1975 graduate of Evansville (Wisconsin) High School, I was hon-
ored to receive the Helen Smith Literary Award, named for a local writer.
Dr. Smith's early encouragement has been important to me.

I dedicate this work to my abundantly loving mate, Bronze Quinton, and

to my splendid parents, David and Catharine Fellows.

xiii

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HOW THESE STORIES
WERE DISCOVERED

Interview subjects were recruited by publicizing the Gay Farm Boys Proj-
ect through press releases sent during the summer of 1992 to twenty-six
gay and lesbian community publications in the midwestern United States.
These included: Chicago, Illinois-Gay Chicago, Outlines, Windy City Times;
Rockford, Illinois-Rock River News; Indianapolis, Indiana-Fever, Indi-
ana Word; Ann Arbor, Michigan-Mich~an Tribune, Out and About; De-
troit, Michigan-Cruise, Metra; Minneapolis, Minnesota-Equal Time,
GAZE; Kansas City, Missouri-Alternative News; St. Louis, Missouri-
News-Telegraph; Omaha, Nebraska-New Voice; Cincinnati, Ohio- Nou-
veau Midwest; Cleveland, Ohio-Gay People's Chronicle, Valentine News;
Columbus, Ohio-Free Press, Gaybeat; La Crosse, Wisconsin-Leaping La
Crosse News; Madison, Wisconsin-Frontiersman; Milwaukee, Wisconsin-
In Step, Wisconsin L~ht; Wausau, Wisconsin-Lifeline; Westby, Wisconsin-
New Beginnings.
To give the editors of these publications flexibility in publicizing the
project, the appeal for interview subjects was provided in two forms-as
a standard press release and a letter to the editor. The text of the standard
release follows:
Farm Boys Sought for Interviews
Are you a gay man who grew up on a farm? If so, your experience as a
farm boy is an important and largely neglected part of gay culture. Urban
experiences are central to the lives of most gay men, but they're far from
being the whole story.
The Gay Farm Boys Project is intended to give gay men who grew up
on farms-whether or not they are still involved in farming-a chance to
talk about their experiences and the ways in which their farm upbring-
ings have influenced their lives.
If you are a gay man who grew up in a farming household and you
think you might be interested in contributing to this cultural research
project by talking about your experiences, please contact Will Fellows at

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XVI How These Stories Were Discovered

[phone number] for more information or to arrange for an interview.

You can write to Fellows at [P.O. box address].
A gay farm boy himself, Fellows is an experienced researcher and
writer who would like to consider your story for inclusion in a book
based on the "gay farm boys" theme . Whatever your age and whatever
your life is about now, your story is a unique and valuable part of gay cul-
ture. If anonymity is desired, names and other key details can be changed.
Approximately 120 men responded by telephone and mail to this pub-
licity. A few emphasized the importance of discretion and anonymity in
this initial contact, but most seemed trusting and uninhibited in their re-
sponses. Some of those who wrote sent brief notes requesting that more
information be sent, sometimes to a post office box address. Others wrote
longer, more engaging letters describing their interest in the project and
their qualifications for being interviewed. For example, one man wrote :
I grew up in the sixties on a small farm in a Mennonite community in a
rural area south of Cleveland, Ohio. The whole family took an active part
in the daily chores of milking cows, plowing, working the gardens, clean-
ing the pens, killing chickens on Saturdays, and acting like saints in
church on Sundays. The horrors on the farm for this guy were too many,
and now in my forties I live in a suburban area outside of Cleveland.
Mter those days in the country, I don't have and won't have even a pet,
at least not four-legged.
Apparent in some letters and phone conversations was an assumption,
suspicion, or hope that the Gay Farm Boys Project would prove to be a
networking service for men in rural areas, men with fantasies about "farm
boys," men with fantasies about sex with animals, or some combination
thereof. One man wrote from rural Minnesota:
I am interested in your research and how you plan to process the infor-
mation . Is this for your edification? A chance to compare notes with
other respondents and form some sort of support group? An opportunity
to meet others in the same boat and socialize? Or what? You may have
tapped a good market for this kind of research. As I expect you know, the
chance to make rural contacts is very limited.
The allure of the farm-boy fantasy was brought home to me in an im-
ploring letter from a man in suburban Chicago . Would I help him make
pen-pal connections with midwestern farm boys who might be interested
in hosting a city boy for a couple of days? "I love the country, and I've al-
ways wanted to have an adventure with a real cute farm boy way out there
in the loft of the barn-wake up to fresh ground coffee, scrambled eggs
with sausage, toast, and a good horse ride. I'm crazy for blond, blue-eyed
hunks." Although I could appreciate the difficulties of making satisfying
connections, I did not intend the project to serve matchmaking purposes .

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How These Stories Were Discovered XVll

Thus, I avoided interviewing men whose interest in the project appeared

to hinge greatly on the prospect of social or sexual networking possibil-
ities.
A man in Chicago wrote to say that his years on a dairy farm in Ohio
had given him "many tales to tell of sex with animals. Is this what you are
interested in? Do you want all the naughty but nice details?" He would
tell me all about it if! promised I was not with the cops . Two men in Can-
ada sent along cartoons relating to bestiality. I had no desire to avoid the
exploration of this subject, which seems to be quite strongly linked with
farm life in the popular imagination. However, I had no interest in inter-
viewing individuals whose responses to the project appeared to be entirely
salacious in nature. My preference was to involve those who evinced broader
imagination and greater thoughtfulness related to the stated themes of the
project. Overall, I was very pleased with the magnitude and caliber of the
response to my press release .
In addition to those recruited for interviews through publicity, I en-
listed a relatively small number of subjects personally. These men were gen-
erally friends or acquaintances, or strangers referred to me by people I knew.
All prospective interview subjects were sent the following letter describ-
ing the project and the interview process:

Thanks for your interest in the Gay Farm Boys Project. This cultural
research project is intended to give you-a gay man who grew up in a
farming household-a chance to talk about your experiences and the ways
in which your farm upbringing has influenced your life . I am gay, grew
up on a dairy farm , and am an experienced interviewer and writer. Your
words will be used as part of a book based on the "gay farm boys" theme .
Life stories rooted in farm childhoods have been largely neglected in
the growing literature that documents the lives of gay men in the u.s. If
you grew up on a farm-whether or not you are still farming-I welcome
your participation in changing this situation. Whatever your age and
whatever your life is about now, your story is a unique and valuable part
of gay culture.
Here are some basic details about being interviewed:

• The interview is informal, in-depth, and is meant to be a relaxed and

enjoyable experience. Please try to set aside two to three hours for it .
• We can hold the interview at your home or at some other mutually
agreeable location.
• The format and content of the interview are flexible and specific to
the individual. General areas that we are likely to cover include: child-
hood experiences; family relationships; parental values, beliefs and atti-
tudes; development of your sexual awareness, understanding and self-
acceptance; your present life situation, values, beliefs, attitudes, etc.

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XVIII How These Stories Were Discovered

• The interview will be recorded (audio, not video ) and portions of the
transcript will be used as part of a book based on the "gay farm boys"
theme.
• There is no payment for being interviewed or for any use that may be
made of the content of the interview, but your participation will be
duly acknowledged .
• If yo u desire anonymity, names and other key details of your story can
be changed . At the interview, we will come to an agreement about
these matters- on which you are free to change your mind later.
• If you would like further information , please contact me at the address
or phone number listed above .

Between the spring of 1992 and the autumn of 1993, I conducted in-
terviews with seventy-five men from rural farming backgrounds. Ages of
subjects ranged from twenty-five to eighty-four years, with men in their
twenties, thirties, and forties representing more than three-quarters of
those interviewed. All subjects were European -American, reflecting the
vastly dominant ethnic profile ofthe rural farming population in the mid-
western U.S.
Most of the men I interviewed lived in , or near, relatively large mid-
western cities and were no longer engaged in farming. This prevailing pro-
file may result from a number of factors . First, this research project was
publicized in gay and lesbian community publications centered primarily
in larger cities. In addition, a greater proportion of gay-identified men
from rural farming backgrounds may live in larger cities rather than small
cities and towns or rural areas. Further, several men living in small towns
and rural areas declined to be interviewed for reasons that appeared to
center around concern about their identities being revealed.
The men I interviewed seemed to possess a wide range of sometimes
mixed motives for agreeing to participate: they hoped that by telling their
stories they could contribute to illuminating people's minds and hearts,
thus making a positive difference for future generations; they were simply
responding enthusiastically to a project that struck them as "a great idea,"
and wanted to help out so that the project would be successful; they wanted
to tell what they considered to be interesting stories about their lives. A
self-therapeutic motive was evident in some interviews; these subjects
seemed to be influenced by a confessional or cathartic impulse to tell all,
perhaps in an effort to pull together life's loose ends and enhance their
self-understanding. It was evident, as well, that some subjects hoped that
their participation would assist them in meeting other men with similar
backgrounds, interests, and values.
Most interviews were conducted in the midwestern United States, in-

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How These Stories Were Discovered XIX

cluding the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa,

Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. One interview was held in California. Sub-
jects participated with the understanding that they would not be paid for
any use that might be made of interview material. Most interviews were
two to three hours in length, exploring many facets of the individual's life.
I was often surprised and moved by the extent to which the men I inter-
viewed seemed to make open books of their lives. I took a casual, conver-
sational, free-form approach to interviewing, letting the subject have pri-
mary influence on the structure of the interview. While the scope of my
questioning was consistent from one interview to another, the sequenc-
ing of, and relative emphasis given to, the various lines of inquiry were in-
fluenced greatly by the ways in which each subject was inclined to talk
about his own life. A summary of the major areas of inquiry follows.

CHILDHOOD BACKGROUND

• Where did you live as a child? What kind of farm was it?
• How would you describe your involvement in farm work?
In house work?
• How would you describe your childhood relationships with
your parents? With your siblings?
• Besides your parents, did any other adult playa significant role
in your childhood on a day-to-day basis?
• Where did you go to school as a child?
• Describe your playmates/friends in elementary, junior high,
and senior high school.
• Were you involved in any school-related activities in junior or
senior high school?
• Were you involved in any non-school-related activities during
junior or senior high school?
• Was there any particular place on or near the farm where you
would go to be by yourself?

FAMILY ATTITUDES, BELIEFS, VALUES

• How would you describe the beliefs/attitudes within your fam-

ily when you were a child about people who were different
from yourselves because of race, ethnicity, or religion? What
were your family's prevailing attitudes regarding gender roles,
sexuality, and homosexuality?

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xx How These Stories Were Discovered

• How would you describe the influence of church/religion on

your childhood?

COMING OUT TO SELF AND OTHERS

• When did you first become aware of your same-sex orientation?

How would you describe your reaction? Did you talk with any-
one or do anything else about it?
• Do you recall any books, magazines, movies, TV shows, or
other forms of popular information or entertainment that were
important to you in coming to understand your sexual identity?
• At any time during your childhood, did you know (or know
of) someone who was gay-and you were aware of it then?
• Did you have any intimate physical or sexual experiences while
growing up?
• How would you describe the influence of the farm culture of
your childhood on your ability to recognize and come to terms
with your sexual orientation?
• Is there any particular theory explaining the causes of homo-
sexuality that you are especially inclined to believe?
• To what extent have you come out to your parents and other
family members?
• Were you ever married?
• When did your parents and other family members learn that
you were gay? What were their reactions?
• How would you describe your current relationships with your
parents and other family members?

BEYOND COMING OUT

• Ifsubject did not stay in farming: Did you ever seriously con-
sider farming for a living? Was being gay a factor in deciding
not to farm?
• If subject stayed in farming: How does being gay fit into your
life as a farmer?
• Ifsubject has lover/partner/mate: How, when, and where did
you meet? Did he grow up on a farm? Has he gotten to know
your parents and other family members? How would you
describe his relationship with them?

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How These Stories Were Discovered xxi

• How would you describe your attitudes about intimate

relationships with men?
• How would you describe your involvement in the gay
community?
• How would you describe your political perspectives, especially
with regard to issues of concern to gay people?

GENERAL REFLECTIONS

• What are your best memories of growing up on a farm? What

are your worst?
• How would you describe the influence that your farm
upbringing has had on the character and quality of your life?
• How would you describe your current feelings about being a
gay man?
• How do you feel about the life choices you have made in light
of being gay?

The fact that all interviews were based on the same range of questions
contributes to a similarity in the topical range of these narratives. How-
ever, interview subjects differed greatly in how they responded to the in-
terview process. Some subjects seemed to be most comfortable with a very
clearly delineated question-and-answer format, and tended not to go off
on their own. Others were more self-directed in what they had to say; I
would ask a question to get things going, ask questions for follow-up or
refocusing as I was inclined, move things along occasionally with a new
line of questioning, and the subject would take it from there . These were
generally the best interviews, driven less by my questions than by the force
of the subject's narrative spontaneity.
Earnestness abounds in these stories. While the reader wi'lI find mo-
ments of humor and light-heartedness throughout this collection, many
of these stories are largely serious in tone. I believe this results from sev-
eral conditions. First, it seems likely that the more serious-minded would
choose to participate in an in-depth autobiographical interview as part of
a cultural research project, especially when they know that portions of what
they say may be published . In addition, many of those who chose to tell
their stories had some distinctly serious things to talk about. There is also
the editorial reality that humorous exchanges in conversation do not al-
ways translate effectively in print . More fundamentally, though, I believe

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XXII How These Stories Were Discovered

that many of these men were less interested in entertaining me and my

potential readers than in telling about their lives and being heard.
It was fascinating to experience the various ways in which these men
approached telling me-a stranger in most cases-about themselves. Some
men seemed to be quite comfortable talking frankly about intimate mat-
ters; others seemed nervous or embarrassed . Some were inclined to take
an orderly, linear, chronological approach in recounting the events of their
lives. (One man in his early seventies reported the exact dates of several
events of his personal development during the 1930s, including that of his
pubescence.) Other men seemed to prefer a looser, more thematic approach
to talking about their lives, which was more compatible with my style of
questioning.
Some men were quite inclined to reflect on and analyze their experi-
ences, and to talk about the emotional and psychological aspects of things.
Others were more disposed to talk about specific people, places, and events.
Most gratifying to me were those occasions when rich surface details came
accompanied by insightful analysis and reflection. The questions that
seemed to be most challenging for many subjects were two that I asked in
tandem toward the end of the interview: How would you describe your
current feelings about being a gay man? How do you feel about the life
choices you have made in light of being gay?
Somewhat less than half of the men represented in this collection used
pseudonyms, including Henry Bauer, Dennis Lindholm, James Heckman,
Norm Reed, Ronald Schoen, David Foster, Doug Edwards, Bill Troxell,
Martin Scherz, Heinz Koenig, Dale Hesterman, Everett Cooper, David
Campbell, Richard Hopkins, Lon Mickelsen, Steven Preston, and Connie
Sanders. All prospective interview subjects were informed that their names
and other identifying details would be changed if they so desired. At the
time of the interview, each subject was asked to specify the extent to which
he wished to have these things changed. Some subjects stated that a sim-
ple change of their own names would be sufficient, while others desired
a more thorough masking of identities by giving pseudonyms to other in-
dividuals mentioned by name in their interviews. If the subject desired geo-
graphical anonymity as well, the locale of his childhood was obscured by
describing it in terms of a county or general region of a state, with no spe-
cific place name . Thus, the only names that have been replaced by pseud-
onyms are those of persons, not places.
I generally did not ask any interview subject to explain either his de-
sire to have his identity concealed or his willingness to have it revealed. We
simply came to an understanding on the matter and left it at that. I took
this approach because I did not want the issue to get in the way of their
talking comfortably with me about their lives. It was apparent from the

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interviews that the desire to conceal was generally rooted in considera-

tions of personal and family privacy, as well as privacy for other individu-
als whose lives were touched on during the interviews. Also of concern to
some subjects were their employment security, personal safety, and the sen-
sitive nature of some of the things they talked about.
While I liked the idea of using real names, obtaining a candid, uncen-
sored account of these men's lives was much more important to me. In
some cases it seemed that a desire or willingness to be identified by real
name, however daring or courageous, was accompanied by a disinclina-
tion to be fully candid. Moreover, the desire or willingness to be identi-
fied by a real name did not seem to be consistent with an overall openness
about being gay in day-to-day life. Some of the men who elected to have
their stories presented pseudonymously seemed to be quite open about
being gay. Conversely, some of the men who chose to be identified by their
real names did not seem to be especially open about being gay in their
daily lives; in these cases, electing to be identified by a real name may have
been motivated by a desire to take advantage of the opportunity to come
out, in print, once and for all.
Of the seventy-five audio-taped interviews, I selected the fifty most
substantive and representative to be professionally transcribed. I then se-
lected approximately halfofthese fifty to shape into full-length narrative
chapters. Each of these interview subjects was then invited to review a draft
of his chapter, with the following instructions.

Thanks for your willingness to review the enclosed draft of your life story
as adapted from your interview. I would like you to check it for accuracy
and for speaking style. Does it reflect your way of saying things? You may
find that reading it out loud is helpful. In shaping your spoken words
into text, I have adhered to your own word choices as much as possible.
Because I try to avoid over-editing and imposing my own words on you,
this spoken-to-written transformation sometimes results in awkward
wording. I hope that you will do what you wish to fix any grammatical
awkwardness that you perceive.
I would also like you to consider whether the piece seems to be a
fairly well-rounded, balanced presentation of your life story. If there are
changes you could make that would clarify or enrich it, please do so.
Keep in mind, however, that I am not looking for you to update your
story. I want it to reflect your life as you saw it at the time of your inter-
view. With that in mind, you are welcome to expand on anything, to add
new material, or to delete material. Simply cross out any text to be
changed or deleted and write in the new text, if any. You may write any-
where on these pages or on separate sheets of paper. Using a pencil is
probably a good idea. It's likely that in most cases I will agree on the re-

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XXIV How These Stories Were Discovered

visions that you specify, but I reserve the right to leave anything un-
changed if that seems most appropriate to me .
All twenty-six subjects of these full-length chapters agreed to partici-
pate in the review process, which improved the narratives in important
ways. Most helpful was the addition of text that clarified or elaborated on
various topics that had not been covered adequately in the interview. Also
helpful were suggestions for rearranging portions of the text to enhance
flow and coherence. Some subjects made changes in wording that were
intended to soften their expressions of anger or other strong emotions or
opinions. In one narrative, for example, "It was a big, hot bitch of a day,"
got whittled down to, "It was a hot day." I believe this impulse was largely
the result of these subjects being struck by the sometimes startling force
of spoken words put down on paper. Some expressed misgivings about in-
cluding text that they decided was too intimately revealing. Since all of
the men who made these problematic revisions had elected to use pseud-
onyms, I felt comfortable disregarding any of their requested revisions
that appeared to diminish the character and substance of their narratives.
I excerpted material from many of the transcribed interviews that were
not used as the basis offull-length chapters. The most substantive of these
excerpts were also made available for review by the interview subjects, with
instructions similar to those detailed above. These excerpt narratives are
shorter than the full-length autobiographical chapters, and they typically
address a single topic or theme . While they lack the larger context of the
longer chapters, they provide concise and engaging illustrations of imp or-
tant themes that emerge in the longer chapters.
Selected quotes for use in the introductory text were excerpted from
several of the interviews that were not fully transcribed. In addition, I in-
vited all interview subjects to share with me any materials they had writ-
ten that were relevant to the focus of the project. In the cases of five in-
dividuals, portions of these autobiographical writings were woven into their
transcript-based narratives.
I have chosen to arrange these life stories according to the subject's
year of birth. This arrangement appeals to me because it acknowledges the
primacy of time and fate . Moreover, it takes advantage of the historical
perspective on American culture which many readers will bring to their
understanding of these stories. It also allows the reader to perceive more
readily the ways in which the experience of growing up gay in the rural
Midwest has and has not changed through the century.
I have divided the narratives of these men, born from 1909 to 1967,
into three groups based on the calendar years during which they came of
age (by my judgement, the period between their fifteenth and twentieth

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How These Stories Were Discovered xxv

birthdays). The oldest of these three groups includes those who came of
age anywhere between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. The middle pe-
riod comprises those who came of age from the mid-1960s to the mid-
1970s. The youngest group includes those who had their fifteenth and
twentieth birthdays anywhere between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. This
chronological framework delineates three quite distinct eras in American
mass culture with regard to the kind and amount of information about
homosexuality and gay identity accessible to midwestern farm boys. Each
of these three groups oflife stories is preceded by a description of the era.

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FARMING GLOSSARY

Farming has its own terminology, some of which may be unfamiliar. This
glossary explains the meanings of potentially unfamiliar words used in these
life stories.

Farming involves raising crops and/or livestock, and relying largely on the
use of harvested crops to feed such livestock as dairy cattle, hogs, or poul-
try. By contrast, ranching involves raising livestock-such as beef cattle,
sheep, or horses-by grazing them on large acreages of herbage, with lit-
tle or no use of harvested crops. Thus, crop production is the major ac-
tivity that distinguishes farming from ranching. Except for picking rock
and walking beans, all of the crop-growing processes described here are
done with tractor-pulled implements on most midwestern farms.

CROPS

Farmers prepare fields for planting by plowing to turn over the soil and
then harrowing to pulverize and smooth the soil for planting. If the har-
rowing implement uses disk-shaped metal blades it is called disk harrow-
ing) or simply disking. If it uses metal spikes, it is called spike harrowing) or
dragging. Once the soil in a field has been prepared, the crop is planted
using a drill or planter. This implement makes holes or furrows, deposits
the seed and sometimes fertilizer and other chemicals, and covers them
with soil. To minimize damage to equipment used in plowing, harrowing,
and planting, farmers with rocky fields sometimes have to do rock-picking
beforehand. This manual removal of rocks needs to be done from season
to season, as plowing and frost-heave bring more rocks to the surface.
Corn and soybeans have become the predominant crops in midwest-
ern farming. Many farmers rotate their planting of these two crops, grow-
ing soybeans in a particular field one year, corn the next year, and so on.
An advantage of this rotation is that soybeans improve growing conditions
for the following year's corn crop by adding nitrogen to the soil. A disad-
vantage of this rotation is that soybean fields are often infested with vol-

XXVII

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xxviii Farming Glossary

unteer corn, those plants that grow from the residue of the previous year's
corn crop. Many farmers deal with this by walking beans-enlisting all
available hands to walk through soybean fields to pull volunteer corn and
weeds. In a corn field, this weeding process can be done mechanically.
Once a corn crop has begun to grow, but is still young enough for a trac-
tor to drive over it, the field is cultivated to loosen the soil and uproot
weeds between the corn rows.
Summertime, while corn and soybean crops are growing, is time for
making hay. This dry fodder for cattle, sheep, and horses is usually a mix
of alfalfa, clover, and grasses such as timothy, orchard, or brome. First, the
hay field is cut, often with an implement called a haybine or windrower,
which leaves the cut hay in windrows. These are rows of herbage which can
be easily picked up by a baling machine after they have dried in the sun.
Use of a hay rake helps to turn the windrows over for better drying and
easier pick-up by the baling machine. Once baled, hay is often stored in a
haymow or hayloft above the level of the barn where livestock are housed
and fed.
Also during the summer, an implement called a corn chopper is used to
harvest immature corn plants, with which the silo is filled. A tall, cylin-
drical structure made of metal or concrete, the silo is sealed to exclude air
once it has been filled with chopped corn. In the absence of oxygen, the
corn is converted to silage, a succulent, fermented fodder.
Oats are usually harvested with a combine (emphasis on first syllable,
rhymes with "tom"), a large piece of machinery that is so named because
it combines in one machine two processes that had to be done separately
in earlier years-cutting and threshing the grain. Threshing means sepa-
rating the grain kernels from the stalk residue, or straw. Some farmers leave
the straw on the field, to add organic matter to the soil. Others bale it for
use as livestock bedding.
A corn picker is an implement that strips ears of mature corn from the
corn stalk, but leaves the kernels of corn on the cob. This ear corn may
then be stored in a corn crib, a ventilated storage building. The dry corn
stalk residue is often harvested in chopped form for use as livestock bed-
ding. Mature corn and soybeans are also harvested with the use of a com-
bine, which strips the corn kernels from the cob or the beans from the
pod. These harvests may be stored on-farm for use as livestock feed, or
may be hauled to a commercial grain elevator for storage or sale.

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Farming Glossary XXIX

LIVESTOCK

Common breeds of cattle in midwestern dairy farming are Holstein (large,

black and white), Guernsey (grayish brown and white), and Jersey (small,
yellowish brown). Angus is a common breed of beef cattle. Among cattle,
a bull is an adult, uncastrated male; a steer is a male that has been castrated
before sexual maturity, for beef production. A cow is an adult female; a heifer
is a young cow that has not yet had her first calf. Many farmers use arti-
ficial insemination for breeding cattle. Semen is collected by a breeding
service and frozen for later use, allowing farmers to do selective breeding
without direct use of bulls. Breeding over many generations within a sin-
gle breed produces purebred cattle, which may be registered with a breed
association. Registered purebred dairy cattle have value as breeding stock
in addition to their milk production value.
Milk from dairy herds is either grade A) for use as fluid milk, or grade
B, for making cheese, butter, ice cream, and other dairy products. Health
and sanitation standards are higher for grade A herds. On grade A farms,
bacterial growth is inhibited in various ways, including spreading pulver-
ized limestone (barn lime) on the floor of the dairy barn, and by period-
ically whitewashing the barn's walls and ceiling with an application oflime
solution.
On some dairy farms, cows are milked while stanchioned in rows . The
stanchion is a device that fits loosely around a cow's neck, restricting her
movement in the stall. Behind the row of cows is a gutter to collect their
excrement. Milking is more automated on some farms; cows walk through
a dairy parlor for milking, and their milk is piped from the milking ma-
chine to a refrigerated bulk tank in the milk house. A milkman who works
for a dairy cooperative or milk processing plant collects milk from bulk
tanks on a number of farms . Earlier in this century, cow's milk was often
put through a cream separator on the farm-a machine that instantly sep-
arated the cream or butterfat portion of whole milk from the nonfat por-
tion . The cream was then put in jars and sold.
Among hogs, a boar is an adult, uncastrated male; a barrow is a male
that has been castrated before sexual maturity, for pork production. A sow
is an adult female; a gilt is a young sow that has not yet had her first litter
of pigs. It is common for the hog farmer to have afarrowing barn in which
sows give birth to and nurse their litters in individual pens. Feeder pigs are
weaned pigs that eat corn and other feed until they reach market size.
Among draft animals, a stallion is an adult, uncastrared male horse. A
mare is an adult female horse . A mule is a hybrid between a female horse
(mare) and a male ass (jackass).

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Farm Boys

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Iowa Farm, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Jim Cross

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 Introduction

I HAVE VIEWED this work of inquiry as "research" only in the broad-

est sense of the word. I have not sought to quantify anything, nor to prove
or disprove anything. My aim has been simply to collaborate with gay men
in telling about their lives, and to assist the reader in understanding what
these men have to say. This chapter describes midwestern farming and farm
culture, and offers some generalizations about the experiences and per-
spectives represented in this collection oflife stories. It is not intended as
a summary of definitive conclusions, but simply as a background against
which to regard the individual narratives.

FARMING

Midwestern farming has changed greatly during the twentieth century.

In the early 1900s, farms were smaller, more numerous, and more diver-
sified in their production. The typical midwestern farm of that era had a
variety of livestock and crops, including work horses or mules, dairy and
beef cattle, hogs, chickens, corn, hay, wheat, fruits, and garden vegetables.
These farms provided most of their own subsistence needs in addition to
producing goods for commercial markets.
Technology brought many changes to farming. From the 1920s to the
1950s, work horses and mules were replaced by gasoline-powered trac-
tors. Electrical power became available to the majority offarmers from the
mid-1930s through the 1950s. The use of hybrid seed and synthetic fer-
tilizers proliferated during this century, as did the use of chemicals to con-
trol weeds and insect pests. These technological changes made greater mech-
anization possible, meaning that fewer farmers could farm more land more
efficiently. Consequently, the number of farms declined and fa'rm size in-
creased as smaller farms were consolidated into fewer, larger operations
using larger machinery.
To meet the market demands of an increasingly urbanized population,
midwestern farms became more specialized as they became larger. Today,
many farms produce only one kind of crop or livestock and even the farms
that remain small and diversified have become more specialized. Hogs and
beef cattle are of primary importance in midwestern livestock farming, fol-
lowed by dairy cattle, poultry, and lamb. Crop farming in the Midwest

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4 Introduction

has come to be dominated by corn and soybeans, thanks to lots of level

land, fertile soil, and a warm, moist growing season. Secondary crops are
hay, oats, grain sorghum (milo), barley, flaxseed, rapeseed, rye, sugar beets,
and wheat. As climate, soil conditions, topography, and market access vary
throughout the Midwest, so does the variety of crops grown in any par-
ticular area.
The men whose stories are presented here grew up on farms that were
extremely varied, reflecting not only regional differences within the Mid-
west, but also changes in farming during this century. Some of the farms
on which they lived were relatively small operations that represented only
a portion of the family's livelihood; one or both parents worked at off-
farm jobs as well. Other farms were larger operations that were the family's
sole livelihood. Some farms were family-owned, others were rented. Some
farms were specialized, but most had some mixture of animals and crops.
On farms that specialized in grains, with little or no livestock, spring and
fall tended to be exceptionally busy times, as the crops were planted and
harvested. Summer and winter were much less busy. On farms that raised
animals as well as the crops to feed them, work demands were more consis-
tent from one time of year to the next. Farm animals, especially dairy cat-
tle, guaranteed the daily grind of chores-feeding, milking, and cleaning.

COMMUNITY

In the early decades of the twentieth century, midwestern farming was an

enterprise that relied heavily on relationships with neighbors and kin. Since
then, it has become a highly individualized and mechanized enterprise.
Technological changes beyond those related to farming methods have con-
tributed greatly to this change. Automobiles, all-weather roads and high-
speed highways, telephone, radio, and television have reduced the cultural
insularity of farm communities. In doing so, they have eroded the differ-
ences between rural and urban life, contributing to a "suburbanization"
of farm life.
A technology-induced decline in the rural population has been a major
force in the disintegration of rural communities . The closing of rural and
village churches and businesses, the demise of one-room country schools,
the consolidation of school districts and the bussing of children to towns
and cities all represent the loss of institutions central to community life.
And as farming operations have become larger, farmers have spread out
over the countryside, impeding neighborly relations .

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Introduction 5

These kinds of changes were lamented by Martin Scherz, who grew up

on a small, diversified livestock and crop farm in southeastern Nebraska.
In the area where I was raised, the old patterns of farming are disappear-
ing year by year. You don't see nearly as much pasture and livestock. All
you see is corn and soybeans, anymore. I don't like the direction that
farming has taken, the increased industrialization and reliance on corpo-
rate power and corporate structure . Bigger farms might mean more pro-
duction, but the cost in human lives is far too great to be a good thing.
We've lost a lot of the independence of small communities such as the
one I come from. For the most part, they continue on a blind descent
into some kind of modern hell. The patterns of rural life have disinte-
grated into a cheap imitation of suburban life. The kids are involved in
the same shit that the urban and suburban kids are. They don't have
much of a sense of community anymore. They lose their grocery store,
they become just a collection of old people living off what years they have
left and wondering what their kids are up to a thousand miles away.
There's a center of life that has disappeared, and I'm not sure what any-
body can do about it anymore. Bring in some Amish? I tend to be a ro-
mantic, I guess. The Amish have a good way of life in many ways, and a
lot of people could learn a lot of things from societies like that . I admire
them, although I recognize that Amish culture can be oppressive to non -
conformists.
Though Martin Scherz's sentiments about the disintegration of rural
communities echo my own, I am struck by the irony of this perspective.
As Martin observes with regard to the Amish, an openly gay identity-of
the sort that I have embraced in one fashion or another all of my adult
life-is essentially incompatible with traditional farm culture, where gen -
der roles tend to be tightly defined and enforced. Thus, it seems that the
possibilities of coming out relatively easily and even ofliving quite openly
as a gay man in a farming community have been enhanced as the integrity
of rural communities has been diminished.
In "suburbanized" farm communities you are not likely to know your
neighbors very well, so you are less likely to be concerned with what they
think about you . You probably consider your hand-picked social network
oflike-minded people to be your community, so the influence of the con-
formist impulse in your rural neighborhood is lessened . You are probably
exposed to, and identify substantially with, the urban culture by way of
the mass media, so that the potential insularity and homogeneity of rural
life are diminished. You are more likely to see farming as a business than
as a way of life, so the social conventions of farming culture lose some of
their authority.
The influence of rural community is illustrated by comparing and con-

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6 Introduction

trasting the experiences of Steve Gay and Todd Ruhter. Steve was born in
1959 and grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. Todd, born in 1967, grew
up on a Nebraska ranch. Both were raised in German families and in pre-
dominantly German communities, both came of age between the mid-
1970s and mid-1980s, and both went to college. But the ways in which
they had accommodated being gay in their daily lives differed greatly. Steve
Gay and his lover, Jim, lived just up the road from his parents' place, on
their own farm. Steve talked about his decision to be openly gay in a con-
servative farming community, despite estrangement from his parents and
siblings.
I guess it's just the strong-willed part of me that some people have and
some don't. You've got to say, hey, my life is going to be what [want, it's
going to make me happy. If other people don't want to contribute to that,
well, then they won't. If they can't handle it, that's too bad. It takes a lot
of will and self-determination to go against your family and friends-to
make people see you differently than they used to.
At the time of our interview, Todd Ruhter was getting ready to move
from Omaha back to his home ranch, to take care of the cattle for several
months while his father recuperated from surgery. Because he had made
large financial investments in the ranch and expected to have the chance
to take it over when his father retired, Todd expressed great ambivalence
about telling his parents that he is gay.
I'm not out with my family... . Whenever they're ready to hear, which
may never happen, they can hear. I don't have any problem with telling
them . . .. But even if! thought they might be ready, I'm not sure I trust
my judgment enough, considering what they have of mine financially,
and how they could really hurt me . They are the keystone of my physical
safety and my ability to interact in the community where I grew up ... .
[And] to make sure I never told anybody at home would be the ultimate
damage control for them, because for anybody there to find out would
theoretically destroy the business for them and destroy the way they're
treated in town. I understand and respect that.
Both Steve and Todd had maintained close ties with the rural com-
munities of their childhood in ways that suited the idiosyncrasies and ex-
igencies of their own lives. Todd's approach hinged on his attraction to
farming as a way of life, and his stated belief that "Where I came from is
as important as what I am ." Steve's credo seemed to be a transposition of
that, the sense that what I am is as important as where I came from . Above
all, Steve said, "My life is going to be what I want ." In contrast, Todd had
decided it was important that he go along with appearing to be what his
family and home community wanted him to be-for the sake of family

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Introduction 7

and community relations, investments, inheritance, and his future in ranch-

ing. For Todd, at age twenty-five, fitting into the rural community that
he still thought of as home was more important than living openly as a
gay man according to the model defined by urban gay culture .

ETHNICITY

As their surnames reveal, more than half of the men whose stories are pre-
sented here are of at least partial German heritage. This is consistent with
the ethnic composition of the rural Midwest, which was settled during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by two main groups, Yan-
kees and Germans. For well over a century now, the ethnic mosaic of this
region has been dominated by these two groups.
The Yankees were native-born Americans who had British Protestant
ancestry. Following the frontier, they migrated to the Midwest from their
homelands in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic states. Close on their
heels were the Germans, new immigrants to the u.s. from Catholic and
Protestant areas in Germany. Scandinavian immigrants from Denmark, Fin-
land, Norway, and Sweden also established themselves as midwestern farm-
ers during this era, with cultures that tended to be more Germanic than
Yankee in character.
The distinct differences between Yankee and German farming cultures
have been described by Sonya Salamon in her book, Prairie Patrimony.
I have drawn on Salamon's work in the characterizations presented here,
and illustrate her generalities with quotes from the life stories presented
in this volume.
Compared to the Yankees, German farmers were strongly communal-
istic. They maintained a strong ethnic identity and very tight, kin-oriented
social networks that were closed to outsiders. "We were very insular," Mar-
tin Scherz said of his German farm community in Nebraska. "A lot of
the people were from the same villages in Germany and were all related
for the most part .... Most of the community was Lutheran." Church and
community were synonymous in German culture; the social and religious
functions of the church were equally important . Children were raised to
be obedient. Everyone tended to know everyone else's business and a steady
stream of gossip and criticism helped to maintain conformity. There was
little tolerance for diversity or nonconformity.
"There was prejudice and bigotry all over the place," said James Heck-
man of his German farm community in Indiana.

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8 Introduction

My grandmother thought the black stuff on black people would rub off,
so she wouldn't shake hands with one. And you had to beware of the
Jews and the Japs. There was a young girl in the area who went off to
school in Chicago, and when she married a black guy her family dis-
owned her. A good friend of our family said, "I could bury a child before
I could accept that," and my parents agreed how terrible it was.

German farmers tended to be industrious, earnest, frugal, conserva-

tive, and slow to change their traditional farming practices. It was com-
mon for all family members, male and female, to be intensively involved in
the farming operation. In Dennis Lindholm's view, "We very rarely did
anything other than work . . .. [Dad] never slept beyond 4:00, and was up
and gone by the time we got up, so we had to go out and help." Because
family identity was very closely tied to the land, German parents did what
they could to ensure that their farm would grow and prosper in succeed-
ing generations. To this end, they reared their children-sons in particu-
lar-for commitment to farming.
Many a successful German patriarch "colonized" his rural neighbor-
hood by acquiring adjacent farms for his sons to operate once they were
married and raising families. Salamon tells of an eighty-five-year-old farmer
who recalled, "I went into the service for four years and when I came back,
I really wasn't so sure I wanted to be a farmer. But my dad told me that
he'd raised me to be a farmer and that's what he wanted me to do . Ger-
man fathers have a real influence on their sons. What else could I do?"
(Salamon, p. 101).
Unlike the Germans, for whom the perpetuation of their farms and
farming methods represented cultural continuity, the Yankees tended to
take a more entrepreneurial and capitalistic approach. They saw farming as
a business and land as a commodity; they farmed in order to make a profit
and to increase the value of the farm. In comparison to the more tra-
ditional Germans, Yankees valued innovation in farming methods and
equipment .
Yankee farmers were strongly individualistic and their communities
more loosely organized . Their ethnicity was not so central to their iden-
tity. Households belonged to individualized social networks that were not
necessarily kinship-based, and one's kin were often divided among dif-
ferent churches. The religious function of church was far more important
than the social. Yankee children were raised to be more individualistic and
autonomous, and the loose-knit community enhanced tolerance of diver-
sity and unconventional behavior. Gossip and criticism were less impor-
tant than among Germans as agents of conformity. Upon reaching adult-
hood, Yankee children were expected to distance themselves from their

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Introduction 9

parents' authority, leave their childhood homes, and find their own way
in the world. Consequently, the Yankee farmer was less likely than the Ger-
man to pressure a son to take over the family farm.
The sharpness of this Yankee/German contrast has been eroded dur-
ing this century, as various factors have led to a blending of these cultures.
Nonetheless, it seems likely that these differences in farming culture would
lead to different experiences for gay farm boys growing up in families
dominated by Yankee or German values. Considering the German culture's
greater emphasis on shaping oneself to conform to the expectations of oth-
ers' it seems reasonable to assume that growing up in a German family
would have been particularly problematic for a gay male. First, being gay
would not satisfy rigorous family and community standards. In addition,
since sons generally succeed fathers in taking over farms, fitting into the
rural community and assuring the continuity of the family farm depends
on marrying and having children. This could only intensify marital and
reproductive imperatives in the coming-of-age experience of farm boys,
especially those who have no brothers.
James Heckman became an only son as the result of his older brother's
death as a child. With the collaboration of his parents and extended fam-
ily, James did his best to fill his dead brother's shoes throughout child-
hood and well into adulthood. He sought to pattern his own identity after
that of his idealized brother. At age twenty-seven, assured by a Catholic
priest that he would grow into it, James married a woman because "she
seemed to be the type of woman [my brother] might have married. And
because my brother would have had children, I had children. There was a
time when I thought of my own children as my brother's children." James's
attempted suicide, psychiatric hospitalization, and coming out in his mid-
thirties helped to end that role-playing era of his life.
In a less traumatic way, Joe Shulka's experience also exemplifies the
pressure exerted by traditional farming parents on their sons. As an only
son, Joe's decision not to go into farming created much disappointment
and strife with his parents.
[Dad] bought the farm from his father, and as soon as he had a son he
figured it was going to continue on for generations .... [Now,] with
Dad planning to sell the farm, there's a lot of people who are looking on
it as a real loss, because he's been at it for fifty years in the same place,
and the farm has really changed under him. I feel some guilt, but I think
Dad and Mom have come to terms with the fact that I've chosen a life of
my own.
Yankee parents were less likely to pressure a son to take over the fam-
ily farm, even if they would have liked to see him do so. My own expe-

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10 Introduction

rience illustrates this dynamic, though, unlike James Heckman and Joe
Shulka, I am not an only son. As a child I was very involved in the work
of the farm, but much less than my brother, who has since taken over the
homestead. Although my brother and I knew that we had the option of
farming for a living, we were not raised to be farmers in the characteristic
German fashion. It was always evident to us that our parents encouraged
us to find our own paths in life. Finding out that being gay was part of
my path has not been easy for my parents, but their disappointment over
my not marrying and fathering children has not been accompanied by dis-
tress about the family farm's continuity.
My own upbringing was consistent with the Yankee profile in other
ways as well. My extended family was large, but kinship connections were
not tight; each nuclear family functioned as a discrete entity, with their
own church affiliations and social networks. This is in marked contrast to
the experience of Todd Ruhter, who grew up with a younger brother in a
German Lutheran family in Nebraska. "My uncles and grandparents could
discipline us just like my mother and father could. Everybody and every-
thing was community property." Also, although I grew up in a commu-
nity that included families of varied European heritage, I was essentially
oblivious to ethnicity throughout childhood . Only as an adult did I come
to realize that many of the surnames of my home community were of En-
glish, Irish, German, and Norwegian origin. Until then, they had been sim-
ply American.

GENDER ROLES

In most cases, growing up on a farm presented these boys with two quite
distinct, gender-based spheres of work activity-farmwork and housework.
Farmwork was largely the male's domain. It extended from the livestock
in the barns and pastures to the crops in the fields, and to the mainte-
nance and repair of farm machinery and vehicles. Housework was largely
the female's domain, typically extending from the house to the garden.
On some farms, caring for the chickens and milk cows was also seen as
women's work, most often when these were relatively small operations.
Until the 1950s, the sale of cream, eggs, and poultry by farm women was
often an important supplement to farm income. As boys, several of the
men I interviewed had been involved in raising and caring for chickens,
with a particular interest in exotic breeds.
Any overlap or flexibility of male and female duties tended to occur
most often in the gardens and barns, and least often in the houses, fields,

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Introduction 11

and machine shops. But what was considered appropriate work for males
and females varied by region, community, and family. In Todd Ruhter's
experience, "There was the wife's role and the husband's role, and the only
time they mixed was when the wife was helping the husband."
With few exceptions, the boys whose stories are presented here fit a
common profile with regard to their involvement in farmwork. They gen-
erally sought to avoid fieldwork and the repair and maintenance of farm
machinery and vehicles. This was typically attributed to an inherent "me-
chanical disability" and to the dusty, dirty, boring nature of driving ma-
chinery back and forth in the fields. Martin Scherz fit this profile, and
felt deficient as a result .
I felt like a damn fumbling idiot around farm machinery. My 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.

Dean Gray, born in 1962, grew up on a small dairy farm in central Wis-
consin. Even in his preschool years, his attraction to animal husbandry
was strong.
There were lots of mechanical things on the farm that I was no help with ,
but I could handle the record-keeping and I loved taking care of the ani-
mals, which included delivering lots of calves. When I was four years old,
we had a calf! named Todd. No one else knew he had a name. One
morning I was in the barn and found out Todd was to be sold. I refused
to go in the house for breakfast. Overwrought and crying, I stood in
front of each cow in the barn and sang a song to each one-thirty-some
songs I made up, looking for comfort.
To the extent that these boys were attracted to any aspect of farmwork,
it was generally the care, feeding, and breeding oflivestock and the clean-
ing and maintenance of these animals' shelters that they found most ap-
pealing and satisfying. This sort of work is essentially the "housework" of
the farm. Mter a housekeeping apprenticeship with his mother in his early
years, David Foster was expected to join his father and older brothers in
doing some of the farm chores. "What I did, I did very well. I've always
been a very thorough person, very organized and clean. I did farmwork
that way too, cleaning the barn and sweeping the feed into the cribs .. . .
My mother would say, 'David's the only one that sweeps it that clean. '"
The degree of rigidity with which the boundaries of gender- based work
roles were enforced varied greatly among the families represented here . In
most cases, enforcement tended to be especially strong for males. For fe-

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12 Introduction

males, things were more ambiguous and fluid. It was far more common
for wives and daughters to do work related to livestock and crops, when
their help was needed, than for husbands and sons to do housework, no
matter how badly their help was needed. But it was common for everyone
in the family, regardless of gender, to be involved in certain seasonal tasks
requiring a large number of hands, such as "walking beans"-walking be-
tween rows of soybeans and pulling out weeds and unwanted "volunteer"
corn sprouting from the residue of the previous year's crop.
A large majority of my subjects identified more closely with, and gen-
erally had richer and more satisfying relationships with, their mothers and
other females than with their fathers and other males. With few excep-
tions, these boys tended to have a stronger inclination to work in the house
and garden than to do farmwork. The extent to which they were allowed
to indulge this domestic preference varied widely. In some cases it was wel-
comed, or at least it provoked no criticism or disapproval. Other boys, while
not forbidden or discouraged from engaging in such activities as house-
cleaning, cooking, baking, sewing, gardening, canning, and freezing, had
little time for these preferred domestic tasks because of the extent to which
they were required to help with farmwork. In other cases, the boys were
admonished or ridiculed as "sissies," most often by fathers, brothers, and
other male relatives. From a young age, James Heckman learned to shun
"girl stuff."
Often I wished I could be at my mother's side to cook and bake and sew,
but in German Catholic farm families only girls did those things. When
we would go visiting, I was very interested in how the house was deco-
rated, what type of food was on the table, how well-dressed they were .
Needlework, knitting and crocheting fascinated me, and I really wanted
to do them. But had I done them, I would have been ridiculed for being
such a sissy. My uncle would have started it and it would have spread out
from there. Even my grandfather would say, "Oh, you don't want to do
that. That's girl stuff."
The degree to which rigid gender roles extended beyond the realms of
work varied widely among families. Some boys were free to pursue their
own interests, however unconventional, as long as they did the farmwork
that was expected of them. Other boys found themselves bound by gen-
der-based expectations in all arenas, even the make-believe play of early
childhood . Terry Bloch, born in 1948 and raised on a crop and livestock
farm in southwestern Minnesota, described an early message that had an
enduring impact.
When I was reallittie, playing with my sister and cousins, I would dress
up like Annie Oakley. I'd put on a skirt over my jeans and cowboy boots,

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Introduction 13

and even had socks for boobs. My mom said, "Your dad doesn't like it
when you dress up like that ." The message was that I was not to be femi-
nine and I was not to play the feminine role . I was to be masculine,
butch. On the other hand, there was nothing wrong with a girl being a
tomboy and holding her own. There was nothing wrong with my sisters
driving a tractor, milking cows; my dad made us all work equally hard.
But my sisters were expected to be girls and I was expected to be a boy. I
tried to excel at sports, dated girls, and stayed in the closet, playing the
butch role.
By marrying and fathering children, Terry continued to play the role that
was expected of him. David Nordstrom, born in 1942 and raised on a
small farm in southwestern Wisconsin, reflected on the role that his up-
bringing led him to assume .
Where I grew up, men were men and women were women and there re-
ally wasn't anything in between. Geared toward being strong, silent and
tough, I accumulated lots oflayers as I went along. I didn't feel tough at
all, but I certainly created a veneer for myself, and that's been a wall, for
me and for other people who have tried to communicate with me. I've
been through some real tough times-an insane drinking career and in-
sane relationships-and at forty-nine years of age I'm finally growing up
and feeling some pride in myself.
Like Terry Bloch and David Nordstrom, many of these men grew up
in families where gender-role enforcement was especially rigid and con-
trary to their inherent natures. In most cases, this gender-rigidity seemed
to lead them to make more drastic efforts to deny or avoid their homo-
sexuality. Common manifestations of this kind of response included get-
ting married, having suicidal tendencies, and becoming immersed in reli-
gious pursuits. In contrast, the boy who was able to create and maintain
a reasonably comfortable gender-identity niche that suited his own nature
tended to have less difficulty in acknowledging and accepting the essen-
tial difference of his sexual identity.
Todd Moe, born in 1962, grew up on a small farm in east-central Min-
nesota. He found something of an alternative role model in the person of
an elderly neighbor woman.
Minnie was an old maid, very manly in her dress, who lived her entire life
on the farm where she was born. Whenever we went to her place to buy
eggs, her house was as neat as a pin and her kitchen always had the smell
of something freshly baked. She was very warm and had a distinctive, con-
tagious laugh. She enjoyed chatting with my dad as much as with my
mom. We sort of adopted Minnie as an aunt or grandmother. In one sense
people probably thought, "How strange, living all by herself," but she was

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14 Introduction

well-liked and respected by the neighboring farmers . She knew a lot about
farm life and about the area . I really admired the respect that she com-
manded, and I sometimes thought that I would like to live like she did.
Many of these boys sought to strengthen their feelings of fitting in
and being worthwhile, even though they didn't fit the conventional gen-
der-role picture very well, by striving to be "the best little boy in the world."
This common pattern of response to feelings of being a misfit was illus-
trated by author John Reid, who used the phrase as the title of his account
of growing up gay, published in 1973. Typical elements of this "best little
boy" response included exceptionally obedient and mature relations with
parents and other elders, an earnest commitment to farm and household
work responsibilities, above-average performance in school and other off-
farm activities, and a devotion to religious belief and church involvement
that often exceeded that of the parents. Richard Kilmer's experience was
characteristic of this response.
From my earliest memory, I knew I was gay, so I always had this part of
me that I had to hide . I thought if people knew, they would never think
I was this wonderful person, so I overcompensated by being a dutiful
son-getting good grades, being polite, not drinking, doing the things I
was supposed to, going to church and being the altar boy. I felt it wasn't
fair that my mother would be out working on the farm and then she
would have to come in and cook the meal while everybody else sat
around. So I became her helpmate, setting the table and doing those
kinds of things, even as I got older.

ISOLATION AND FREEDOM

The freedom to get away on their own in the large, open spaces of the
farm had great positive significance for many of these boys. For many of
them as well, this freedom was accompanied by isolation from social con-
tact with people outside their own families. The degree of isolation varied
greatly, determined not only by the farm's location in relation to neigh-
bors and the nearest village or town, but also by the modes oftransporta-
tion available and by the parents' attitudes toward the value of activities
that would afford their children social contact.
Some boys were tied relentlessly to work responsibilities throughout their
growing-up years; others had relatively few work responsibilities and were
able to participate in outside activities quite freely. Some parents made an ef-
fort to overcome the geographical isolation of farm life for their children.
Other parents, it seemed, were attracted to farming because it afforded a large

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Introduction 15

degree of social isolation, which may have been consistent with their own na-
tures and what they considered appropriate for their children. For the boys
who were most isolated, the influence of home life was inevitably intensified.
Most of these boys lived in rural communities that were very homo-
geneous with regard to racial, ethnic, and religious heritage. Racism, re-
ligious intolerance, and a general suspicion of strangers were quite preva-
lent . Nonetheless, Tom Lewis said, "It was broadening to have grown up
on a farm, which is ironic because I wasn't exposed to great diversity there ."
Tom, who grew up in northern Illinois and now lives in Chicago, attrib-
uted this broadening influence to having established a strong connection
with the natural world, and having developed an appreciation for "the bal-
ance between humans, animals, and plants."
One of the fundamental characteristics of farming is that it deals with
living, growing things and with the cycles of nature. The lack of human
diversity in the social experiences of many of these boys appears to have
been offset to some extent by their rich experience of the diversity of the
nonhuman world. Essentially, the often subconscious message that many
of them seemed to get from observing the inherent variability in animals
and plants, both on the farm and in the wild, was that being different was
unusual, sometimes strange, but very much a part oflife nonetheless. This
impression helped some of these boys accept the different sort of male they
sensed themselves to be.
Wayne Belden, who grew up on a dairy farm in northwestern Illinois
and now lives in Chicago, described what he considered to be an effect of
the social isolation of farm life.
In the city, your main reference point is people . You tend to think that
everything that's holding you back or moving you forward has some-
thing to do with other people. When you make your living dealing with
the cycles of nature, you know that there are other reference points out-
side human society and that you can't control everything.

A number of these men suggested that the isolation they experienced

both hindered and helped them in coming to recognize and understand
their differentness. While they missed out on the kind of information, per-
spective, and social experience that they may have had access to in a town
or city, the potentially devastating expectations and ridicule of their peers
were also avoided or diminished. Like many of these men, Everett Cooper
experienced a lot of pressure to conform to standards of masculinity that
prevailed in junior high and high school.
If I 'd had an inordinate amount of teasing on any given day, I would get
real melancholy, and would sometimes go out in the woods to cry or to

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16 Introduction

fight things out inside myself. And I enjoyed riding my horse in the
openness and expanse of the fields . It was almost a gift to be able to get
away and think my own thoughts-to ride free and unrestrained. I often
wondered if my school friends in town were ever able to get away from
everything and get in touch with themselves .
In the relative isolation of the farm, some of these boys were better able
to avoid peer pressure and invent themselves according to their own in-
clinations and standards. Jim Cross believed that because his childhood
was so uncluttered, he was able to focus on the blossoming of his own in-
dividuality. The isolation of his growing-up years made it possible for him
to create his own frame of reference, his own gender identity.
These stories do not suggest that there was necessarily less pressure to
conform to expected gender roles on the farm than in town. They do sug-
gest, however, that if these boys were going to have any success in creat-
ing and maintaining their own unconventional gender-identity niches, they
were more likely to do so in the arena of the immediate family than in the
larger community. As Barney Dews observed, "An eccentric is a person in
your own family; a freak is in someone else's." With a few exceptions, fam-
ilies tended to be more accommodating of these boys' differentness than
were peers in the larger community, most often encountered at schoo!.
Donald Freed grew up on a farm near the small town of Loomis, in south-
central Nebraska. "In school, I was branded both a sissy and a smarty, and
that persisted all the way through high school. Thank god I grew up out-
side of town and not in it!"
"Growing up on the farm, if you don't want to deal with anybody out-
side of your own family, you don't have to," said Allen Victor. He was born
in 1955, the oldest of six children on a 160-acre crop farm near Sleepy
Eye, in south-central Minnesota. "It was a pretty blissfully ignorant exis-
tence, and I was free to be who I was . We were raised to be independent,
to think for ourselves-'Who cares what the neighbors think? They don't
have to live your life . You have to do what you feel is right for yourself.'
That came through real strong from my mom."

SEXUALITY

In her book, Lettersfrom the Country, Carol Bly mused on "Scandinavian-

American sexual chill" in the prairie country of western Minnesota.
As your eye sweeps this landscape you can see five or six farmers'
"groves" (windbreaks around the farmhouses ). At dawn and dusk the
groves look like the silent, major ships of someone else's navy, standing

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Introduction 17

well spaced, well out to sea. When I came out here ... on my first visit,
we drove in the evening . The bare bulbs were lighted in the passing
fa rmyards. The barn lights were on for chores . I remember saying, "How
marvelous to think of night on this gigantic prairie- all the men and
women making love in their safe houses guarded by the gloomy groves!
Who wants to think of anyone making love in Los Angeles- but how
great to think of it in these cozy farmhouses!" The reply was: "That's
what you think!" (pp. 1- 2)
It is a fairly common and sensible thing for people from urban back-
grounds to assume that farm folks regard sex with a fairly comfortable mat-
ter-of-factness. Mter all, sex is central to raising livestock, and the livestock
usually do it in broad daylight. Nonetheless, in the experience of most of
these boys-Scandinavian-American or not-the blunt reality of sex among
the farm animals did not translate into open, comfortable attitudes about
human sexuality. In some cases, it appeared that even sex among farm an-
imals was seen as a bad influence. Several of these boys were forbidden to
watch the breeding of horses or cattle, and John Berg was reprimanded
harshly when, at age seven or eight, his father found him engrossed in ob-
serving a boar mounting a sow.
On the other hand, John Beutel's mother was probably like many par-
ents in her belief that sufficient sex education was afforded by observing
breeding among farm animals and pets. A large majority of these boys re-
ceived no sex education from their parents and very little at school. Access
to other sources of information about sex varied greatly among these boys,
with generally greater access for those who came of age in more recent
decades. From Lon Mickelsen's perspective, sexuality was held in an un-
dercurrent. Tom Lewis suggested that "sexuality was kind of like God-
you believed in it, but you didn't talk about it." In fact, God and sex were
closely connected, as religious influences appeared to be a major factor in
fostering sexual prudishness among conservative farm families . Silverstein
commented on the role of the church in his 1981 book, Man to Man : Gay
Couples in America.
Sex is not yet an idea whose time has come in the heartland .. .. The
churches teach generalized guilt concerning all feelings of sexuality....
The force of religion and the lack of alternatives in the heartland have
unquestionably prevented many gay men from experiencing their homo-
sexuality and in some cases prevented them from awareness of it until
later years (pp. 324- 25).
Many of these men believed that growing up on a farm hindered the
development of their understanding of human sexuality in general. And
no matter when they began to sense something different about their own

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18 Introduction

sexuality, many of them believed that their farm upbringing hindered their
ability to recognize, understand, and come to terms with their homosex-
ual orientation. "In that farm environment, it's like I was in hibernation
as to who I really was sexually," Robert Peters observed. Lon Mickelsen
elaborated on that idea.
It took longer to come to grips with being gay growing up on a farm,
not so much because of the homophobia but because of the absence of
homosexuality in that culture. It's not that homosexuality was frowned
upon. It simply didn't exist. There were never any strong overtones about
it being wrong, because it was never discussed.
This invisibility of homosexuality is not unique to farm communities,
but it was probably enhanced by isolation, religious conservatism, and sex-
ual prudishness. Further, the mixture of antipathy and fascination with
which many farm people regard urban life seems to foster the belief that
homosexuality is an unnatural phenomenon of the city that has no rele-
vance to rural life . The silence surrounding homosexuality was compounded
for a large majority of these boys by the fact that they were not aware of
knowing any homosexual person throughout their growing-up years. Sil-
verstein stated his impressions of a rural-urban difference.
Repression of the homosexual identity appears more successful in the
boondocks of America and in many of the small- to medium-sized cities
of the South, the Southwest, and Midwest. Especially in the heartland of
America, it's possible for men to reach age twenty or more before becom-
ing aware of their homosexual needs; this is quite different from the case
in larger cities in which some men make a decision to suppress and refuse
their homosexuality. Men who have married without knowing they were
gay live everywhere, but are probably less prevalent in the largest cities
than elsewhere (pp. 322-23).
As with information about sex in general, access to information about
homosexuality varied greatly, with generally greater access for those who
came of age in more recent decades. For example, the June 26, 1964, issue
of Life magazine carried a ground-breaking feature story, "Homosexual-
ity in America," that was an important source of information for two of
these individuals, one as a teenager and the other as a married man. Mag-
azines, newspapers, and books appeared to have been most significant, with
television having great importance for those who came of age between the
mid -1970s and mid-1980s. Nonetheless, many of these boys made no par-
ticular effort to obtain information about homosexuality, and many who
did make an effort tended to come up short. Dale Hesterman perused a
health book that his parents had in the house. "The section on homosex-

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Introduction 19

uality talked about studies that had been done, and one had found that
men whose right testicle hung lower than the left were more prone to ho-
mosexuality. I looked at mine and, doggone it, the right one was lower
than the left."
For some, their ignorance was likely to have increased the chances that
they would believe, as David Nordstrom did, that "to wind up being a
queer was the worst thing I could think of." However, it's unlikely that
much of the information that was available before the 1970s would have
led any of them to a more favorable conclusion.
Some of these men, as boys, did not seem to need information about
homosexuality in order to feel okay about themselves. Although Harry
Beckner did not think of himself as homosexual during his adolescent years,
he accepted his attraction to other males as a natural thing because he felt
it to be so central a part of who he was. Nearly all of these men believed
that they were essentially born with a homosexual orientation. The few
who diverged from this perspective believed that their attraction to other
males was fostered, at least in part, by receiving too little affectionate at-
tention from their fathers and other males. Several men speculated that
their fathers may have had strong but conflicted homosexual tendencies.
More than one man wondered if his father's distance and lack of affection
was the result of discomfort at seeing "gay" characteristics in his son.
The assumption that farm people are more comfortable and freewheel-
ing about sex had become apparent to some of these men in their con-
nections within the gay community. Clark Williams said, "Sometimes when
I tell someone that I grew up on a farm, he'll ask if! had sex with the an-
imals-or if there was a network of country boys who got together for cir-
cle jerks. God, I wish!"
In 1948, Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin wrote: "The city boy's failure
to understand what life can mean to a boy who is raised on a farm, and
the farm boy's idea that there is something glamorous about the way in
which the city boy lives, apply to every avenue of human activity, includ-
ing the sexual (p . 449)."
Among males, Kinsey's group reported, "sexual relations with animals
of other species are, of necessity, most often found in rural areas" (p. 459).
Several of the men whose stories are presented here engaged in sexual re-
lations with farm animals and pet dogs. That several other men chose not
to reveal having had sexual contact with animals became evident in con-
versations subsequent to their interviews. In most cases, these incidents of
bestiality appeared to be isolated, experimental events of adolescence. How-
ever, animal contacts were a major sexual outlet for David Foster until he
reached his early twenties.

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20 Introduction

Kinsey's group reported slightly lower frequencies of both total sex-

ual activity and homosexual activity among rural males compared to urban
(p. 464). In contrast, Silverstein stated that the greater freedom and pri-
vacy of the farm lead to a degree of sexual activity among rural boys that
equals or exceeds that of urban boys (p . 262). In regard to the boys whose
stories are presented here, it appears that the combined effects of social
isolation and sexual ignorance and prudishness could have only served to
restrict sexual activity.
A number of these boys had no sexual outlet throughout their teen
years, with the exception of wet dreams. For others, masturbation was the
sole sexual outlet. Nonetheless, many of these boys did have sexual rela-
tions with other males during their preadult years, most often with peers
from neighboring farms or from school. In some cases these relations were
naively exploratory and experimental, while in other cases they consisted of
complete sexual acts engaged in repeatedly. Several boys had sexual rela-
tions with brothers; several others had sexual contacts with adult males, re-
lated and unrelated. None reported having sexual relations with his father.
Approximately one-quarter of these men married . One of these men,
still married, arranged to be interviewed at a public library in Indiana. He
talked about his intention to come out to his wife and adolescent children
in the next several years. Several of these men, as adults, engaged in exten-
sive psychiatric therapy or psychological counseling related to sexual iden-
tity issues. Cornelius Utz, born in 1909, stated that his Victorian upbring-
ing led him to repress expression offecling in general, and this repression
was reinforced by several years of sex-focused psychiatric therapy in the
late 1930s. He was married for nearly forty years, and came out shortly
after his wife's death . Several of these men had seriously contemplated sui-
cide, and one had attempted to kill himself in the midst of his marriage.
The older men in my group were more likely than the younger men to
have been married, to have engaged in extensive sex-related therapy or
counseling, and to have contemplated or attempted suicide .

PRESENT LIFE

The men whose stories are presented varied greatly in the degree to which
they were open about being gay, and in the extent of their involvement
with their local gay communities . While some assumed an activist orien-
tation, most tended to be more conservative in their attitudes toward gay
politics. Tactics that were seen as rocking the boat were generally disdained .
Some disapproved of gay pride parades or other highly visible events, and

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Introduction 21

of gay men who are drag queens or who behave in flamboyantly effemi-
nate ways. Tom Lewis stated that he has had difficulty accepting men who
don't act like men did on the farm-"where men were men." Richard Hop-
kins described his view of being gay as a very private thing.
I don't want to wear it on my sleeve. It's not open for discussion, and I
don't ever intend it to be-with people I work with, the next-door neigh-
bors, the family even. If you know me, you're either going to like me or
you're not going to like me, but not because I'm wearing a banner up
and down the street so everybody knows, or saying in your face, "I'm
gay, like it or leave it."
In their approaches to socializing, these men tended to favor get-to-
gethers among relatively small groups of friends rather than the more pub-
lic and densely populated socializing that prevails in bars and clubs. Sim-
ilarly, many of these men believed that they needed more solitary time
than gay men from urban backgrounds required. Considering that many
men seem to have a "loner" tendency-regardless of their sexual orienta-
tion and whether their upbringing was rural or urban-it is not surpris-
ing that a number of these men felt they lived on the fringes of their gay
communities. It is likely, however, that the origin of these feelings goes
beyond the typical male loner impulse . Most gay communities are urban
phenomena, and although many of these men lived in or near relatively
large cities, they were not of the city, as many of their gay peers were.
Wayne Belden, who has lived in Chicago for about twenty years, said,
"Here in the city I'm kind of out of my element . I just have to get on as
best I can, gaining some things and losing some." Larry Ebmeier had a
similar reaction to getting acquainted with the gay community in Lin-
coln, Nebraska, once he started to come out in his late twenties.
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 con-
tact with in the gay community tend to be more outgoing, more talka-
tive, less introverted than I am . I wonder if there aren't other people out
there who are like me, more quiet and more private, not like the gay
mafia that you see so much of-the outgoing, outspoken, socialistic, ac-
tivist, flamboyant and fast-paced, dishing, camping-it-up type of people
who seem to dominate when gays come together in urban areas.
Allen Victor, who has been with his partner Jeff since 1979, ruminated
on their efforts to create and sustain gay as well as mainstream commu-
nity connections in a small city in southern Minnesota.

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22 Introduction

Jeff and I live in his hometown, so we're very involved with his family.
The house we bought was a block away from his grandmother's, an old
Norwegian lady who lived to be eighty-five . She and I got along very
well, always teasing each other. Once, when she thought I was putting
Jeff up to doing something she didn't quite approve of, she told him, "I
don't know if you should hang around with Allen-I think he's a homo-
sexual. But he is a good cook."
When she passed away, we inherited her best friend from across the
street, and her next-door-neighbor friend. It's an old, established neigh-
borhood, but through living here and doing things for his grandmother
and her friends, we've gotten to know our neighbors . We feel a little bit
more support from some of them than from the other gay people in
town-just because our values are more in tune with those of our neigh-
bors, I guess . It seems like people here can handle gay and lesbian couples
who've been here a long time and live openly but quietly. There's one
couple that's been together here for close to forty years.
It's hard to be closeted in this town, because word gets around. When
we first moved here, a lesbian came to us and said, "All right, we're
here-we have to organize a little bit." So we got a post office box and
got a group of eight or ten people together. It started out to be a real
positive experience, but we ended up burning out on personality con-
flicts and bad feelings because of different outlooks on how to live in this
small town. Jeff and I felt like we were being pushed to the foreground.
Since we lived together, we could be the visible ones and take the flak .
We really resented that, because we had just bought a house and we were
trying to do business in the community.
Jeff and I try to keep informed through the gay press, give some
money to AIDS organizations, and get together with other local gay men
when we can. I've had a hard time socializing with other gay men, and
I've had a hard time getting the difference between "gay is good" and
"all gay people are good and everything they do is good ." I know some
gay men who are real assholes. If they were straight I wouldn't give them
the time of day. And some of the things that gay people have done "for
the cause" I now see differently; it's easy to be more radical if someone
else pays the price. I don't know if this perspective is coming with age,
from owning more things, or from the small-town attitude rubbing off.

Approximately one-third of these men were in relationships with other

men at the time of their interviews . Being in a stable, long-lasting, com-
mitted relationship had great significance for a large majority of these men,
whether or not they were currently in one. Some of them attributed this
trait to the stability of their farm backgrounds where, as Tom Lewis de-
scribed it, "friends remained friends and people stayed together." Quite a
number of the men who were interviewed expressed an interest in meet-

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Introduction 23

ing other men from farming backgrounds, and this interest was apparent
in others who seemed reluctant to express it.
Some of these men expressed considerable enthusiasm about being gay.
For others, feelings were more mixed. Although none indicated a desire
to become heterosexual if that were possible, some men were clearly dis-
tressed by the ways in which being gay had affected the course of their
lives. Nonetheless, many of these men reflected Harry Beckner's opinion
that "farm people tend to be down to earth, to accept things for what they
are." For some of these individuals, however, achieving that acceptance
had been a very long and rough process.
These men varied greatly in the extent to which they were open with
their parents or other family members about being gay. Some were actively
open about it; some were passively open, making no particular effort to
reveal or to conceal being gay. Others made a considerable effort to con-
ceal their orientation-in some cases because they were not yet ready to
take on the task of coming out, or because they believed that such self-dis-
closure would serve no useful purpose, or would give too much satisfac-
tion to troublemaking family members.
Gary Christiansen's direct approach to telling his family about his sex-
ual identity is most characteristic of the men who came of age since the
mid-1970s. Born in 1967, Gary grew up with an older sister and brother
on a mixed livestock and crop farm in western Iowa, between Missouri
Valley and Logan. The coming-out letter that Gary sent to his parents and
siblings when he was twenty-five included this statement: "From the very
beginning, I have accepted that I am 'different' and I have never strug-
gled with my identity or wished to change it. There is nothing to change,
because I am the way God made me."
In our interview, Gary explained how his upbringing had influenced
his response to being gay, including his decision to reveal that part of him-
self to his family.
We were raised to face things, to do what you've got to do to take care of
each problem as it comes up. Life is unfair, but you've got to bounce right
back. You don't run away from your problems, because you aren't going to
get anywhere. When a problem would come up, my dad would say, "Well,
that's just the way it is-you'll just have to deal with it." When I realized I
was gay, I didn't try to run and hide from it. Even though I knew my par-
ents weren't going to like it, I knew that was just the way it was.
I sent the letter to my mom and dad, my sister, and my brother and
sister-in-law. My mom called and was in hysterics. "We don't understand
this. It's abnormal. It's not right. We can't tell anybody about this." She
said it was a good thing I lived in Omaha, because if I lived up there

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24 Introduction

they'd have to move. When she said she didn't know how she was going
to tell my dad, I said she didn 't have to tell him. "That's why I sent the
letter-he can read it just like you did and fall off his chair if that's the
case ." When my dad had a really hard time with it, I told him that "my
being gay is no different than your goddamned tractor having two flat
tires. That's just the way it is, and you 'll just have to deal with it."
My mom was a lot calmer when she called two days later, but she said
she just didn't understand. I said, "Think back and put things together.
You must have at least suspected." Rut she said she'd had no idea. My dad
said that he had suspected, and then he said , "With modern medicine,
why can't you just take a pill to take care of it?" When my mom asked,
"What did we do wrong? ," I told her that it was nothing she did that
made me this way. "It's kind of like a field of clover," I said. "Most of it
is three-leaf clover, but there's one that has four leaves. That's a gay
clover- it's different, but it serves its purpose. It's there with the rest of
them, just trying to survive and do its job." She didn't buy that analogy.
Since a few weeks after that letter, the subject hasn't been brought up .
I'd like to sit down with my parents and talk about it, but I know my dad
would just leave the room. I think, in time, my mom and I will discuss it
o nce in a while, as we feel a little more comfortable. It's a long process. I
don't know how to answer some of her questions, and it's hard for me to
talk to her about sex. Of course, she's worried about AIDS. I'm trying to
get into her mind that I don't sit around in bars and have sex all the
time. I get up, put my pants on , go to work, and pay my bills just like
anybody else .
In one of his radio monologues on "A Prairie Home Companion," Garri-
son Keillor stated that "every family needs at least one good sinner who
does it right out there where you can see it ." By being open about being
gay, some of these men have played that role in their families. As a result,
they have experienced varying degrees offamilial disdain and rejection . In
some cases these negative reactions have been rooted primarily in biblical
injunctions. In other cases, concern about the family's image in the com-
munity appeared to be the main consideration. The potential for disap-
proval, gossip, and ridicule tends to be an especially potent enforcer of con-
formity-or the appearance of conformity-in farm communities, where
families are often deeply rooted and thus less able to sever social ties or
move away in the face of disapproval.
Terry Bloch's description of the area where he grew up provides a vivid
snapshot of the force of conformity in a rural community, and how it af-
fected his life as a gay man.
Southwestern Minnesota is white , conservative, Republican country
where, in those days, you didn't admit there was such a thing as child

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Introduction 25

abuse, you didn't admit that your husband was a wife-beating alcoholic,
you didn't let yourself get a divorce. You'd go to church on Sunday,
smiling and waving, and keep your skeletons in the closet. The husband
was the strong, dominant one in a marriage, and he didn't talk about
things. I brought those values into my relationship with Jahred, only
to discover it wasn't right. We have to be equal, we have to be more
open with our feelings and thoughts. Sometimes I do a real shitty job
of that.
Despite the list of apparently negative influences that one could com-
pile from these life stories, many of these men saw much that was positive
in their childhoods. Lon Mickelsen's assessment is characteristic.
Looking back, the farm and my hometown seem like distant, impossible
places-places where my life doesn't fit, and where "keeping it to your-
self" is considered an admirable trait. But growing up on the farm didn't
seem that limiting to me until I was no longer there. And though there
were times when it was rough around the edges, my life on the farm
gave me many of the things that I value most today: my appreciation of
the importance of relying on others and allowing them to rely on me, of
balancing work and play, of keeping a wide-eyed fascination in the
world; my love of animals and nature, my work ethic, my desire to grow
things .
Although it was common for these men to believe that their farm up-
bringings delayed their sexual self-understanding, they did not necessar-
ily see that as a drawback. Barney Dews speculated that if he had grown
up in a city he would have come out earlier and would likely be dead by
now as the result ofless-healthy living-drinking, smoking, and engaging
in risky sex . "If I had come out when I was younger, I probably would
have died of AIDS," Terry Bloch commented. "Growing up where I did
made me conservative, traditional, straight-laced, slower to jump on the
bandwagon."
Many of these men believed that their farm upbringings instilled in
them a strong and persistent work ethic. "Be responsible, work hard, and
win acceptance" appeared to be a central motivating principle in many of
their lives. Mark Vanderbeek described the role of work in his life.
I tend to be an over-achiever. At times it's a blessing and at times it's a
curse, but I don't want anyone at work to ever have reason to say, "Not
only is he gay, but he doesn't do above and beyond the call of duty." You
can call me a faggot, you can call me any slur you want to, but don't ever
call me a sluff-off or someone who doesn't put out 110 percent. It's defi-
nitelya trait I picked up from my father. He would say, "Count your
blessings for every day you can work."

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26 Introduction

Karl Gussow elaborated more broadly on the work-ethic theme.

Farm life has a certain amount of genuineness to it-honesty and an in-
ability to shirk responsibility. The cow's udder is going to burst if you
don't milk it, the weeds are going to continue to grow if you don't hoe
them, the hay is going to rot if you don't put it in the mow, the silage is
going to reach its peak and go the other way if you don't get it put up. I
think being reared where I was has caused me to be a little more appre-
ciative of the urgencies and the responsibilities with which we have to ad-
dress life.
It was common for these men to see the reality of their homosexual
orientation from a perspective very similar to Karl's view of udders, weeds,
hay, and silage. James Heckman compared his own homosexuality to a bull
that doesn't take to cows and concluded that, however inexplicable, it's
all a part of nature and must be accepted for what it is. Some of the men
for whom religious belief continued to be significant had a similar "that's
the way it is" way of looking at things. Their belief that God made them
the way they are and loves them the way they are seems to be a theologi-
cal extension of the belief that whatever nature creates is the way it's meant
to be.
In thinking about the farming country of his childhood, Barney Dews
acknowledged "something very organic that draws me back there because
it's familiar, it's home." Many of these men continued to feel strong con-
nections to their rural midwestern homelands, but their feelings for these
places did not tend to be wistfully romantic or sentimental. Martin Scherz
described his feelings of a continuing connection to his Nebraska home.
When I go back home, I feel a real connection with the land-a tremen-
dous 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 .... I feel alienated in a lot of
ways, and it's not the kind of place that would welcome me if! lived
openly, the way that I would like to live. I would be shunned.
For many years, Dean Gray concealed his rural heritage. Mter finish-
ing college in the mid-1980s, he moved from the Midwest to New York
City, where he works in theater and lives in the West Village.
Now I cherish having grown up on a farm . It's one of the first things I
tell people about myself. People in New York say to me, "You're a farm
boy. What are you doing here? Don't you miss the country, the open
space, the animals?" I do. When I go back home to Wisconsin, I'm out in
the barn first thing in the morning, feeding the animals and cleaning the
barn. I feel something there I can't feel in New York.

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Introduction 27

However, apart from fantasizing about living on a few acres in the coun-
try, most of the men who were living in cities and towns were not look-
ing to move back to farming communities. They tended to believe that,
despite the appeal of certain aspects of farm life, urban life offered them
as much or more promise of fulfillment. It appeared that what they val-
ued most about their farming backgrounds they carried with them, wher-
ever they lived.

REFERENCES

Adams, Jane . 1994. The Transformation ofRural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Alyson Publications. 1990. The Alyson Almanac. Boston: Alyson Publications.
Blumenfeld, Warren J" and Diane Raymond . 1989. Looking at Gay and Lesbian
Life. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bly, Carol. 1982. Lettersfrom the Country. New York: Penguin.
Katz, Jonathan. 1976. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the Us.A.
New York: Crowell.
Katz, Jonathan. 1983. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary. New York:
Harper & Row.
Kinsey, Alfred c., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. 1948. Sexual Be-
havior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.
Nardi, Peter M., David Sanders, and Judd Marmor. 1994. Growing Up before Stone-
wall: Life Stories of Some Gay Men. New York: Routledge.
Reid, John. 1973. The Best Little Boy in the World . New York: Ballantine.
Salamon, Sonya. 1992. Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in
the Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Silverstein, Charles. 1981 . Man to Man: Gay Couples in America. New York: Quill.
Welch, Paul, and Ernest Havemann. "Homosexuality in America." Life: June 26,
1964, pp. 66-74, 76-80.

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Copyrighted Material
PART 1
Coming of Age Before
the Mid-1960s

Copyrighted Material
Our Favorite Team, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a 1920 photo of an Indiana farm boy, courtesy
of Larry Reed

Copyrighted Material
 Introduction

DESPITE PROFOUND changes in the character of U.S. life from the

early 1900s to the mid -1960s, there was little change throughout this era
in the kind or quantity of information about homosexuality accessible to
a farm boy coming of age in the Midwest . The invisibility of homosexu-
ality through the 1930s was described by Robert C. Reinhart in A His-
tory of Shadows.!
Gays lived without a literature, a means of communication to serve their
interests and needs, or any sense of community. .. . When gay people
were even heard about, it was in the pages of psychiatric journals, annals
of jurisprudence, or the news columns that chronicled sexual transgres-
sions, but usually in such veiled terms that readers were hard put to know
why the person had been sentenced to five years in jail (pp. 53-54).
The veil was drawn back from homosexuality in two novels published
in 1948-Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Roomsl and Gore Vidal's
The City and the Pillar. 3 To the extent that mainstream publications gave
these works any notice, their reviews ranged from disagreeable to hostile.
The Kinsey report on American male sexual behavior, also published in
1948, was not so easily ignored.4 The report stated that homosexual ac-
tivity was much more common than generally believed, that very few in-
dividuals were exclusively homo- or hetero- in their sexual nature, and that
many individuals had a mix of both homo- and heterosexual experience.
Kinsey's findings challenged America's ability to sustain the denial, silence,
and ignorance surrounding homosexuality, but even in the face of scien-
tific evidence the facade of America's Victorian/Puritan sexual code did
not crumble. The Kinsey report astonished, appalled, and fascinated mil-
lions without seeming to enlighten very many.
Throughout the 1950s, the efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the
Eisenhower administration to expel Communists, sex perverts, and other
undesirables from influential positions captured headlines and spawned
localized witch-hunts around the country. In the face of these oppressive
attitudes, today's organized gay rights movement got started in the 1950s
and early 1960s, but it was an exclusively urban phenomenon with very
limited reach.
The tenor of prevailing notions about homosexuality was both re-
flected in, and reinforced by, the mass media. National mass-market peri-

31

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32 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

odicals gave minimal coverage to the topic. In 1959, Time presented a psy-
chiatrist's view that the homosexual is a "psychic masochist," a glutton for
punishment whose "distorted pleasures feed on the allure of danger. "5 The
gist of a 1960 article in Newsweek) "To Punish or Pity?," is conveyed ef-
fectively by the title. 6 Newsweek reported in 1961 that the number ofho-
mosexuals in the military was increasing. "These people are sick, they need
treatment. They can be cured if they want to be," a psychotherapist stated.
From a preventive perspective, he advocated school-based psychiatric treat-
ment on the premise that homosexuals could be spotted as early as seven
years of age. 7
For many of the men whose stories are presented here, coming of age
between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s meant bearing a burden of un-
equivocally negative feelings toward their emerging selves. Some carried
this burden for decades, others for only a short time . For more than half
of them, this negativity was shouldered in tandem with the expectations
and responsibilities of marriage and parenting. Those who managed to
avoid marriage were faced with the task of creating a meaningful life focus
and identity apart from mainstream conventions and often without the
example of role models that were acceptable to them.
Henry Bauer's tale of psychoanalytic misadventure is emblematic of
coming of age during this era. So is Cornelius Utz's account of coming
out to himself in his seventies, after thirty-five years of marriage. Robert
Peters' reminiscences are snapshots from the life of a naive adolescent male
on a poor backwoods farm in the late 1930s. In light of the oppressiveness
of this period, the diversity of experience in this group of stories is no-
table. For example, Jim Cross and Dennis Lindholm were born within two
years of each other and both grew up in Iowa farm families, but that is
about the extent of their similarity. Jim came to grips with being gay in
his early twenties and with relatively little pain; Dennis came out in his
mid-forties and with much trauma.
In the face of a debilitating lack of self-confidence, John Beutel strug-
gled to achieve a sense of self-worth through his work as a teacher. For
Ronald Schoen, being able to help a gay student through the uncertain-
ties, fears, and isolation of his rural teenage years has been greatly reward-
ing. Myron Turk winces at seeing a nephew in the midst of a painful ado-
lescence similar to his own. Norm Reed, who hoped that marriage and
religion would banish his homosexual feelings, continues to adhere to the
fundamentalist beliefs of the church that ostracized him . In contrast to
Harry Beckner's light-hearted account of growing up gay, James Heck-
man's suicide attempt is a reminder that many gay farm boys who were
fated to come of age in this era did not make it to the next .

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Introduction 33

NOTES

1. Robert C. Reinhart. 1982. A History of Shadows. New York: Avon.

2. Truman Capote. 1948. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House .
3. Gore Vidal. 1948. The City and the Pillar. New York: Dutton.
4. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. 1948. Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.
5. "The Strange World." Time: November 9,1959, p. 66 .
6. "To Punish or Pity?" Newsweek: July 11 , 1960, p. 78 .
7. "One Soldier in 25?" Newsweek: May 15, 1961, pp. 92, 94 .

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 Cornelius Utz

Cornelius was born in 1909 in Buchanan county, northwestern Missouri, on

a small farm about five miles south of the city of South St. Joseph, where his
father was a horse and mule trader. Cornelius was the youngest of eleven chil-
dren-eight boys and three girls. He was married for thirty-five years, is the
father of two children, and had a career in social work. He lives in a retire-
ment community in Cleveland, Ohio.

I AM DEEPLY saddened by the sociocultural pressure that's put on ho-

mosexual people . We're human beings and it just happens that the genes
worked this way for us. I didn't learn this until I was practically eighty
years old. Internalized homophobia affected my whole life in a sadly dele-
terious way. I couldn't happily be myself because I thought if people knew
me they wouldn't accept me . I was afraid I would reveal my homosexual-
ity, so I put the damper on all kinds of self-expression. I wanted to be liked,
so I went out of my way to please people . I wanted to like myself, but I
couldn't quite allow myself to do it . This damned internalized homopho-
bia is just godawful, it's tragic, and it took me a long time to overcome it.
I really feel good about myself and I think I'm a very lovable person, but
I still struggle with it every once in a while .
When I decided to come out, I did it with a bang, and the heaviest
weight descended from my shoulders. I never felt so free-released from
a burden that had been with me all my life . With this release of creative
energy, I have gotten tremendous satisfaction out of everything I've done,
from writing to teaching to playing bridge and creating artwork. I get
great accolades for the fiber artworks I produce, and I'm very proud of
them. Hell of a long time I had to wait to get those kinds of satisfactions,
but thank god they came. I've had a productive life and a good life, basi-
cally, but I weep sometimes at how much better it could have been had I
not been so inhibited, had I had the freedom to put all of myself into learn-
ing my profession and creating my early artwork. I feel incredibly grate-
ful that I finally learned to love myself enough so that here in my twilight
years I can get tremendous satisfaction out of my artwork and my won-
derful relationships.
34

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Cornelius Utz 35

The house I was born in was built oflogs and we lived in that house until
I was four years old-thirteen people in four rooms. My father then built
a much larger house that would accommodate our family. We had a long
dining table with benches on either side, six kids on one side and five on
the other, father at one end and mother at the other. On Sunday morn-
ings when I was a small child, my father would put an extra dollop of cream
in his coffee, pour it in a saucer, and blow on it to cool it down, and then,
with me in his lap, let me take a sip of it from the saucer. That sweet, creamy
coffee tasted so good it made me tingle with pleasure . It was like sucking
at my father's breast .
We had a lovely big fireplace in the living room of the new house,
with a circle of chairs around it. One day, I had injured myself while
playing and felt I deserved special treatment during my recovery, so I
sat in my father's chair, the most comfortable one in the room. When he
came home he was enraged that his youngest pipsqueak son would
have the effrontery to be sitting in his chair, so he lifted me out of it
by my ear, ignoring my injury. Crying, I started running upstairs and
said, "Ain't you got no sense?" Like a flash, he caught me at the bot-
tom of the stairs and gave me an awful licking-the only one I ever got
from him.
My mother liked to have me learn poems or speeches, and she trained
me to declaim. She would listen to me go over and over a piece, and in-
struct me in how to make it more powerful. There were contests in the
county, and I won the first prize more than once with my declamations.
My father would then insist that I perform at social gatherings. It scared
me to pieces to be asked by my father, out of the blue, to get up in front
of all those people, but I did it . I was afraid if I didn't deliver I'd get a
whipping when I got home.
I loved it when we had company, because they related to me with great
warmth . Once I cried because I couldn' t ride along when somebody in
the family was taking the company back home . My mother said, "So you
cry when we say you can't go? I'll give you something to cry about!" and
she whipped me with a switch, very hard, on my behind and legs. Experi-
ences like these deeply affected my ability to be very spontaneous about
any expression offeeling. You didn't have to get those kinds of whippings
very often to begin to close up.
Surreptitiously I learned to crochet and embroider from my sisters. I
was really quite good at handwork, but I wouldn't allow my brothers to
see me doing it . When I was seven or eight, my mother got a new sewing
machine-an old foot-pedal type-and taught me how to work it . I loved
to work that machine and would sit at it for hours, hemming sheets and

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36 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

pillow cases. That was a great help to my mother, because we bought sheet-
ing and pillow tubing by the bolt for that size family.
I learned to ride horseback when I was five or six years old, and from
about age eight until twelve I was highly involved in the farm. We had a
chunky little Shetland pony-just the dearest thing you could ever know-
and I became so proficient that I could ride him at a gallop standing up
on his rump. One of my chores was to ride the pony to the pasture and
bring the cows in to be milked, then milk them and drive them down the
long lane back to the pasture. I would also round up the sheep and bring
them to the farmyard for protection from wolves and coyotes by night.
When we harvested wheat and oats, my oldest brother Millard drove
the team that pulled the binder, a very heavy machine that cut the grain
and bound it in bundles. Because the binder was so heavy, five horses or
mules or some combination of the two were required to pull it, with two
in front of three. Someone had to ride one of the lead horses to guide
them. By the time I was eight years old, I was the chosen one since I weighed
less than anyone else. It was a very exacting job. The binder cut a five- or
six-foot swath of grain, and I had to guide the team so that it didn't leave
little spaces that weren't cut. It was a pleasant enough chore for a short
time, but a full day of it was hard work. I was always glad when those long,
tiresome days on the horse came to an end.
With my little pony and cart, I was the water boy, wearing bib over-
alls, a large straw hat, and a bandanna tied about my neck to absorb per-
spiration . I would fill one-gallon stoneware jugs with water, put them in
a burlap-lined fruit crate, and cover them with water-soaked burlap to keep
them cool. I took this fresh, cold water to the men in the fields as they
were loading the wagons to bring the sheaves of grain to the steam-driven
threshing machine . Then I would go to the threshing machine and give
the men there their water. That cold water was a godsend for those men,
working in ninety-degree heat or even hotter, as it was some of those days
in late July and early August. They greeted me with joy and pleasure .

My family were fairly strict Methodists, especially my father. He frowned

on playing cards, dancing, smoking, and the use of alcohol. And in spite
of the fact that we were eleven children, my parents had a good many in-
hibitions about sexuality. Anything sexual was to be controlled and de-
nied. Once I was in the barn when a cow had a calf. It was incredibly ex-
citing to me, but I was scared to death to let my family know that I had
witnessed it, for fear I would be punished.
When I was about four years old, Rindy, our black laundress, came to
our house and brought her grandson, Lester, who was about my age. He

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Cornelius Utz 37

"The house I was born in was built of logs and we lived in that house until I was four years
old-thirteen people in four rooms." Cornelius Utz's mother and nine of his ten siblings in
front of their four-room log house, about 1905. Courtesy of Cornelius Utz.

was a lively little boy and had an endless imagination of things to do . One
day we ended up in the scale house, which was used as a garage for one of
our buggies. He asked me to lie down, and he lay down on top of me. We
had our clothes on and he was dry-fucking me. It was not unpleasant . He
was quite aggressive and in control, and I was very docile in order not to
displease him. I liked having kids my own age to play with and there weren't
any in the neighborhood. Suddenly Rindy appeared and saw what was hap-
pening. She picked up a bridle with long leather reins and gave Lester a
whipping within an inch of his life. She didn't say or do a thing to me, but
she made it impossible for us to play together the rest of the day. Mter
that, when Rindy and Lester came there were a lot of other kids with him,
or Rindy would say, "Cornelius, why don't you ask your mother if you can
go over and visit your friend ." This younger neighbor kid had nice toys
and we would play together, but there was nothing sexual at all. I think
Rindy thought it would be all right if! had sex-play with other little white
boys, but not with her grandson.
One summer afternoon when I was five years old I was in the cow barn
and George, our new hired man, approached me. He patted me on the
head and placed his hand on my shoulder, then squatted and hugged me

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38 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

"1 would also round up the sheep and bring them to the farmyard for protection from wolves
and coyotes by night." Courtesy of Cornelius Utz.

gently. It felt good, so I let myselffall against him. We snuggled a bit, then
he gently unbuttoned my pants and brought my penis out as if to help me
pee, but I didn't need to pee. Instead, my skinny little penis became erect
and he fondled me a bit, producing a feeling I had never had before. I
liked it, but I felt a little fear as well. George stood up and took his penis
out, asking me to hold it, and I did. It was not as hard as mine, but it felt
okay in my hand. I began to feel afraid, so I stopped holding his penis, re-
turned mine to my trousers, buttoned up, and went back to the house.
Not long after this, my mother told my sister and me that we should never
go to the cow barn alone if George were there. Shortly thereafter, George
was gone for good.
In one way or another, I had sex-play with six of my seven brothers-
fondling and masturbating each other to orgasm, dry-fucking by pressing
against each other. It usually occurred at night when we would be sleep-
ing together, like it was happening in our dreams, and we never spoke about

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Cornelius Utz 39

it . I slept in my parents' bed until I was four years old, but when we moved
into the new house my oldest brother Millard and I shared a bed . He was
seventeen years older than I. Some mornings, he would feel my penis and
stimulate me until it got hard, but he would never let me touch his. It was
very titillating in a way, but he said, "You really shouldn't do this." When
I was older, Millard and I had some sex-play together, but I don't think
we ever came to orgasm together because "you shouldn't do that."
When I was five or six, I was out in a cornfield with my brother Law-
rence, of whom I was quite fond. We both had to urinate, and he said,
"Let me see your penis." As he looked, it got hard and he pulled the fore-
skin back and cut it a little bit with his thumbnail, saying it looked like it
was growing over the head of my penis. He was very tender and gentle
with me, but I think that was a bit of sadism on his part . Later, when I
was adolescent, Lawrence and I had a number of episodes of sex-play when-
ever we slept together. He sucked me, but I couldn't suck him for any length
of time-I guess because I wanted it so much that it gagged me. When I
was probably thirteen, we had a black hired man . He and I had sex to-
gether a time or two, and shortly after that occurred my mother cautioned
me that I should not do anything with him . I don't know how she knew
I had done anything, if she did, or whether it came to her attention that
he had made out with one of my brothers.
I had suspicions, but I really denied like hell that I was "that way." I
grew up feeling that same-sex relations were immoral, and even to mas-
turbate would cause you to have problems later. I masturbated an awful
lot between twelve and sixteen or eighteen, sometimes two or three times
a day. I would determine that I wasn't going to do it again-"I'll just do
this now and I won't do it again today or tomorrow"-but I was highly
sexually stimulated and felt bad about my tremendous sex drive. There
were times when I would get extraordinarily hard and almost painful
erections as I was riding my horse, and there was nothing I could do to
subdue them .
My father had jackasses that were bred to grade mares to produce work
mules. He also had a large white stallion for breeding mares to produce
grade work horses. I was never permitted to be out there when breeding
was going on, and there was a high board fence around the barnyard so
that you couldn't see the breeding from the ground level, but from the
window of my bedroom I could see what was going on and I would mas-
turbate. I was highly excited by the animals. When cows are in heat they
dribble something, and it would just drive me over the wall when our cows
did that . It made me want to get up there and fuck them. We had an old
mare who had been neutered and often when I was alone I would stick

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my arm down her vagina. She didn't seem to mind it at all. I tried to fuck
her by standing on her hocks, but I wasn't very successful.
In 1921, my father's business failed and we lost the farm and every-
thing. Two of my brothers who were renting a farm together let the re-
maining family move in with them, and we lived there for about two years.
During those years, I slept a lot with my brother Lawrence and we had
sex-play together. I was twelve or thirteen, and very interested in people
slightly older. I was also highly stimulated by a very attractive hired hand
they had. It was all I could do to keep my hands off of him. I wanted to
play with his penis, and I thought it was just terrible that I had those kinds
of feelings. That helped me restrain myself from acting on them .
I left the farm when I was fourteen. A sister and brother had established
housekeeping in St. Joe, so we younger children lived with them and com-
pleted high school in the city. We had a coach in high school who really
turned me on sexually. I loved being with him. He would shower with the
rest of us and I would get a chance to see his equipment and fantasize about
it. Mter football practice, those hunky football players would say, "How
about a rubdown?" I loved doing it, and I'm sure it was sexually stimulat-
ing to them as it was to me. I became very adept at giving rubdowns.
I was highly attracted to a number of guys in high school, but I didn't
dare let it be known . To be a good, sturdy, non-sissy guy, you had to be
interested in sports like football and basketball. I really tried to be an ath-
lete because I wanted to emulate my brother Sam. He was the first and
only other man in our family who went through college, and he was greatly
admired by my parents for doing that. Sam called everybody and his dog
a sissy that wasn't a high-level football player. I really hated football, but I
tried to play because it would make me more of a man.
The first time I had sex-play with Sam, I was on the track team in our
high school. We had a track meet in Cameron, Missouri, where Sam was
the coach. Mter the meet, he asked if I would like to stay overnight. We
shared the bed where he roomed, and he initiated sex-play with me, which
I welcomed. When I was in college in Columbia, he came down there on
coaching business several times and spent the night with me and we would
have sex-play. This was after he was married and had children. He told me
that his wife was kind of nervous, like a Jersey cow.
In college, I heard about a biology professor who was homosexual.
When I finally connected with him, he took me to a very lovely place in
the country, a secluded and protected woodland area. We were enjoying
the birds and the view when he put his arms around me, turned towards
me and kissed me. That was the first time I'd ever been kissed by a man.
He gave me a deep French kiss, which was highly exciting. We hugged

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Cornelius Utz 41

each other a bit and then went to his house. He lived with his mother,
who was closeted in the back of the house and told never to interfere when
he had guests. We went to his bedroom and disrobed and made love some
more. I took his tongue in my mouth and put my tongue in his mouth. I
played with his cock some, but I could never suck him without gagging.
He always sucked me, and never seemed to expect me to relieve him through
masturbation or anything.
He really introduced me to what it can mean to have gay sex. It was
an idyllic experience . I would feel ashamed of myself, but whenever I felt
horny I would call him and ask if he would be home a little later. He al-
ways said yes. To a great extent, this took care of my sexual needs through-
out the rest of college. I really think he fell deeply in love with me, but I
couldn't allow myself to feel love for him, because that would make me a
really full-blown "that way" person. (I didn't become familiar with the
word homosexual until I was in graduate school in social work.) I denied
that I was completely male-sex-oriented.
I enjoyed being with girls, had relationships with a number of girl-
friends, and did a hell of a lot of necking. I'm sure they all wanted me to
fuck them, but I never could bring myself to go that far. Consciously, I
was scared to death I would impregnate them and then I'd be hooked be-
cause it would only be honorable for me to marry. I wasn't in a position
to get married; I had no job, no capacity to support a family.
During my college years I carried on a correspondence with Karl, a
friend from high school. It was a purely platonic relationship but I cared
very much for him and he seemed to care very much for me. I asked if!
could stop and visit him on my way to graduate school in New York. He
was in graduate school in Philadelphia and lived in a neat little house out
in the country with his roommate Ted, a biology professor. When it came
time to go to bed, I was assigned a bed in the bedroom with Ted, upstairs,
and Karl slept in the bedroom downstairs. Ted made a pass at me before
we went to sleep and we had sex both nights I was there . The interchange
was kind of electric between us, so that Ted and I developed a really won-
derful relationship, and I continued to be a good friend of Karl's.
During my years in school in New York, I would go down to Philadel-
phia when I could scrape up enough money to spend a weekend with them.
They did wonderful things to entertain me, and Ted and I always had our
reunions in the bedroom. Mter Karl developed a brain tumor and died,
Ted would come to New York to spend weekends with me. He fell in love
with me and really wanted me to make my home with him . I liked him,
and I'm sure he would have supported me ifneed be, but I just could not
allow a feeling oflove .

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42 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

In college, I had learned enough psychology to become more and more

concerned that I was homosexual, and I had to restrain myselffrom telling
this to my close friends. In graduate school, we deep-dished into Freudian
psychology and my being queer descended on me more and more. About
1936, I decided I couldn't live with it. I went to a female analyst-I was
afraid to go to a male-and had a very comfortable interview with her. I
didn't hold back z.nything. She said she thought I should have analysis,
and she did not think I should go to a woman. She put me in touch with
a Dr. Wiggers.
When I told Dr. Wiggers about Ted, he said, "It's up to you. I think
if you continue seeing Ted you're not going to be able to give this up. I
don't know whether you'll be able to give it up if you don)t see him, but I
don't think there's any chance of your coming through with a good het-
erosexual relationship if you continue seeing him ."l The next time Ted
came to visit, I told him that it would be our last weekend together-that
I really wanted to see if I couldn't work this out. He understood and said
we could still be friends, and I said I'd love to be friends with him.
Analyses are never completed, but after five years Dr. Wiggers and I
decided we were as far as we could go . I had gone six days a week for the
first two years and five days a week for the rest of the time. I continued
to see him from time to time to talk about things that were troubling me.
He gave me a great deal of confidence in myself, and my skill as a social
worker grew by leaps and bounds as a result of my analysis. I feel incredi-
bly grateful for my treatment because it enabled me to function as well as
I did throughout the rest of my life . It enabled me to have sex with a woman
and enjoy it, and as a result of that I have two lovely children and four
beautiful grandchildren . I feel that having children contributed inordi-
nately to my growth and development as a person.
I met and courted my wife while I was in analysis. I no longer had the
need to tell anybody I was gay, and I never discussed it with my wife. For
a few years we had very good and satisfying sex, but I simply could not
control the drive to have sex with men . If ever I was out of town I would
pick up somebody and have a one-night stand. None of them were very
pleasant experiences because I would be half-drunk. I almost became an
alcoholic during my marriage, and I smoked very heavily.
I couldn't keep up my correspondence with Ted because I felt I would
have to explain it to my wife, so I just quit writing and didn't give him any
explanation. He continued exchanging Christmas cards with one of my
sisters, and every so often she would report to me what he was doing-
that he was in the army in World War II, that he had moved from Philadel-
phia to Boulder. After my wife died in 1978, I got Ted's address from my

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Cornelius Utz 43

sister and wrote him the kind of a letter you write to somebody thirty-five
years later. I said I would love to hear from him ifhe felt like it. He wrote
an incredibly nice letter back, inviting me to come and see him.
When I went to Boulder for a weekend to visit with Ted, I said I wanted
to apologize for how I had terminated our relationship. He said, "Don't
think a thing about it. I knew you were trying to get over it, but I knew
you were queer and would always be queer." He said that it was in the
genes and I couldn't get it out. We had better sex on that visit than we'd
had thirty-five years before. I visited him twice after that long interval of
nothing, and we had a wonderful visit each time, highly meaningful and
exhilarating. I fantasied going out there and living with him the rest of
our lives, but I don't think he wanted that, and I probably wouldn't have
done it. He died a couple of years ago, so that's wiped out and washed up.
Mter my wife died, I decided to see what I could find out about the
gay community, so I went to the baths on the west side in Cleveland . This
was before the AIDS scare. While I was there I found out about Integrity
and went to their next meeting.2 One member of the group told me about
somebody he had met who he thought really needed to talk to me-a fel-
low named Dave who was married and had a couple of kids. He gave me
Dave's phone number at work, and eventually we met for lunch and talked.
He was not happy and he and his wife hadn't had sex for years. I appreci-
ated the struggle he was going through. He was still living with his wife,
who was extraordinarily homophobic, and he didn't have enough sense to
keep quiet about his gayness with her.
To seal our beginning friendship, Dave and I hugged and had a nice
deep French kiss. I got a letter from him saying he wanted to see me again,
that he had been so excited as a result of our kiss that he had to go to a
public restroom and jack it off. So we met again and had incredibly beau-
tiful sex with each other-the best sex with any man I had ever had . He
began writing me love letters, and he was the first man I ever allowed my-
self to really feel love for. We had a sustained relationship for several weeks
and then suddenly he got anxious and tried to break it off. I was disap-
pointed and saddened.
Dave and I came together a number of times after that and they were
pleasant encounters, but his restraint affected my ability to put myself quite
as freely into the sexual relationship. We were incredibly compatible oth-
erwise. He appreciated my artwork, he was a cultured person, we liked a
lot of the same things. He played with the idea of getting a divorce and
setting up housekeeping with me, and I said ifhe did I'd come out of the
closet. But I finally wrote Dave a letter, saying that I felt he was treating
me like a prostitute the last few times, and that I didn't want to continue

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44 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

that kind of relationship. He wrote back and said, "I loved you very much,
and 1 still do, but I can't give up my relationship with my family. I've de-
cided that's the way it has to be. 1 was afraid that if I kept seeing you I
would lose control of myself, and lose my job and my family." As sad as it
was, it was a beautiful experience, because it left me free to love other men.
I don't hold back feelings of love as I always did before, when I was try-
ing to avoid being a homosexual. 1 feel a lot oflove for other men, whether
I have sex with them or not.

In 1979 I joined the Unitarian Universalists for Lesbian and Gay Con-
cerns. Two years later I was one of the organizing members of our local
chapter, but I was snug in the closet and insisted on confidentiality out-
side our meetings. In 1985 I attended a continental UULGC meeting
in San Diego. Both the gay and straight members of the First Unitarian
Church there were incredibly loving, accepting, and supportive. In that
atmosphere I began to love myself enough to decide I would be who I
was, and I determined to come out of the closet, come hell or high water.
I had not yet gotten a foothold in the gay community and had been fear-
ful that in coming out I might lose my straight friends and then would be
bereft. With my newfound confidence as a result of learning to love my-
sel( I felt that if my straight friends weren't still my friends after I came
out, they hadn't been my friends before.
With that resolution, I came out to a friend of fifty years living in San
Diego, a guy who had been in the short course in social work. It didn't mat-
ter to him, and he said, "You're speaking more freely now than I've ever
seen. You don't seem to be holding anything back now, as apparently you
were before." My niece, also there in San Diego, could tell that I was a lit-
tle bit nervous as I was coming out to her at dinner. She reached across the
table and grasped my hands and said, "Uncle Cornelius, you've always been
very dear to me, and you always will be ." I thought, boy, this is not bad!
I wrote a letter to my two children and sent each of them a copy. My
daughter and her husband were very accepting, and she's very interested
in my continuing reports about UULGC meetings and other things. When
I have initiated the conversation with my son a couple of times, he has
said, "It's all right, but why do you have to say anything about it?" He
said he couldn't understand why I chose this, and when I said there is no
choice, it's in the genes, he said, "Well, you had a choice to give in to it."
I said, "I'm sorry, Dave, that I haven't been able to handle this very well
with you. 1 don't think you've really understood what I've been trying to
tell you . Maybe sometime I'll find a way to make it clearer-I hope I can-
but 1 may not be able to." He's been incredibly loving and caring and con-

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Cornelius Utz 45

cerned about me, but this is a struggle for him. He may be worried that
he's carrying that gene himself and that maybe his sons are too.
I don't have a lover and probably won't have, but I do have some peo-
ple I occasionally play in the hay with. I have a lot of pen pals and some of
them come to see me, so I have a love-in for two or three days. That's the
best I can do, and hope springs eternal. It's reassuring to me at eighty-
four that I can still get it off with joy. A man in Georgia has begged me to
come and visit him. There's something about the foreskin of an uncut older
man that turns him on incredibly. But I feel that there should be a real
feeling oflove along with the sex experience. There's an awful lot of em-
phasis on just getting it off. That may be pleasurable, but unless you can
have a real feeling oflove with your sexual partner, it doesn't mean very
much.
I'm not in the gay community that much. I used to go to the bars, but
I wouldn't put my foot inside one now because I can't stand the smoke. I
smoked and drank to take care of stress for too long. That's why I have
emphysema. And I got no fun out of being there. By the time I came out,
I was so old that none of the young guys would look twice at me. They
didn't know how attractive I would be if they'd get to know me. There's
a group of older gay men that meets at somebody's home on the west side,
but I haven't kept up with them because there was no one there who had
any of the cultural or artistic interests that I do. For an ongoing relation-
ship, those things are just as meaningful to me as sexual compatibility.
I've never felt comfortable in the gay community, but I have developed
a pretty good tolerance for most gay people. We're all in this together, and
if we can't love each other we'd better figure out where we're going to
find people to love. The church is my community. It was through my ex-
perience with the UULGC that I found I loved myself enough to come
out. When I don't show up at a meeting there are a lot of people who miss
me, and they tell me so. I'm active on the Gay/Lesbian/Straight Task
Force, which is working to combat homophobia in our church. I'm also
in a men's group at the church, and I'm very open there. I feel an in-
credible love for all the members of my men's group and for people in the
congregation of my church.
IfI'm in a friendship that means anything to me and the person doesn't
know that I have a same-sex preference, I will mention it at some point. I
haven't really encountered any problems in being out with people that mat-
ter to me, and I'm not at a loss for friends. I've got my circle, both men
and women. I came out to the social worker who interviewed me before
I came to live here, but I haven't mentioned it to anyone else here. I haven't
felt it would serve any special purpose. There's a group of men here who

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often eat in the dining room together. Every once in a while they'll make
denigrating statements about homosexuals, and I'll say, "I don't know
what's wrong with homosexuals. They're human beings like all the rest of
us." That's as far as I've gone. In spite of their homophobia, I feel a lot of
love for those old bastards.

NOTES

1. The psychiatric treatment of gay men in this era is described in Peter M.

Nardi, David Sanders, and Judd Marmor. 1994. Growing Up before Stonewall: Life
Stories of Some Gay Men. New York: Routledge.
2. Integrity, founded in 1974, is the gay and lesbian caucus of the Episcopal
Church with chapters in many cities in the United States.

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 Robert Peters

Robert was born in 1924, the oldest offive children, and grew up on a poor
scrub-sand farm offorty acres near Eagle River, in Vilas County, northern
Wisconsin . He married and fathered four children. The author of more than
thirty books ofpoetry, criticism, short stories, and plays, Robert retired in 1993
from teaching literature and writing at the University of California, Irvine.
He lives in the Los Angeles area with his companion of many years, Paul
Trachtenber;g.
Robert Peters' autobiographical poetry may be found in his Poems: Se-
lected and New, 1967-1991 (Asylum Arts, 1992). The autobiographical prose
pieces that follow are excerpted from his Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin
Boyhood in the Thirties (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). In these ex-
cerpts, Old Crip is a rooster, Osmo Makinnen is the school bully, Lady is a cow,
and Margie is Robert's sister.

KILLING THE HEN

OLD CRIP DANCED on spurless legs, making deep -maw proprietary

sounds. Once the hens were eating corn and chortling, he fed himself,
keeping a wary eye on us.
We selected a large Rhode Island Red, one no longer laying. "Now,"
Dad said. "Point the barrel at her eye; then pull the trigger slow."
An olio offeelings: I did not want to shoot . I did not want to displease
Dad. Oblivious, the hen pecked at her corn.
The trigger felt like ice. My index finger seemed jointless.
"Now, do it right," Dad warned.
The bird's yellowish ear was a minuscule sun. Stunned, she chortled,
rattled, and fell, clawed the air, stiffened, and then stilled. Dad whipped
out a pocketknife and slit her throat . "Wasn't too bad, was it?" He lifted
the hen by its legs. "Nice fat one. Be good with dumplin's."
I plunged the bird into boiling water. The feathers loosened immedi-
ately and smelled like rancid rags. Then came the singeing and butcher-

47

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48 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

ing. Mom planned an early supper, complete with blueberry pie, from ber-
ries picked the previous summer.

EASTER

As Easter neared, I read the Bible with increasing fervor. Whether I un-
derstood or not, each word was truth. Even the interminable "begat" verses
were mines of spiritual ore. I meditated over the saccharine color prints of
Jesus with lambs, of Jesus being scourged, of Jesus dying, and I began to
talk to Jesus, shaping the air with my hands, imagining Him as my very
own.
The circumstance resolving my struggle was my first ejaculation. I had
no idea what had transpired. I woke during the night to find my belly
wet. At first I thought it was blood. Without disturbing my brother, I
crept from bed and found a flashlight . Where had the strange substance
come from? My parents told me nothing of sexual change, and I was too
naive to relate my own seminal flow to that of farm animals. My fevered
psyche interpreted the incident as a warning from Jesus that I must be
baptized.
I resolved to go to mass the next morning, Palm Sunday. My parents
approved-though not without some hesitation that I might turn Cath-
olic. .. . I hoped to remain anonymous, so I decided to attend a later mass.
I dallied along the road, examining pools for frogs' eggs, throwing
sticks and stones into a swirl of rusty water emerging through a culvert
near Mud Creek, and admiring a grove of june berry trees loaded with blos-
soms. Twice I turned and started back for home.
By the time I reached St Joseph's Catholic Church, the second mass
had ended, and there was no other. Jesus, I felt, had arranged this timing
for some umbrageous reason of His own, sheltering me from Catholicism .
Services were about to begin at the Christ Evangelical Church across the
street. On the steps were Eileen Ewald and her parents. I had had a crush
on Eileen ever since she appeared in second grade and said "sugar." It was
not the word itself, but her cultured tone in saying it that struck me as spe-
cial. I ached to be in love with her.
I followed Eileen into the church and sat in a pew at the very back. I
was entranced by the pale oak altar with its pastel plaster crucifixion. The
organ music, the first I had ever heard, was splendid. All through the ser-
mon, by the Reverend Joseph Krubsack, I sat in a daze. Jesus had directed
me here!
I lingered until Rev. Krubsack was alone and told him of my wish for

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Robert Peters 49

baptism. He promised to baptize me and my family on the Sunday after

Easter. But I would not become a full Lutheran, he warned, until I had
passed instruction.

PLOUGHING AND SEEDING

For five dollars, my uncle hired out his team, Bill and Bess, for plowing.
I was a coward near horses, and when Dad asked me to drive the team
while he steered the plow I refused. Horses would suddenly shake their
necks and bare their teeth.
My uncle was a hard driver. I had seen him beat Bill with a club while
the horse was tied in his stall. In pain, the horse broke free and ran from the
barn toward Minnow Lake, with my uncle in pursuit. I followed and saw
him corner Bill, who waited docilely while my uncle, his wrath spent,
grabbed the broken halter and stroked Bill's neck with surprising gentleness.
Eruptions of violence always dismayed me. In a recurring dream, Osmo
Makinnen threatened to attack. When I sought to defend myself, my arms
froze at my sides. Usually I woke in a sweat. Why my impotence? Dad had
given me pointers-and he had boxed at carnivals. To support my inepti-
tude, I found the Bible useful. If you followed Christ's example, you sim-
ply turned the other cheek. I found the violence of men far worse than
any violence of horses. A man enraged by a horse unleashed an enormous
force few men could hope to restrain.
One lasting image is of my father beating Lady. I had been told to graze
her in timothy along Sundsteen Road. Since she was always docile, I went
to the house for a drink of water and lingered talking to Margie. When I
returned, Lady was not where I had left her. Shortly, I heard my dad's
angry voice-the cow was in the cornfield. When he flung stones at Lady,
she sped crazily across the potato field . Dad cornered her near a fence,
grabbed a tree branch, and beat her. She stumbled and fell, quivering, her
belly swollen with calf. I grabbed the branch. Dad was shaking with rage.
I flung my arms around Lady's neck. I felt her blood on my face. Slowly,
she righted herself. I told Dad it was my fault. "It's all right," Dad said.
"Take her to the barn. Give her water."

TIMBER

On weekends I accompanied Dad to Buckotaban Lake, where we peeled

logs for the Wisconsin-Michigan Lumber Company. Dad and a friend, Mar-

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50 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

ion Briggs, were hired to strip bark from the logs and pile them so that
sledges and tractors could reach them for easy hauling. Briggs was a tall,
husky man in his thirties, with a small daughter. He had been abandoned
by his wife, reputedly a Spanish dancer. His mother raised the girl, keep-
ing her in homemade dresses of an ugly Victorian style. Briggs was a vio-
linist who, under mysterious circumstances, had given up his career. Only
rarely would he consent to perform. He encouraged Dad to play instru-
ments. They earned thirty cents for each log trimmed of branches and de-
barked. By working hard, they could finish six or seven trees an hour. My
job was to peel logs Dad had trimmed and slashed along one side. I used
a "spud," or tire iron. Pine bark came off easily. The spruce were difficult
though . On these I used a drawknife, a blade with two parallel handles,
scraping free the obstinate bark without gouging the wood. Since I was
slow, Dad worked most of the spruce himself. The best logs would be sawed
into lumber, the remainder pulped. Our clothes and hands were coated
with pitch. Only kerosene would cut it.
Briggs worked by himself, creating his own piles of timber. One after-
noon he walked over to me, chatted briefly, and then whipped out his penis.
There's a protocol for relieving yourself in the presence of other males: ei-
ther you turn your back or you stand beside them, facing the same way;
neither of you gazes at the other. Briggs's member was almost equine; I
had never seen anything like it. Dad came over and spoke curtly to Briggs,
who never displayed himself to me again.

THE JOLLYS
By traversing Ewald's forty and our own, we reached Perch Lake, the best
of all nearby lakes for swimming. Minnow, nearer our house, was thick
with bloodsuckers. And wading was impossible-you were soon up to your
knees in muck. Perch Lake had a wide sandy shore and a sandy bottom.
To get to the beach you had to cross a large potato field owned by a bad-
tempered bachelor, John Simon, the town grave digger, whose house was
invisible from the lake.
A grassy bluff with scrub Norway pines overlooked the beach. By get-
ting a good run, you propelled yourself into the water. We had contests to
see who could jump the farthest. For a swimsuit I wore old jeans cut off
above the knees. My sisters had one-piece suits from Sears. Nell, only four,
rarely went with us. My cousin Grace's breasts had already formed. George
Jolly delighted in flashing his rear at Grace-"mooning," he called it.
I enjoyed going to Perch Lake with the Jollys. George was my age, Bill

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Robert Peters 51

a year older. They lived at the opposite end ofSundsteen, a mile and a half
past the school. I thought nothing of walking the distance to meet them,
and since there were no telephones, there was no way of knowing whether
they would be home or not . They came from a huge family of ten chil-
dren. Bill and George loved fishing and often went to Columbus Lake.
The Jolly house was a two-storey affair covered with gray shingles. It
had the usual spread of outbuildings-a barn with lofts for hay, a hen-
house, a pigsty, and corrals for cows. The father and the oldest son worked
for the Wisconsin-Michigan Lumber Company. Mrs. Jolly was an ebul-
lient woman with huge breasts who wore the same dress for months, until
it turned to shreds. All of her dresses were of the same magenta Rit tint,
the hue rubbed dull by grease and child-soil.
The downstairs living room doubled as a bedroom. Here the parents
slept in a single bed with the three smallest children . Upstairs, the four
boys shared another bed, as did the girls, Margaret, Helen, and Lucille.
No rooms had rugs or linoleum. Bill and George would lie on the floor
directly over the dining table, collect bed fluff, wood slivers, and mouse
turds, and drop them through a crack into a pan of baked beans below.
Daily, Mrs. Jolly baked bread and cinnamon rolls. She gave me thick slabs
of hot bread smeared with bacon grease and peanut butter or wildcherry
(" pincherry") jam. There was never enough silverware. The family ate at
a rectangular oak table in two shifts, the older girls feeding the younger
children. In the center of the clothless table, near a platter of fried pike
and perch, stood the blue roaster full of beans. Bread, homemade jelly,
butter, lard, fresh milk, coffee. To help yourself to food you simply reached
into the roaster and then wiped your fingers on some bread . No plates
matched, and most were cracked. Only the parents used spoons and forks.
Cinnamon rolls. Fresh gooseberry pie.
At school Bill and George often took my part against Osmo Makin-
nen. Bill, blond, short, and muscular, was quieter than George, who had
black hair like mine and was always mischievous. Both were good students.
The three of us would start high school together. Bill later died at Monte
Cassino in the early years of the war.
From the Jollys I learned how to fish, and they taught me the little I
knew about sex. They seemed wiser than I, perhaps because they had older
brothers, perhaps because they were raised far more permissively; their
mother hardly had time to linger over their nurturing.
For our night swims in Perch Lake, Bill would bring matches, and after
we swam, we'd rustle up wood for a fire. Bill had already reached man-
hood, but George and I lingered in late adolescence. One evening, George
and I, naked, were horsing around, grabbing one another. Bill squatted

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near the fire watching. When George wrestled me to the sand, pinning
my shoulders, Bill came over. His penis was hard. He started to play with
it. George also began masturbating. I sat hunkered with my head on my
knees, amazed, excited, yet vaguely embarrassed. Out in the lake, hundreds
of toads swam toward our fire . As they hopped frantically ashore, we beat
them with sticks and threw them into the flames. Then we doused the
fire and left the beach.

COLUMBUS LAKE

I met Bill and George Jolly one morning at their house at 6 A .M. Their sev-
enteen-year-old brother, John, a freckled, husky youth, was still asleep on
the bed the three of them shared. He was lying on his back and his sheet
had worked up across his chest, revealing a sizable erection. George settled
a noose offishing line around John's penis and dropped the loose end of
the line out a nearby window. "Watch," he laughed, running downstairs.
The black thread moved with delicate tugs. John grew even more erect.
George yanked harder, and John awoke, cursing. "That's George doin' it
again, right?" Keeping the string taut, he went over to the window and
urinated . George yelled, ran back upstairs, and proceeded to wrestle his
naked brother to the floor.
Later, while George ate breakfast, I helped Bill dig night crawlers . They
loaned me a cane pole; they each had casting rods. They jammed some
bread and cheese into a bag, which would serve also for bringing fish home.
To reach the lake we traversed a superb stand of virgin timber-pine,
hemlock, and cedar, with some yellow birch . Partridge flew from thick-
ets. When we reached a floating bog, I matched my footprints to George's.
One misstep and you were up to your waist in muck. As it was, on any por-
tion of the bog your feet were under water. The trick was to leap to the
next clump before the mass sank deeper under your weight . The vast lake
was visible a hundred yards off. We soon reached high land and a rapid
creek that flowed into the lake .
We dropped our gear on the sand and stripped to our underwear. The
shallow water was rife with pickerel weed. Beyond was a drop-off where
Bill planned to fish . We tied fish stringers and a small bag of worms around
our waists. George showed me how to bait the hook.
Bill hooked two walleyes and some bass and bluegills. George caught
a pickerel, which he threw back, saying it was too bony, and nearly a dozen
bass, bluegills, and large perch. My catch consisted of six bluegills and three
smallmouth bass.

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Robert Peters 53

Robert Peters, age eighteen, holds his sister Jane in the fam-
ily's living room . Courtesy of Robert Peters.

We stopped for lunch, stripped, and had fun swimming and splashing.
When we were thirsty, we simply scooped up handfuls of water and drank.
A doe and a fawn appeared. A black bear, fortunately without cubs, spied
us and waddled back into the forest . While Bill continued fishing, George
and I lay stretched out on the sand, absorbing sun and talking about girls.
He claimed that he "did it" with Alice Carlson. She was the oldest of a
brood of children left motherless when their mother had died giving birth.
I knew George was fibbing, yet I chose to believe him, enhancing his prow-
ess, fearsome and mysterious to me. Perhaps I had a crush on George, of
the kind youths have on one another. I don't know. The more masculine-
and crude-he was, the better I liked him. I wished for the afternoon never
to end.

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IMPREGNATION

Charlie Mattek had staked his Guernsey bull in the north pasture, wait-
ing for Lady. When I led her to the gate, the huge Guernsey caught her
scent, grew aroused, reached the end of his tether, and pawed the ground.
While he grew frenetic, his penis dripping, Lady seemed oblivious of him
and kept munching grass, well beyond his reach. When Charlie pulled Lady
nearer, the bull began licking her, his penis a hot rod of meat ready for
penetration:. He shuddered and withdrew, lowing. Strings of semen dripped
from Lady. "That should do it," Charlie said. I led Lady home. I was to
bring her back if she remained in estrus.

CARNIVAL

The carnival took place in a field at the junction of Sundsteen Road and
Highway 17. I walked there before opening day to help erect tents and
booths. Brightly painted vans were arranged in a row at the back of the
field. Barred wagons, badly in need of paint, held a lion and a gorilla . Some
booths were already up. There would be a ferris wheel and a merry-go-
round . The carnies looked rough, most of them unshaven, some stripped
to the waist. The women among them dressed like men.
A large tent was splayed over the dirt, ready for hoisting. Half a dozen
men were driving stakes into the ground and tying guy ropes. "Don't just
stand there!" a voice shouted. "Get to work." The man, in his mid-twen-
ties, wore red trunks and was tanned a savage brown. His biceps were huge
and flexed as he stood before me. His accent was strange. "He'p get this
tent up and you'll earn a silver dollar."
I held the guy wires taut while he secured them to stakes . The crew
raised the tent, working a large center pole upright. We erected shorter
poles. The pungent odor of crushed grass blended with the snake-like smell
of canvas.
We set up platforms for a trapeze and surrounded an area of painted
boxes and hoops with a circle of wire, where the lion and gorilla would
perform. Near the center pole stood an ornate calliope, which received
power from a noisy generator.
When we broke for lunch, the carnival man invited me to his wagon .
His name was Brik. He was from Georgia, and traveled with the show for
half the year, moving north during the warm season and moving south
when it got cold. He bossed the crew.
The interior of his wagon was set up like a living room, complete with

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Robert Peters 55

small sofa and an embroidered, brightly colored pillow saying "I LUV U
MOM." A small dinette contained a couple of chairs and an icebox, and
a mattress and blankets were on the floor. "Like liverwurst?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, sitting at the table. He brought out milk and pop. "Milk
keeps my muscles big," he said. "I suppose you noticed."
"1 want to look like you," I said, feeling stupid as soon as my words
were out.
"You've got height, lad. Here, stand with your back against mine.
You'll see."
His buttocks flared against mine . He tightened the muscles of his back.
"I was right. You're taller." He faced me. His chest was covered with
curly black hair. "You'll have hair, and it'll be as black as mine." He
laughed. "And you'll get muscles." He had grown up on a farm . "I like
ramblin'," he said. "I could never be like my dad, married to some woman,
with kids tying me down."
He smeared liverwurst on slabs of soft A & P white bread, piling the
sandwiches on a paper plate. "Two's plenty," I said. His bare knees touched
mine. He spread his legs. I felt giddy, swallowed milk, and finished my
sandwich. A magnetic current from his knee jolted me . There was sweat
on my lip.
"Well, let's get on. There's more work to do." IfI stayed, in addition to
the silver dollar, he'd see that I got a pass for the big tent show. "I wish you
was older," he said. "I'd ask you to join this here carnival, and live with me."
Later, I went to his wagon to collect my pay and found him on his
couch stark naked. "Don't get upset, lad. You've seen a man naked before.
I have to wear my 'public duds' for tonight." I stole a look at his penis. It
had an enormous foreskin. He pulled some dress pants on, felt in his
pockets, and withdrew a silver dollar. "Don't see many of these around,"
he said. "Plenty in Colorado, though." He gave me a piece of paper say-
ing "Tent Show: Admit One."
I thanked him. He told me that ifI helped tear down the tents the next
night, I'd earn another dollar.
All the way home, I heard his accent. In a trance, I milked the cow. I'd
go anywhere he wanted, do anything he asked.
I plastered my hair with brilliantine. I regaled Margie with descrip-
tions of the tiger (in actuality a defanged beast) and the gorilla. She would
use my show pass; I'd sneak under the tent.
The Big Show was exciting, particularly the aerialists, billed as The Fly-
ing Godeckes from Poland. Spangles barely concealed the runs and tears
in their tights. Glimpses of peach-colored flesh glowed whenever the
woman balanced on her head and spread her legs and the trapeze turned.

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The aerialist doubled as a lion-tamer, while his partner put the gorilla
through hoops and loops. A scrawny elephant, tuskless, performed list-
lessly with a girl dressed as a ballerina with glittering tiara sitting on his
head. A pair of clowns pretended to throw pails of water at the audience;
the water was feathers. During the show, Brik circulated, supervising the
erection and removal of props.
I treated Margie to cotton candy and a sideshow featuring a fat woman
with a second head growing from her side, a midget missing all fingers ex-
cept for his thumbs, and a mummy, reputedly the body of John Wilkes
Booth, stolen from its grave. Most fascinating of all was a lady geek. Once
a night, so the hype went, she required a feast of hen's blood, Black Or-
pington, to be precise. We paid our fifteen cents and crowded close. A
nervous hen was tied by its leg to a stake in the ground. Harsh recorded
music, in scratchy violins, heralded I-Zelda's appearance. She undulated
forth, painted like a gypsy and dressed in a gaudy skirt and layers of beads.
"A good fat hen holds one pint of hot blood," a tout exclaimed. "For your
admission, you will observe I-Zelda, Princess of Turkey, bite this here black
hen's throat. It will cost you another fifteen cents to see her suck out the
life, killing the chicken dead!" He motioned us closer. "Anybody with a
bad heart, leave now. What you are about to witness ain't for the squea-
mish!" No one left. Margie looked puzzled, then horrified.
With ceremonial gestures, I-Zelda smoothed her hands over her body,
jangled her bracelets in a brief dance, circled the hen (now positioned be-
tween two large lighted candles), took up the fowl, and began sucking its
beak. She pulled a scarlet scarffrom her cincture and wound it about the
hen, securing its wings . Taking the bird firmly by its feet, she placed its
entire head in her mouth. The bird struggled. I-Zelda withdrew the
head. Trickles of blood were visible on its throat. I-Zelda's mouth was
bloody.
Margie was sick. We pushed our way through the crowd and started
home. This incomplete act, like so many in a lifetime, assumed a mystical
force. Was she a sorceress, or merely another desperate human performing
an outrageous act of survival?
I did not return to Brik the next evening. I stayed in the field all af-
ternoon gathering and husking corn. I chopped wood. Mter supper, I lay
in bed praying for Christ to quiet my turbulence. He approached with
palms extended, the wounds visible. He smiled, His robes wafted by an
aromatic breeze . As He neared, I saw that His face was the carnival
man's!

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Robert Peters 57

FIGHTS

To stifle the numerous quarrels Margie and I had that summer, my mother
would declare, "Just wait till you get to high school. Those guys are tough .
They'll knock your block off."
My worst quarrel with Margie occurred a week before high school, the
week after the county fair. To play pig family we formed a circle of kitchen
chairs on the grass. Our conflict was over which of us would play the sow.
Margie felt that a male should always play the boar, lingering at the back
of the pen digging up roots while the lucky sow lay on her side squirting
forth piglets. For a convincing porcine look, we wore Dad's heavy winter
coats.
I would, for once, be the sow! I grabbed the coat my sister preferred,
put it on, and flopped down in birth throes. I loved the delicious sensa-
tion of birthing. Squirt. Squirt. Squirt . When I turned to lick the piglets,
Margie kicked at me and yelled. I fought back, spraining her hand. She
announced she would drown herself in the lake.
I called her bluff, waved good-bye, and took the coats and chairs back
into the house. Half an hour later, I began to worry, filling in time with
some desultory hoeing in the flower garden. I started for the lake, near
panic. No signs near shore of her shoes or clothes, no footprints, no evi-
dence of a drowned person in the water. If she had indeed jumped, she had
drifted into the cranberry marsh, out of sight .
I returned home. As I passed a hayrick, crying, Margie jumped out
laughing. "Served you right," she said. I felt both angry and relieved.
From this point on, we played few childhood games. Within a few days
her menstrual cycles began. Mom was in the Rhinelander Hospital hav-
ing her goiter removed. Dad sent Margie to Aunt Kate to explain the facts
of life and chose the occasion for my own sex education-or at least he
tried. He explained "monthlies" and said it was time I "fucked" a girl. I
should cross the road and take Celia Kula into the woods and "do it ." I
was shocked. The paradox of women as both citadels of purity-this is
how I saw my mother, and how my father conditioned me to see her-and
licentious whores was painful.

GYM

I dreaded gym class, so I delayed the perfunctory physical examination for

weeks, hoping I would contract a disease rare enough to excuse me from
class. Not only was I inexperienced at games, but I dreaded showing my-

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self nude to strangers. The ball we had played at the Sundsteen Elemen-
tary School was for kids. Even then, I could rarely catch a ball, and my bal-
ance was terrible-I had never ridden a bicycle. The only thing I did well
was sprint over the rough terrain of those gravel country roads.
The principal, Mr. Kracht, known for his violent temper as "The Bull
of the Woods," demanded to know why I was not attending gym. He was
unimpressed when I said I lacked money for clothes. His ultimatum: "At-
tend on Monday! I will personally see you do!"
While the other students suited up, I stalled, removing my shirt as care-
fully as if it were glued to burn scabs. The locker door hid my lower body
from view, and I faced the wall, preferring to show the world my rear rather
than my privates. Once in the gym, I stood about with my arms awkwardly
folded, intimidated by the prowess and agility of the other boys, especially
those from town. When it came time to choose up sides for games, I was
always chosen last . I avoided showers until the gym teacher threatened to
strip and scrub me himself. "We don't want you stinking in class," he said.
Again, I lingered, disrobing slowly, waiting for the other boys to finish.
Draping my towel in front of me, I'd make my way to the end of the shower,
face the wall, and bathe. Weeks elapsed before I was able to linger and
enjoy the hot spray, a treat indeed considering our primitive bathing con-
ditions at home.
Eventually, one of the flashiest town boys, Augie La Renzie, took an
interest in me . I helped him with Latin declensions. He was curly-haired,
funny, incredibly agile, and popular with both girls and boys . In his fresh-
man year he made varsity basketball. During free periods, we would meet
at the gym, where he gave me pointers on basketball. I was soon fairly
adept at free throws. Augie also gave me health advice: Never wear some-
one else's jock strap; keep the venison out of your teeth; stop using bril-
liantine. He grew up to marry the county judge's daughter and became a
World War II ace and a commercial pilot.

Copyrighted Material
 Henry Bauer

Henry was born at home in 1932 on a rented dairy farm near Money Creek,
Minnesota, a small town in Houston County in the southeastern corner of the
state. The second oldest offour children, Henry has an older brother and a
younger sister and brother. He is retired from teaching and was living in a
city in southeastern Minnesota at the time of our interview.

EVERYTHING I DISLIKE in myselfis from my German side. My dad's

family was German and my mother's family was Norwegian . A lot of the
things you hear about the Germanic culture were true of the men on my
dad's side. They were aggressive, arrogant, boastful. My Norwegian side is
more docile and placid. But when I was growing up, we were closer on
my father's side; they were adamant about getting together for holiday re-
unions. I came to realize that I didn't like that aggressiveness and arro-
gance, but since it was what I grew up with, it was my idea of what a man
was supposed to be.
According to his older sister, my dad was raised to think that all the
obnoxious things he did-which he continued to do all his life-were cute.
He was the oldest boy in a German family, and spoiled. His father bought
him a new car when he was only fifteen. He quit school after the eighth
grade, never mixed much with other people, and never learned that he
couldn't always have everything he wanted. He never got over demand-
ing to have his way, and he used any method necessary to get it.
After my older brother was born, my father desperately wanted a daugh-
ter. Then I came along, and had the misfortune to be a boy. I've never re-
gretted it, but Dad certainly did. When my sister was born a year after my
younger brother, I overheard my grandmother say to my aunt, "I'm sure
glad Ted finally got a girl. He was so disappointed in those other two."
By the time I was four years old, I knew that he didn't like me. When we
were sitting around listening to the radio, I often wanted to sit on his lap,
but he would never let me. If I climbed onto his lap, he'd say, "Get off!
I'm tired ." One time, when I was twelve, we had a houseful of Dad's rel-
atives visiting. There was no place to sit, so I sat on Dad's knee and he
flicked his hot cigarette ashes down my back. I left the room crying, hurt
and humiliated.
59

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60 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Threshing Scene, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Henry Bauer

When I was about four years old, I just loved some of my dad's friends.
They were so nice, and gave me attention . One man especially, a neigh-
boring farmer, was so pleasant; he always smiled and was always happy. I
remember thinking what a beautiful man he was. He was good-looking,
but it wasn't his looks. I liked him because he was so darned nice . I didn't
think men were supposed to be nice.
My older brother worked outside with Dad. He was kind of Dad's
buddy and I was Mother's friend. I must have been kind of effeminate when
I was little, because I wanted my hair curled, and my mother curled it for
me one time. I played house a lot, and my mother would come and pre-
tend to help me. She made it fun and often made me laugh. I liked dolls
when I was four, five, six years old. Nobody seemed to be too upset about

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Henry Bauer 61

that, not even my dad. I remember him saying a few times, kind of as a
joke but not real put-down, "Henry should've been a girl."
Once a year, black singers from a college would come to sing in the
local church, and my aunt always had them over for coffee. One time, I sat
on the lap of one of the black women. She was large and plump, so warm
and nice, I liked her very much. Mter that I wanted a black doll. In those
days everyone called it a nigger doll. I got one for Christmas and I loved it.

About the time I graduated from college, just before entering the Army,
I was really hurting, troubled by homosexual thoughts and feelings I
couldn't control. We didn't hear anything about homosexuality back then.
The late forties and early fifties were the dark ages of sex. What informa-
tion you could find was awful. I read in a book or magazine that mastur-
bation was bad for you, so I tried to stop.
r went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and saw a psychiatrist . Appar-
ently, the official position of the clinic was that if you worked hard enough
and wanted to badly enough, you could change from gay to straight. I
told the psychiatrist about having homosexual feelings and he said, "Well,
you don't have as much ofa problem as you think you've got." I was de-
lighted, because this was what I wanted to hear. He said, "Now, I want
you to do some dating and, a few months from now, write back and tell
me how things are going." The idea was that if I would just date girls, I
would get over my fear of them . Homosexuality was regarded as a fear of
the opposite sex. In our rural culture, we believed doctors were the ulti-
mate experts, next to gods. So I tried dating and thought I was doing just
fine. I even wrote the psychiatrist a card telling him so.
In the army, in Korea, two or three months before I was due to come
back to the States for discharge, all my defenses wore out . It was nip and
tuck every day. I thought, can I hang on, or am I going to lose control? I
didn't want to have a nervous breakdown over there, because I'd be put
in a military hospital and God only knows when I'd have gotten out. I was
quite religious then, having been raised a Methodist in a very conservative
culture, so I would repeat to myself a couple of Bible passages I remem-
bered. One was, "Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not unto
thine own understanding." The other was, "You shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free." I had no idea at that time what the truth
was going to be, because I was so totally denying my gayness. I still ac-
cepted the idea that I was straight and only had to conquer my fear of
girls.
I got a teaching job in a small town within easy driving distance of
Rochester, because I knew that if I was going to get help, I had to be able

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to see a psychiatrist. For seven years, three days a week, I left school and
went to Rochester for psychotherapy sessions. I paid it all out of my own
pocket because I had no medical insurance. I didn't even dare to take my
legal tax deduction, for fear somebody would find out . At that time, see-
ing a psychiatrist automatically branded you as crazy.
I wanted desperately to change . There had been a guy in Korea everyone
knew to be a homosexual; the other guys would joke about him. I didn't
want to be known as one of "them," so I worked and worked. After lying on
the psychiatrist's couch for a whole year, all of a sudden, one day, I realized
I was very angry. It scared the shit out of me, because I didn't know the anger
was there, I had buried it for so many years. I had a hell of a time learning
to deal with it. That was in the days when psychiatrists wanted you to get it
all out at once-just go into a rage and spit it all out. I couldn't.
After seven years of this-and, of course, the psychiatrist was encour-
aging me to date again-I still hadn't figured out I was gay. He pro-
nounced me cured, said I was fine and I didn't need to come back any-
more. I believed him, but I noticed when we shook hands the last day, he
didn't look at me-he looked at the floor. Later I realized he knew bet-
ter, but didn't know where else to go. He was under the gun of his supe-
riors and didn't dare say, "Look, Henry, accept the fact that you're ho-
mosexual." And ifhe had said that, I might have freaked out.
Things started to go really bad. I 'd send for pictures of gorgeous young
men and then get pissed off at myself, tear them up and throw them out.
I was a little over thirty years old and horny as hell.
I saw another psychiatrist once a week for four years. He was shrewd
and nonjudgmental. He just let me talk and pointed things out occasion-
ally. I spent a lot of t ime putting myself down, since I thought I was com-
p
ete
y worthless because of my homosexual desires. I was convinced I was
rotten, that there was nothing good about me . One day, after about a year,
he zeroed in on me . He pointed out things I had said I'd done that were
good, and then he insisted that I say out loud, "I'm a good person." I felt
like I was being strangled . It scared the shit out of me . I tried every trick
in the book to avoid admitting there was anything good about me, but he
wouldn't let me out of it. This guy was a tough old fart . Finally I said it,
and after saying it I almost started to cry, but instead I started to giggle
like a little kid . I couldn't stop giggling.
That was the turning point, when I started to get better, though I still
considered myself straight . I saw him for another three years, and when-
ever I would get into my self-deprecating mode he would turn the screws.
I couldn't get out of it . He never told me, "Look, you're homosexual, ac-
cept it." I think he knew I was so paranoid about it that ifhe had just told

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me to accept it, I would have freaked out . He let me discover for myself.
I was shaving one morning, looking at myselfin the mirror, and all of a sud-
den I realized I was seeing beauty in my arms. I was never a physical speci-
men, but it didn't matter. I was beginning to see some beauty in myself.
Mter four years with him, I began sneaking up to the Twin Cities on
Saturday nights. I would go to the Hennepin Baths-this was all before
AIDS-and I'd watch the queers. I'd go in the steam room and of course
they'd come in. They obviously wanted to do something, but I would ig-
nore them and feel horrible about it. Then I heard about a different bath-
house, went there, and started getting into sex. It was very exciting, but
I still had the guilt and still considered myself straight .
I started going to a bar called the Gay Nineties for about the last hour
on Friday nights, just to watch the queers. But one night, a little voice in
me started saying, "These are my people." That voice kept on coming again
and again, "This is where I belong, these are the people I belong with."
I was still rejecting being gay, but the voice wouldn't stop.
When I was forty-four, on Thanksgiving weekend, I was at a gay bar
in La Crosse called the Down and Under. When I saw two very macho-
looking guys sitting at the bar, I thought, this bar can't be gay, they're
not gay. When they started kissing passionately, I was shocked. Mter all
this time, I still thought all gays were nellie queens. Then I thought, boy,
if they can be gay, I can too. That was the moment I threw in the towel-
that was my coming out . I saw a gorgeous guy dancing by himself in the
middle of the floor, so I went out and started dancing with him. Why was
I spending twenty-five dollars a week on the psychiatrist, when I could be
spending it on myself, having fun? The next week I told my psychiatrist,
"I'm gay, I realize now. I don't think I need to see you anymore." He said,
"That's fine," we shook hands, and he wished me luck. I can never de-
scribe the weight that was lifted from my shoulders. At forty-four years
old I felt I was just beginning my life.
I got ungodly promiscuous for the next four years, and thank good-
ness it was all before AIDS. I think when anyone first discovers his sexu-
ality, he's going to go crazy for a while. There were two bookstores in
Rochester. Going into them probably wasn't very wise for a public school
teacher, but I wasn't the only teacher going. We could sneak in the back
doors off the alley and somehow there was never a problem . They had glory
holes, and young straight or bi guys would come in wanting a blow job.
They were horny and usually a little drunk and hadn't been able to pick
up a girl in a bar. Sometimes I would bring one home-gorgeous men.
Those were the ones that always turned me on, more-or-less straight or
straight-acting guys .

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I've never had a relationship and I've never wanted one. I suspect that
I'm not capable of it, or maybe I fear it . I've had some wonderfully excit-
ing sexual experiences and still do occasionally, but AIDS has scared many
young guys away from even the safest sex . I like being independent, free
to come and go. I just met a neat guy about my age at a picnic in Min-
neapolis. We had good conversation, but I could see he was also very in-
terested in me sexually, which is not what I want . I want to be friends with
guys my age, but I don't want to get into sex with them. I prefer to have
sex with a younger guy or not at all.
Coming out to myself and other gays didn't make me instantly at ease
with being gay. If anything, it made me more paranoid. I probably would
have been fired from my teaching job had my gayness been discovered.
There were plenty of good Christian teachers and administrators who would
have seen to that. I'm still not ready to come out publicly. In this town, gays
and lesbians who are open about it get hate calls and death threats. I'm fine
with being out to a few good friends and supportive relatives.

My dad would make a sexual joke and then laugh lasciviously. He regarded
sex as very dirty and nasty and funny. My mother regarded it as very dirty
and nasty and not funny. A young neighbor girl in the little town of Money
Creek had gotten pregnant and Mother said, "Well, she got herselfin trou-
ble." Her eyes got big, which made me think it was really bad.
Until I was about ten years old, anytime I was walking upstairs in front
of my dad, he would goose me all the way up the stairs. Apparently, this
gave him some kind ofthrill. When I was about ten and protested, he didn't
do it anymore. He was verbally abusive, and he played mind games with
all of us . We never knew what to expect-sarcasm, insults, anger, or a put-
down joke, all of which we were expected to accept with grace. Dad's
temper was one of the most intense I've ever known, and expressing anger
was perfectly acceptable for him. For us kids, however, getting too angry
meant getting punished, sometimes severely.
I have suspected that my dad may have been a closet homosexual, given
his extreme frustration with life. He didn't have the access to therapy I
had, so I suppose he dealt with it in the only way he could . He hated ho-
mosexuals. As Shakespeare said, "He doth protest too much ." But he also
seemed to hate women. When television came out and we'd see entertain-
ment shows with a woman in skimpy clothing, you'd think a heterosexual
man would have enjoyed it . But Dad would say, "God, she thinks she's
smart." He always put women down, treated my mother like dirt under
his feet. Outside the family he was a very popular man, as abusive people
often are, but inside he could be cruel.

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My relationship with my mother was infinitely better, but there were

things that weren't right. She gave me too many enemas when I was lit-
tle. I think she got some jollies from that. Kids were given enemas a lot
then-people thought it did them some good when they were sick-but
I got enemas when I know I didn't need them.
Church played a great role in formulating my guilt feelings, because in
those days the church controlled people by making them feel scared and
guilty. And of course it still does, especially the religious right. I was quite
religious until I came out of the closet and started reading the gay under-
ground news, such as The Advocate. Since I've learned how the church has
discriminated against gays and many other groups in the name of Chris-
tianity, I've become very hostile toward the Christian religion.

When I was about thirteen, going to a country school, I discovered mas-

turbation. There were three of us boys in the eighth grade-that was the
entire grade. One day, one of these boys and I were walking home and a
little white terrier dog was following us. We took the dog to a secluded
spot down by a little stream and my friend beat it off. Within the next few
days, I tried it myself. That's when I became aware of sexuality.
I was a real good friend of one of the other boys in my grade. He kept
asking me to stay overnight at his place. Naturally, we would have slept to-
gether. I never went, because I was sexually attracted to him and was afraid
that once we got to bed I would grab his cock and start playing with it,
and that would be unacceptable. I had this fear instilled in me about the
awfulness of any kind of sex.
I was always interested in wildlife and conservation, so in 4-H I built
wildlife shelters to place along the edges of our fields, and another one
which I demonstrated at the county fair. If I were to get a blue ribbon
there, I would go on to the state fair. I knew all the boys had to stay in a
dormitory at the state fair, and I was afraid of what I might do, or what
one of them might want to do with me, so I purposely did a poor job at
the county fair.
My worst fear in high school in Winona was having to take phy. ed.
and be in the locker room with the other boys. I suppose I was afraid I'd
get a hard-on, even though other boys did frequently, much to my fasci-
nation. But more than that, I think it was the competition-playing foot-
ball and basketball. I didn't know how. We didn't play those games on the
farm . During basketball season, the teacher would come in, take roll, toss
out the basketball, and go have coffee for the rest of the hour. I was glad
when he left us on our own, so we farm kids could go over to a corner and
talk and stay out of the game.

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There was something horrifying about phy. ed. and 1 hated it. When
we played basketball, we had to dribble down and make lay-up shots. That
was the most foreign thing in the world to me. The city kids had no mercy
and would chew us farm boys out royally when we did something wrong.
Very often, I would get sick and stay home on the day I had phy. ed., es-
pecially if we were going to be wrestling, which I hated most of all. I don't
think there was ever a day I was sick that wasn't a phy. ed. day.
Joining choir in my sophomore year got me out of phy. ed . one day a
week. I loved music anyway. I loved singing, and choral music is still one
of my favorite forms . I also wanted to learn to play piano, and bugged may
parents until they finally let me take lessons. For some reason, my dad
hated music and didn't want one of his sons being a musician, even though
many of his relatives were. Joining choir was probably what caused me to
end up majoring in music in college, because 1 discovered the beauty of
great music that I might not have otherwise.

When I was about a junior in high school, I tried to screw a cow. I had
gotten up on a bushel basket, ready for action, when I heard my dad and
the farm owner coming to the barn door. So I never consummated my act
of love with the cow and I never tried it again. Another time I was going
to fuck a sheep, but the sheep was so dirty it wasn't possible. I tried to
have a calf suck my cock once, but one lick ended that. The calf's tongue
was so rough, it was extremely painful.
I never heard the word "homosexual" until my senior year in high
school, when I was trying to put the make on a friend of mine . To keep
me away he said something like, "There are three kinds of homos-homo
sapiens," and homo something else I can't remember, "and homosexu-
als." That's the first time I knew there was a word that described my sex-
ual feelings. The words gay, faggot, and queer weren't passed around like
they are now. Some guys I knew were effeminate queens, but I didn't think
of them as having sex with other guys. I didn't like them, felt embarrassed
in their presence, and avoided them . I'm still embarrassed to be seen in
public with guys like that .
During my senior year, I drove my dad's car to school and gave a ride
to a neighbor boy who was in the ninth grade, a real cutie. Sometimes in
the wintertime, when it got dark early, we would sit and talk at the place
where I let him off. One time I got him to sit on my lap and I beat him
off, but I felt so guilty about it I kept him at arm's length after that. I
know he wasn't gay, but I'm sure we could have had some exciting times
had it not been for my guilt.
I put myself through college by playing in a dance band . There was a

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high school kid who was in the band also , and within the next two years
he and I got to be pretty good friends. Oftentimes when we got back from
a dance job I gave him a ride home. We'd sit out in front of his house and
talk about sex, if! could get him on the subject . Sometimes I jacked him
off and sometimes he did it for me , but we never took our penises out of
our pants. It was very erotic. He was straight, as far as I know.
During my years in college, I began to get more and more bothered
by my homosexual feelings. I'd assumed this was a natural phase boys go
through-maybe I'd read it somewhere-and that by the age of eighteen
it would change . I tried to do some dating and to force myself to have fan-
tasies about girls when I masturbated, but it didn't work. By the time I
was a senior in college I was becoming a nervous wreck about all this, so
I was staying away from sex, for the most part. Just after 1 graduated from
college, I went to Rochester to see that first psychiatrist , the one who told
me to do some dating .

Our farm was in a valley and we had pastureland that extended into the
woods on the sides of the bluffs. I was in heaven when I was in the woods;
it was an escape. In the summer, it was my duty to get the cows home for
milking. Frequently, they were back in the woods. I usually went early to
give myself time to explore. I loved the wildflowers I would see there. Often
I would drop my pants and jack off back there, sometimes with a cow or
two watching curiously. It was very erotic. I still love the southeast Min-
nesota forests and go hiking in them occasionally.
I have always believed that growing up on a farm builds good charac-
ter. My mother and I didn't like farming, but as a teacher of thirty-four
years I always knew that the farm kids were my favorites-wholesome and
decent and clean-cut. They were more honest, more down-to-earth, more
reliable; they knew the value of work. In that way, I appreciate my up-
bringing. But I was pretty isolated.
When I was fifteen, the milkman who came to get our milk was beau-
tiful. This is when I was really getting horny to do something with an-
other guy. I waited every day for him to come. There I was, a fifteen-year-
old kid standing around wondering how to get at this guy's body. I couldn't
even talk to him, couldn't think of anything to say. I just stood there, watch-
ing him, wondering if he knew why. If I had grown up in a city where I
had the freedom to get downtown, to be exposed to more city influences
and gay men, I might have come out a lot sooner. I feel certain that if I
could have been seduced by some gentle, understanding man when I was
fifteen or sixteen, I would have avoided a lot of pain.

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 Harry Beckner

Harry was born in his grandparents) bedroom on their farm in northeastern

Nebraska) Wayne County) in 1937. He and an older sister grew up on three
rented farms in that area. Harry was an elementary school teacher for thirty-
seven years) was married for twenty-seven years) and is the father of two chil-
dren. He lives on an SO-acre farm in western Iowa with his partner, Bill
Hogan) where they raise cattle, hogs) turkeys and chickens) and put up their
own hay.

I'VE LIVED A heterosexual life, but it was a facade . In 1957, I wanted to

get away from home. What do you do? I got married, which was the ap-
propriate thing to do in that day. On the wedding night, I was wishing I
was going home with a man instead of a woman. I looked at all the guys
in the wedding party that were sexy as hell and I would've gone home
with anyone of them, except that wasn't the way it was supposed to be .
There was an empty farm place between the two country schools where
my wife and I taught, and there was another gal that taught a mile up the
way. I was in hopes that I could get another guy to teach close by, and the
four of us would live in that house . We two guys would sleep together, and
the two women could sleep together. I thought it would've been just neater
than hell, but it never came to be.
The first few years of being married I was fucking every night and jack-
ing off in-between because the fucking didn't satisfy me. I relished nights
when my wife went out and I stayed home and took care of the kids. I'd
get out my jug of wine and drink till I felt pretty dang good, and then I'd
go to the bathtub and do all kinds of things with little toys that I'd in-
vent, because I didn't dare have anything around. I'd have a sex orgy with
myself, and dream about other guys.
In the sixties, Life magazine had a story on the gay life of San Fran-
cisco. It showed guys leaning up against lightposts and trees, waiting to
get a trick. I dang near wore it out reading it, thinking oh god, I wish I
was in San Francisco. l Some of my wife's relatives had just gotten back
from California, and several of the people they had gone out there to see
were no longer couples because, as they said, "Her husband left her to live

68

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Harry Beckner 69

with a guy. Can you believe it? They call it 'gay.'" I thought, god, that's
what I am .
I was married for twenty-seven years, but I was always out playing
around, having sex with men and being sexual with my wife on the side.
The hardest part was saying, hey, I'm gay-I can't live on both sides of
the fence. Now I'm ver y open with my family and they all accept it . I'm
still Dad and I'm still Grandpa, like I was when I was straight or what-
ever.
I've always been interested in guys, and it's never been something that
I felt dirty or guilty about doing. It was such a part of me that I accepted
it as being natural-I did it because it was an urge, and I satisfied the urge .
I assumed that everybody did it, because I felt so comfortable doing it. I
never thought of myself as homosexual and I knew of no one that was. I
read about homosexuals in health books, but I thought you had to be some
kind of a fruit loop to be one. I was as normal as the next guy. I knew I
liked guys, but didn't everybody?
There were two women that lived together in our town, and they were
accepted by the community. Mom said, "Well, one of them's got to be the
man." So I realized as a kid that women did that , but there weren't any
men that I knew of. There were two guys, two miles from us, that lived
together for years and died together, but as a kid I just passed that off.
When Dad needed help at harvest time he told me to go get them, because
they didn 't have a car. Everybody said they were brothers, but they didn't
have the same last name.

The first farm we lived on was only eighty acres and not that productive.
We were very poor, so we made do with what we had-one tractor and
horses. Dad said that if! did the work, then he wouldn't have anything to
keep him busy. So until I was in high school I did very little farmwork ex-
cept walking through the corn and cutting out all the cocklebur, a pesky
weed. I did that from the time I was big enough to carry a hoe .
House and garden and chickens were things that Dad said I could do
up until I was fourteen-"Stay around the house and help your ma." I had
to help plant and take care of the garden. We never had to worry about
mowing the house yard because the chickens ate all the weeds and the
grass. I always had a batch of my own chickens to raise every year, from
the time I was big enough to take care of them. I think I've raised just
about every kind that they make.
My grandparents, my mother's parents, lived about two miles from us.
You could stand in our door yard and see their place. I saw them almost
every day. My grandmother used to say, "Learn how to sew, learn how to

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cook, learn how to bake-you don't know what that old lady that you
marry is going to be like . You may have to do those things ." I did a lot of
cooking. I couldn't wait for my mom and dad to leave-in those days they
didn't go much of anywhere-so I could have the kitchen to myself and
stir up something. Usually it was pies or cake or something that Mom
didn't make.
People used to just drop in to visit , which they don't do anymore. If
there wasn't anything in the house to serve for lunch, I'd be out in the
kitchen whipping up a lunch while my parents were in the living room
talking with the guests. I even made ice cream and baked a cake both while
they were having a chat. When they got done chatting, I'd say, "Come
have lunch!" One Sunday we had a family gathering of all the aunts and
uncles and cousins . I was flying around there helping serve this, that and
the other thing, and one of my uncles said, "He's going to make some-
body a good wife someday," and I thought, hmmm.
When I started high school, we moved to a farm that was 240 acres,
three times the size of what we'd had. In 1950 that was a pretty good size.
We had two tractors, so I got worked in real well . We always had cattle,
hogs, and corn and oats. In the spring, I would take off days from school
to help plow and disk and plant oats. By the time we got to planting corn,
school was out . When it came harvest time, we were t he only ones in the
area that still had a threshing machine . My dad, two neighbors, and my-
self was our crew. Another guy and I would load up all the bundles, haul
them over and pitch them off, then go back out and get another load .
Most of the other farmers already had combines. Dad thought it was a
waste to use a combine, because he wanted the straw instead of leaving it
out in the field .
I preferred milking by hand, so I usually did that while somebody else
used the machine. We took our cans of cream to town on Saturday night
and sold it to the creameries. That was our paycheck for the week, what
we bought our groceries with .
Dad was thirty-nine when I was born, so I always felt that he was an
old man. He was kind of a loner and I was more outgoing, so we didn't
have a good close relationship, but we always got along. Mom and I were
always real close. If! got anything at school when I was a kid, like a candy
bar, I waited to share it with her when I got home . She was always so happy
to have it . I took every paper home from school to show her.
My sister and I went to a country school a quarter of a mile from our
house . One day when I was in kindergarten I asked the teacher if I could
go to the bathroom. I wanted to go to the outhouse because I'd noticed
a hole in my pants, in my crotch, and I was afraid everybody was going to

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Harry Beckner 71

see my underwear. I didn't go to the outhouse, I ran home. It was snow-

ing something fierce, the wind was blowing like crazy, it was below zero,
a blizzard. I didn't put on my mittens, I didn't button up my coat, and
the snow was deep already.
When I got home, I was crying because my hand was frozen from hold-
ing my coat shut. Mom and Dad had just butchered a hog, and they were
working on it in the kitchen. Mom said, "What's the matter with you?
Why are you home?" I said I had a hole in my pants, and I was afraid some-
one would see. Mom told Dad to go tell the teacher where I was. I stayed
home because Mom said I would just run away again. She thawed out my
hand in cold water, and then I got to have some cracklin's from the fry-
ings of the lard.

This is weird, but when I was four years old I thought it would be neat to
be able to go out to the cemetery and walk around underground and play
with everybody's cock. I knew that they wouldn't care, and I could get an
assortment of them. I had never been to a cemetery, but I knew there were
cocks out there and nobody would care if I played with them .
Dad was quite a sexy man . Mom did the puritanical thing, like so many
women did back in those days. Sex was taboo. We'll do it if we have to, but
we aren't going to talk about it. Dad was interested in presenting himself.
I used to watch him stand in front of a mirror when he got dressed. He'd
reach in his pants and make sure his cock was in just the right place so it
would show. He'd see if it made the right impression on his pants, and if
it didn't he'd rearrange it.
When I was five, Dad had a friend come home from work with him for
supper one night . The guy was single, and he had just gotten back from
World War II, and he was cute . I went into my bedroom and arranged my
cock in my pants so that it would show, hopefully, so that he would take
an interest in me . Then I came out with something to show him, but he
didn't seem to notice my cock. There probably wasn't anything to notice,
but I went back to my room and rearranged it, got something else to show
him, and came back out . I kept doing that till my mother told me to quit
making a nuisance of myself and go play.
I always wondered if Dad played both sides of the fence . Ifmy mother
and sister and I were gone for some reason, he always got one of his older
brothers to sleep with him . This brother was about ten years older, and he
and his wife hadn't slept together for years. I've been interested in sex since
I was old enough to know that there was a difference, so these things made
a mark on me. I thought it was a little queer.
Dad had another brother, a year or two older, that never had married.

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72 Part 1. Coming ofAge Before the Mid-J960s

"1 always felt fortunate to be on a farm, that it was the best place to be." Harry Beckner at
age thirteen. Courtesy of Harry Beckner.

Uncle Fuzz used to come for the Fourth ofJuly and Christmas. Ifhe came
at Christmas, he might go home by Easter, because he worked seasonal
jobs for farmers. He would stay with us until he ran the battery down on
the radio, then go on to the other relatives who had electricity. One of my
uncles had seven or eight girls, and Uncle Fuzz would let them-or ask
them to-paint his fingernails and toenails, and he'd always have a neck-
lace or something on. No male wore a necklace in those days. I started
thinking Uncle Fuzz was just a little bit queer, but it was okay as far as I
was concerned.
In high school you had to fit the mode or you were queer, so I played
the straight line. But I wasn't interested in girls. I wore extra-tight pants
because I wanted the guys to say, "Look at his cock," and they did. One
time I was sitting in the car waiting for my sister and a guy said, "I've got
to see that big thing." He came over and stuck his hands in the window.
I let him unzip my pants and take it out. Once he got it out and it got
hard, he left .
My best friend and I were born on the same day. Our cocks were so
identical that if you put them in a sack you couldn't tell which was whose.
I always wanted in his pants. He was of the Catholic faith and said, "If!
play around, I've got to go to confession in the morning and tell them I
had sex with a male, so I don't want to." One night he said he had to take

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a leak, and I said I had to. So we got out of the car. I said, "Somebody's
coming!" and it scared the heck out of him . He got in the car and didn't
zip up, so I grabbed his cock and played with it . I did that two or three
times with him and it always worked .
Another night we had been up to the next town. He had a girlfriend
there, and she had a boyfriend in the town. We were outsiders. We'd gone
up to the girl's house , and her boyfriend found out about it, so we got our
hind ends chased out of town . We had a tire that was darn near flat on a
gravel road, and we were just flying along to get the heck out of there and
save our necks. When we got out to the farm he had to pump up the tire,
and then we sat there in the car. I reached over and- he was very cooper-
ative-unzipped his pants and took his cock out and banged him off. "You
son of a bitch," he said. "Now I've got to go tell the priest in the morning."
I was involved wholeheartedly in Future Farmers of America. 2 But
driving the tractor through the field in the summertime, cultivating corn,
it was hot, and I was so sleepy watching the corn go by. I would think, I'm
not going to farm anymore. I'm going to get me a big, fancy, high-falutin'
city job. Yet, deep down inside there was that part of me that loved the
farm.
My best friend and I were chosen by our FFA chapter to go to the na-
tional convention at Kansas City when I was a senior in high school. Fred,
a student teacher, went with us for the week, and we all slept in the same
bed. Fred must've read me like a book. At night, he and I would sit on the
couch and talk. One night he laid his head in my lap and said, "Well, this
is nice, but there's something hard underneath." He banged his head up
and down. "Oh, it's got to be your belt buckle. Undo your belt buckle."
So I undid my belt buckle . "There's still something hard ." I was a minor,
so he didn't touch it. But, god, I wish he would have.
That fall I started teaching in a country school and sent Fred an invi-
tation to the Christmas program . He said he was going to stay with me
that night. I was exhilarated and didn't know what to expect. It was colder
than hell and we slept upstairs in an old farmhouse that had no heat up-
stairs. We had covers on till the cows came home . We talked in bed for a
couple hours, and Fred said, "Let's lay side by side so we can keep warm,"
so we snuggled up real close. He slipped his hand over onto my thigh and
inched over, little by little, until he touched my cock. It was harder than
hell, just ready to jump up and down. I grabbed his and we had one heck
of a rendezvous. That went on for several years .
One of the guys I went to high school with was a cheerleader, and when
a guy was a cheerleader, he was a pussy. We both started teaching that fall
right out of high school. I suggested that we stay together in a hotel in

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Norfolk for teachers' convention . In the middle of the night he rolled over
and his cock was hard as he rolled onto my hand . I grabbed ahold of it
and started banging away on it, and about the time that he was ready to
shoot, he reached over and grabbed ahold of mine. Man, did he ever thrash
it! He shot his load and rolled over and went to sleep, and there I laid all
primed and in trouble . But it was worth it, because I always wondered
what he had.

Bill and I have been together for over seven years. We met in Carter Lake
Park in Omaha, looking for tricks. I'd taken the whole day and gone to
town to see how many I could do in a day. Bill and I had times together
for several years before we got together. Now we're both pretty well set-
tled; we're monogamous and have been since the summer we started.
One Saturday that summer, Bill was digging the septic tank hole on
his piece ofland . I saw his car parked there and he was down in that hole
throwing dirt out. He had carved steps into the dirt, so I walked down-
about ten, twelve feet . All he had on was a pair of shorts, and I yanked
them down and gave him a blow job. He asked me if I wanted to get off
and I said no, because I still wanted to tear around. A couple weeks later
he called me up and asked if he could come see me Saturday night. He
brought me a gorgeous bouquet of iris . It would've taken a bushel basket
to hold them all. We put them in bouquets, and I asked him if he could
stay all night. We've been together ever since. IfI'd have looked for some-
body high and low, I would never have found anybody as compatible.
When Bill started to live here with me, he used to say, "Why don't you
clean out the stufffrom around those trees down there>" I've got all kinds
of stuff in those trees, from treasures to junk. I said it was because I might
need it someday. That was one of the things I learned: You don't throw
anything away, because if you throw it away you're going to need it and
you'll have to buy it. In the years that Bill has lived with me, he's used
more out of those trees than I have. He'll drag something up to the
house-"You mind if I take this? You got any use for this?" In the city, if
you don't have, you don't have . What are you going to make do with? On
the farm, there's always some way to come up with it . lfit's food, you can
grow it or raise it. Ifit's heat, you can go cut it down and chop it up.
Usually farm people are more down-to -earth, not pie-in-the-sky, and
accept things for what they are. I always felt fortunate to be on a farm,
that it was the best place to be. You've got a lot offreedom that you don't
have in town. I used to look at my cousins in town and think, jeez, how
awful! And I still feel that way. When spring comes in town, so what? The
grass gets green and you've got to mow it. On the farm, spring is the most

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Harry Beckner 75

exhilarating time of the year. Everything starts to come to life, new baby
animals and time to start planting.
Someday, Bill and I are going to build a house on Spencer's Mountain,
south of Missouri Valley. He would like to build it today, but I'm not ready
to quit farming yet . Bill has two-and-a-half acres and has got the blue-
prints all drawn. It's out in the country, so I could handle that. There's a
cemetery just west of the property, where Bill has bought three lots. That's
where we're going to be buried someday. You can see Omaha from there.
It's about sixteen miles from Omaha, perfect and beautiful.

NOTES

1. Harry refers to an article, "Homosexuality in America," in the June 26,

1964, issue of Life (pp. 66-74,76-80). The photograph he recalls, of a man lean-
ing against a lightpost, actually showed "a policeman in tight-pants disguise
wait[ing] on a Hollywood street to be solicited by homosexuals cruising by in
cars ." The article, by Paul Welch and Ernest Havemann, reported on the gay
world's recent emergence from the shadows, consequent conflicts with law en-
forcement, and perspectives on this "affliction" from legal, religious, and scien-
tific viewpoints .
2. Future Farmers of America (FFA) is an organization for students in grades
seven through twelve, to help them prepare for careers in farming and farming-
related businesses. It was founded in 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, where the na-
tional convention is held each year. Members of local FFA chapters participate in
varied activities, including livestock and crop judging competitions, and are eligi-
ble for various degrees and awards.

Copyrighted Material
 Jim Cross

Jim was born in northeastern Iowa in 1938, where he and his parents and
older brother lived with hisgrandparents on their 160-acre farm near the small
town of Westgate, in Fayette County. His parents bought their own farm nearby
when Jim was about four years old. Two sisters were born after that. Jim and
his lover, George, live in Madison, Wisconsin.

WHEN I HEAR some of the stories people tell of their childhoods I

think, my god, I must have been really protected. Maybe I missed some-
thing. My parents were very open, very nurturing, tried to let us have as
much rein as we dared before they would pull us in if they saw us going
off the deep end. They were always very supportive of us learning how to
do different things. For many years I didn't realize what good role mod-
els they were.
My mother's mother died when she was five, so she was raised by an
aunt and uncle . We lived with them when I was a young child. Mter that,
we still saw them a great deal. They were like grandparents to me, always
supporting me in whatever I wanted to do, and praising me if! did some-
thing good . They gave me a real sense of who I was, and of feeling good
about myself. They were very strict people, but at the same time they were
very progressive for their time .
Even after gas and electric stoves were popular, my grandmother in-
sisted on keeping her wood-burning cookstove . My grandfather would sit
by the stove, by the cob box, and I would sit on his lap and he would read
to me-Mother Goose tales and other children's stories. There were al -
ways books in the house. And Grandpa would hitch up the two-horse team
to the flatbed wagon and take my brother and me down to the creek bed
to get a load of sand for our sandbox. We had the hugest sandbox in the
country.
When I was about four years old my father bought his own farm, where
I lived untill graduated from high school. It was a smaller farm, 120 to
140 acres, two miles from my grandparents' farm. We lived about a half
mile off of the main gravel road, and the road to our place was just dirt.
Certain times of the year the mud was so awful, we couldn't go back and

76

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Jim Cross 77

forth in a car or pickup. We went on the tractor from our house down to
the corner, where my father would leave the car. I always got dirty riding
the tractor, and it made me mad, because then I didn't look good when
we got to town .
We had hogs and Black Angus feeder cattle and chickens running about.
Washing eggs was a daily chore-if the eggs made it to the house. One
day my father went out to the chicken house carrying two buckets of water.
While he was there, he gathered the eggs. He had one bucket of eggs and
another that still had water in it, and when he came out of the chicken
house he decided he was going to throw the water out . But he didn't pay
any attention to which bucket he picked up, and there went the eggs. We
were lucky enough that we got to see it happening.
We had a pot-belly stove, and my brother and I had to get wood from
the basement, bring it up and pile it in the woodbox by the stove for over-
night, so that we wouldn't freeze to death. I was usually the one that helped
in the house because I liked doing it and I was the youngest . My brother
was enough older and stronger that he could help Dad do the outside stuff.
When the first of my sisters was born, I was delegated to the house to help
mother so that meals were ready when my father and brother needed to
come in and eat . I was glad, because I enjoyed cooking and all of the things
that go along with keeping house. I learned to appreciate a lot of the things
that farm women do and most farm men take for granted.
My brother and I got along real well as young children, but we started
drifting apart. I realized that I was more prone to keeping house and I en-
joyed it. I think in some ways he was resentful because I was able to do
that, and I still could do outside work if! wanted to or needed to. I never
felt like there were real boundaries. My parents never pushed us into those
slots, where a guy had to do this, a girl had to do that. It probably explains
why they were very supportive and accepting, from the very beginning,
when I came out to them. I think they already knew, in their hearts.
I did a lot of cooking and baking-pies, cakes, cookies, most every-
thing, the basic stuff that farm people eat. And there was always canning.
We had a very big garden and we all worked in it. My mother and I would
do the canning and freezing in what they used to call a washhouse, a lit-
tle shell-type building with cooking and laundry facilities that we used
pretty much all summer and into the fall. A lot of cooking and canning
happened in that little building.
My father was always appreciative of anything that I did to help him.
If he didn't like the way I was doing something, he would say, "I think
you'd find it easier to do it this way. Let's try it this way." At the time I
thought, oh yeah, sure. But in the long run he was usually right. Working

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78 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

with my father was quite regimented and routine-you fed the cows at
this time of day and you fed the pigs at this time . The long blocks of time
that my mother and I spent together were a lot more spontaneous. But I
was close to my father and I really admired him . He was a very hard-work-
ing person, a very simple, common person, and extremely well-liked. There
wasn't anyone that he couldn't talk with .

My brother and I were always watching the farm animals do what they do
naturally, whenever the mood strikes. And my folks were certainly aware
that my brother and I were sexual and sometimes played out sexual fan-
tasies with the neighbor kids. The first time I got caught having sex I was
ten or eleven years old. It was with the neighbor girl, and we were in our
hayloft and lost track of time. We were both stark naked, feeling each other
and doing all those things that kids do . We were interrupted when my fa-
ther came up to throw hay down for the cattle. Fortunately, he didn't throw
us down with the hay. He just told us to go in the house and behave our-
selves-didn't make a big issue of it. When we talked about it afterward,
he didn't chastise me or say that my hands would fall off if I touched that
thing again. We had neighbors that would tell their kids that if they didn't
stop playing with themselves, their hands would rot, they'd go blind, all
sorts of awful things.
Maybe six months later, there were two neighbor boys a year and two
years older than 1. The three of us were in the barn and of course we had
to experiment . I was already attracted to the male gender rather than the
female, and I was real curious to know what other boys looked like. I ini-
tiated it, but it was a mutual thing, they didn't fight it. They were from a
very big family and told me that they had done this kind of thing with
their brothers and sisters. We were getting pretty serious, playing with each
other's genitals, when both my mother and father walked in and caught
me with my pants down. They said, "Get your clothes on and go outside
and play like you're supposed to play." I thought, what does that mean? I
didn't understand what they were saying much of the time. But they didn't
get really wild . Some parents would have started beating their kid .
I finally wised up and realized that there were lots safer places, so it
happened many times after that . Our farm sat at the edge of a heavily
wooded area, twelve to fifteen acres . Oftentimes we'd just hike into the
woods. That was real safe, because there were lots of places where nobody
would find you . We made a number of little hideaway places. We'd get a
bunch of leaves and make it like a bed.
We did this for two or three years. We were performing oral sex on one
another, and anal sex a year or two later. Then it began to fade, because

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Jim Cross 79

"My brother and I got along real well as young children, but
we started drifting apart." Left, Jim Cross and his brother,
about 1940. Courtesy ofJim Cross.

they were getting to the age where that kind of behavior was not accept-
able for them. I always felt fine about it and enjoyed it. I knew it was en-
joyable for them, but I knew that I enjoyed it a lot more than they did.
When it finally ended, it was real hard for me and I didn't quite know how
to deal with it. I felt like they were rejecting me as a friend.
I grew up in a pretty religious household, Missouri Synod Lutheran,
one of the strictest of the Lutheran denominations. There was no grey-
it was all black or white. I went to parochial school in seventh and eighth
grade, took catechism, and was confirmed. By this time I knew where my
sexuality was headed, but I was still uncertain. At the parochial school I
had a teacher who was a dirty old man. He was always coming around,

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80 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Jim Cross as a junior high student: "By this time I

knew where my sexuality was headed, but I was still
uncertain." Courtesy of Jim Cross.

touchy-feely. One day during class he was talking about a particular Bible
lesson and he brought this word up, homosexual, and my ears perked up-
that's a word I don't think I've heard. At home that night I looked it up
in the dictionary, and then I started going to the school library and find-
ing things with that word in them. I was very curious and learned quite a
bit about it just by reading.
My freshman year of high school, I saw this guy and I knew that he
was watching me too. Tom was a year ahead of me. I worked on the school
newspaper, and he was one of the editors. At first, the attraction was more
like questioning-he was wondering where I was at, I was wondering
where he was at-until we had spent enough time together and finally re-
alized where we were both at. Then things began to happen. We got to
know each other and spent more time together, and one thing led to an-

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Jim Cross 81

In his early teens, Jim Cross plays the cigarette girl for his parents' friends and neighbors at
their Saturday-night card club, about 1952. Courtesy ofJim Cross.

other. Tom was old enough to drive and had a car. We were sexually active
during my sophomore and junior years in high school.
Tom and I worked together on the school paper for three years, spent a
lot of time together, and had a lot of fun . We would go to ballgames and
dances with a group of friends, guys and girls, and when the evening was
ready to wind down, Tom would give me a ride home. We would sometimes
park on one of the roads and sit and talk. It felt real good having someone
that I was that close to, but it wasn't a real heavy thing. We never talked re-
lationship talk. We wouldn't have known what that was all about, anyway.
I dated in high school, but dating to me was just a fun time. I didn't
harbor any great thoughts of getting married and having kids and living
happily ever after. My parents would have liked that to happen, but they
didn't ever put a lot of pressure on me. There were times when they would
say, "Why don't you date her? She's really nice and you're so cute together."
But I never went out with high school sweethearts with the idea of going
to bed with them. I always thought it was gross. Mter a while, I think my
folks realized that I probably wasn't ever going to seriously date a woman
and get married and settle down. Perhaps that's one of the advantages of
having an older brother-he kind of took care of that .

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82 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

The jocks-the real macho guys, the big brutes-gave me the hardest
times in high school. I was pretty small, rather petite, and they would get
on my case about being a real f~mme. They used to call me "Nellie," and
I'm not sure they knew fully what it meant. Once in a while I would hear
"fag" or "homo ." It used to make me really angry, but I knew that I
couldn't do a whole lot about it. There were three or four of them, twice
as big as I was, so I wasn't about to pick a fight.
My high school years were the toughest, because I was realizing what
was going on with me. It was a small school and everybody knew every-
body, so you couldn't get lost; you were always out there, for whatever
that was worth . Toward the end of my junior year, my folks realized that
I was having some difficulties in school and asked me what was wrong. I
told them that I was being harassed by a bunch of the jocks. They talked
to the school principal and things kind ofleveled offin my senior year, so
it wasn't as bad. But I had a lot of fun in spite of all that. I had some re-
ally good friends.
Mter high school, I was in the Army Medical Corps for three years. I
was sexually active the whole time I was in service, but I really came out
after I got out of service in 1960. I lived in California fur two-and-a-half
years and spent a lot of time going out and partying. Then I moved back
to the Midwest, where I've lived since.
My family is pretty comfortable with my sexuality and how that weaves
into the family circle. I've been in a relationship for close to fifteen years,
and my family is very supportive of it. They're also very fond of George .
He's like a member of the family, and it's been that way for a long time .
I've been in other relationships where it was very similar. They weren't as
long-lasting as this relationship has been, but they were always accepted.

Growing up close to nature, close to all those things that you see come to
life, gives you a completely different perspective on how you deal with other
people as well as yourself. Seeing life becoming life, respecting that, watch-
ing that happen, watching things grow-I kind of did the same thing with
myself. It was totally uncluttered. I didn't have to deal with a lot of peo-
ple . I had lots of time to think my own thoughts and to process those
thoughts. Doing that made me much more respectful of others and of
everything in the universe.
I loved being in the country, but sometimes I would get lonely and
would crave seeing other people . It was nice to have company or to go to
the neighbors' and visit with them once in a while. And I never really liked
the farmwork part of the farm . I saw my mother and father work very hard

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Jim Cross 83

for many years and I made up my mind that I didn't want to work that
hard.
But the farm is where my foundation was laid, and it's taken me a few
years to realize how strong that foundation is. Just the fact that I was able
to grow up in a healthy home taught me a lot about how to deal with
everyday things. I feel like I can relate to all kinds of people, and on all dif-
ferent levels. Being aware of and sympathetic to people who aren't as priv-
ileged, caring for your fellow humans-we used to hear those things a lot
from my folks. And just being proud of what one has accomplished or is
still accomplishing.
I've never regretted any of the things I've done, and I've done lots of
crazy things, probably just because I am gay. I'm sure I wouldn't have done
them otherwise. I'm real satisfied with where I'm at at this point in my
life, what level I'm at with my own people and with everybody. I don't feel
real uncomfortable, no matter where I am anymore. I won't allow that . I
can hold my own as a human being, and should have the same rights as
anybody else. I'll do what I have to do to get those rights.

Copyrighted Material
 Dennis Lindholm

Dennis grew up on a 160-acre farm in southwestern Iowa, Montgomery

County, between Elliott and Red Oak. Born in 1940, he has an older brother
and a younger sister. A high school teacher, Dennis has lived in the Madison,
Wisconsin, area since 1966: He lives on a small piece of land near Cottage
Grove, Wisconsin, where he gardens extensively.

I FEEL VERY angry and bitter toward society for robbing me of much
of my life . I spent so many years denying and subordinating and hiding
the fact that I was gay. A lot of unhappiness and some severe depression
were the result of that. Until I came out, I didn't realize what I had been
doing. I can see now that I have been gay all my life, but I didn't always
know it, or at least I didn't admit it. There wasn't the option to be myself.
I was married in 1963 and divorced in 1970. I have no regrets about
the divorce, but I am angry that I telt forced to marry. There wasn't any
alternative, there weren't any other role models. It wasn't fair to my wife
either. I loved her, but by the end of our marriage I was having sex with
her because I had to , not because I wanted to. The kids were four and five
years old, so the divorce was difficult and painful. In those days women
always got custody, so I didn't even fight it. But they were too much for
her, so she was very happy for me to take them whenever I would, and I
was very happy to take them. Basically, I built my life around the kids-I
took them at least twice during the week, ever y weekend, and all summer.
After the divorce I just drowned myself in work. I was a workaholic,
still am, and moving out in the country gave me plenty to do, because this
place takes a lot of work. I was teaching full -time and spending basically
full-time with the kids as well, so I didn't have much time to think about
other things. At least that's how I kept myselffrom thinking. I didn't come
out to myself until 1985 . Oh, Christ, if I had known, I could have had
those fifteen years that I isolated myself. I had several affairs with women,
but it didn't occur to me that I could have affairs with men.
Seeing Consenting Adult on TV is what really got me to come out.
This kid told his mom that he was gay and she kind of accepted it, after a
while anyway.' This was in early 1985, a really rough time in my life. My

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Dennis Lindholm 85

friends were moving away and my kids were graduating from high school.
I had devoted the last fifteen years to raising those kids, and they were
leaving, so I was getting panicky about what was going to happen.
I called the gay phone line in Madison to get a psychiatrist, because I
thought I was sick. I decided to try this because I was going to commit
suicide anyway. I had it all figured out, so it wouldn't hurt to try. I got
ahold of Tony, to whom I shall be grateful for the rest of my life. He spent
about forty-five minutes talking with me, and suddenly I didn't think being
gay was such a sick thing anymore .
I had been conditioned to believe that the things homosexuals did were
very sinful, sick, and dirty. I had gone to an X-rated bookstore a couple of
times to look at erotic films . When I saw people standing around in the
dark, waiting for other people, I put them in the category of perverts. I
thought that was what it meant to be gay, and that was not me, so I con-
cluded that I wasn't gay. I didn't know about the gay community. I knew
there were gay people in Madison, but I didn't know where to go, I didn't
know that it was okay, that a normal person could be gay.
I went to the Gay Center in Madison and found out that there were
gay bars in town, that it was all right to go to them, and that there were
different activities available . These people weren't child molesters and per-
verts. Everything happened so fast once I made the first step. I started
going to a coming-out support group, and one night I went to a meeting
of gay men over the age of thirty. It was a potluck, so I made something
real special, and I was about a block from the place when I said to myself,
"Dennis, what in the hell are you doing? Go home where you belong."
But I went and, as it turned out, they were normal people. This was all so
earth-shaking . You just can't believe what happened to me inside. When
I came out and that weight got lifted otT my shoulders, Jesus Christ, I was
flying ten miles high for so long. I haven't thought about suicide since .
I came out to the kids in the summer of 1985. Once I finally got the
word "gay" out, it wasn't so bad, but getting it out was just horrendous.
I don't really know what their reactions were, because I avoided looking
at them . I tried to reassure them that just because I was gay didn't mean
they were going to be gay, and all the other things that my gay fathers sup-
port group had told me to tell them . I said that I had tried my darnedest
over the last forty-five years to change, but I couldn't, and I was accept-
ing it myself for the first time.

Farming was a hell of a lot of work. It was hard work and it was hot work,
and it was always pretty iffy how it was going to turn out. I hated farm-
ing and couldn't wait to get far away from it, I was just so bored and al-

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86 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

ways alone. Morning and night, we had to feed and milk the cows, feed
the pigs, and feed the chickens. I had to take the cows down to the pas-
ture every morning before the school bus came, and go get them every
night. We milked about ten cows, from which we sold the milk until the
state put in sanitary regulations that we couldn't meet . Then we sold just
the cream and fed the milk to the pigs. I carried the milk out to the hog
lots after we separated it up at the house. We used the cream and egg money
to buy our groceries when we went to town once a week. We were fairly
self-sufficient and didn't buy anything we didn't have to buy.
All summer we had to put up hay and harvest oats. Haying was the
worst because it was always so hot in Iowa, and when the hay was ready it
had to go in the barn whether it was 110 degrees or not . We worked with
the farmers in the area, and had bought a baler together. The baler would
go from farm to farm and all of us would follow it, putting up the hay at
one farm, then moving on to the next.
We very rarely did anything other than work. We had a large garden
and Mom did most of that. I would help when it came time to do things
like pick beans and shell peas when she was canning. Mom wore the pants
in the family, made all the decisions, and Dad just worked all the time. He
never slept beyond 4:00 in the morning and was up and gone by the time
we got up, so we had to go out and help .
I was in 4-H for years, an officer in our local club and on the county
level, and went to camp a couple of times.2 I raised and took care of my
own steer and pigs and dairy cattle. I liked working with the animals, but
when your 4- H project was over you sent the animals off to the slaugh-
terhouse. That was just the way it was.
On Sundays we went to a Methodist church. In Sunday school they re-
ally drilled into us how lucky we were that we weren't Catholics. When
Kennedy was running, that was a big thing, to have a Catholic as presi-
dent and have the pope running our country. I was very religious in high
school and went to a religious college for two years . I was president of the
local and district youth groups, so that took a lot of time . On Saturday
nights, I helped put the church newsletter together. On Sundays I helped
the minister. For several years, I did everything in the Sunday service ex-
cept the sermon.
I got into embroidery in my early teens . I liked doi ng things with my
hands, and I liked embroidery because you had colored threads, nice pic-
tures offlowers and little animals, and when you got done you had some-
thing that was real pretty. Dad didn't like that I was doing it-it was sissy-
so I didn't make a show of it. My mother bought it for me in the first
place, so it must have been okay with her. One time I told a kid from school

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Dennis Lindholm 87

Dennis Lindholm with his yearling holstein heifer, Candy, at the beginning of the 1956
4-H club year. Courtesy of Dennis Lindholm.

that I would let him see my embroidery ifhe promised he wouldn't tell. I
showed it to him and the next day in school he told everybody, which was
disastrous. I didn't do embroidery again. I became very conscious of what
male things were, of what one does and doesn't do . I've always been en-
vious of women who could pull out their knitting and do that while they're
talking or watching television.
I started collecting insects when I was in junior high. I would go down
to a creek that ran through the farm, where I could find a lot of insects.
I don't think Dad particularly liked that either-there was something sissy
about collecting butterflies and those kinds of things.
We were pretty isolated out on the farm, but Sunday was visiting day
when people would just drop in. That's one thing I really miss. We would
get home from church and have a big dinner and be lying around, and
someone would say, "Let's go for a ride," and we would just go. We would

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88 Part 1. Coming ofAge Before the Mid-1960s

"I started collecting insects when I was in junior high. I don't think Dad par-
ticularly liked that either-there was something sissy about collecting butter-
flies and those kinds of things." Dennis Lindholm, about 1957 Courtesy of
Dennis Lindholm.

stop in and see if somebody was home and they would always be glad to
see us. We would go in and stay for a while-play cards and talk and have
a good time. "Why don't you stay for supper?" And lots of times we did,
but we always had to get home because the cows had to be milked.
People would come to our place, just out for a ride, and they would
stop in to say hello. "Why don't you stay for supper?" "Oh, no, no." "Come
on in. We've got plenty." "Oh, well, okay." Those were just the most fun
times. Sometimes kids were along, but it didn't make any difference, be-
cause they always included us kids in playing cards.
My sister and I played together because there weren't any other kids
that lived close enough to do anything with. My brother had his friends
and I was always in his way, so I was just somebody to beat up on. In high
school, I was a real pain for him because he had a driver's license, and my
folks made him take me along to spare them from having to take me to

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Dennis Lindholm 89

wherever I had to go to. That's probably one of the reasons my brother

didn't like me. Another reason was that we had to share a bedroom.
My brother showed me how to masturbate. One day he said, "This is
what boys do." I hadn't done it before that. I understood what the birds
and the bees were about, because of the farm animals, but sex was some-
thing you didn't talk about. Masturbation was a sin. I was tormented by
guilt, and prayed myself to sleep at night so I wouldn't touch myself.
I was the outside one in the family, and felt that I never really belonged.
My folks and the neighbors all thought that my brother was a great per-
son, so I was just his brother and not a person in my own right. I was very
insecure and tried harder than everybody else. I was really trying my
darnedest to be the best little boy ever. I was a big wheel in school, did all
kinds of stuff, but I was discouraged because I was too small to be good
in sports, which was the only thing that really counted.
I knew I was different, and I knew it was stuff that I couldn't share
with anybody. I was very much taken with good-looking boys, and thought
that a couple of the high school senior guys were so big and attractive. I
was attracted to a couple of my classmates; we were best friends, and my
best friends were all good-looking boys. I suppose I was in love with them.
I certainly built my whole life around them, as far as getting together on
Saturday nights. The big thing was to go into Red Oak to drive around a
lot and go to the movies-there wasn't much else to do.
lt was so awkward when we couldn't get together because they had
a date. I was envious of them, and jealous, and I fantasized about them
having intercourse with their girlfriends. I couldn't wait to go to church
camp every summer-god, there were some knockouts there. I would
dream about them for months, about them being with girls. I never
dreamed about being with those boys myself. I didn't know one could do
that, or even dream about doing it. I knew two men could masturbate
one another, but it never occurred to me that two men could sleep
together.
The worst thing you could be called in high school was a homo, but
kids threw that word around without knowing what it meant. I was very
careful not to wear yellow on Thursdays. 3 The messages that I got about
homosexuality were all very negative, and in the back of my mind I was
afraid that someday somebody was going to find out that I was like that.
Every once in a while the newspaper would have an article about a purge
in Washington, about how they had found homosexuals in the State De-
partment or wherever, and all of them were dismissed. One time, a hun-
dred and some were dismissed under Eisenhower. 4

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90 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Dennis Lindholm as a college student in 1962. Courtesy of Dennis Lindholm.

Things just happened and I kind of stumbled into them. I stumbled into
teaching because I was a history major and there wasn't anything else I
could do with it. I stumbled into marriage because that's what you had to
do . I'm just waiting for retirement, to do all the things that I want to do.
There are three big milestones in my adult life, three major steps that I
have taken that have saved me . First was the divorce, because it liberated
me from a very stifling situation. Second was moving back to the coun-
try, so I could get back to the soil. Third was coming out.
My sister and I get along real well, so I've tried to come out to her. I
would never tell my brother. We still don't get along, and he's the exact
opposite of me-he likes guns and golf, he's a Republican. Mter I came
out to the boys, I asked them if they wanted to talk it over with their mom,
because if they did I said that I should be the one to tell her. They said
they didn't want to, and she still doesn't know about me. The boys and I
are good friends . I'm certainly an influence in their lives and I am defi-
nitely their dad. I was always around. Coming out to them was rough, but
we got through it and we're very close today. I love them more than any-
thing in the world.
I'm very closely tied to the land. Living in the country is tremen-
dously important to my self-worth and satisfaction. I would love to farm,
but I wouldn't want to have to make my income from it. My one-and-a-
half acres is really all I can take care of, and I want to stay here as long as

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Dennis Lindholm 91

I am able to take care of it. It isn't farming, but it's more than just a gar-
den. I ' m not afraid of work, and I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty,
so I get a lot done. I'm pretty self-sufficient, both in terms of doing things
for myself and living off the land.
I've become very domestic and I like it. When I was married, my wife
did the kitchen work. I had to teach myself cooking and canning and all the
other things that I do. Sometimes people make comments about how I'd
make a good wife. That kind of stereotype just infuriates me. But I would
like to get married again-this time to a man-and I do mean married. We
should be able to get a legally recognized marriage and everything else that
goes with it . I don't know if we ever will, but that's my political goal.
My social life is entirely gay-oriented, but I'm not out at work, so I still
lead two lives in that respect. I belong to several gay groups that meet
once or twice a month, and I get together with friends . I'll probably al-
ways be at the edge of gay life, because I have an awful lot of social con-
ditioning to overcome. I bought into everything they fed me all those years
and I know a lot of other people who have not overcome that internalized
homophobia. I'm not sexually active, partly because of the health thing,
but also because it's just something you don't do, it's dirty. I've gotten
over a lot of that, though. My therapist told me, "Dennis, you've got to
have anal intercourse with somebody so that you know what you're talk-
ing about. Then if you don't like it, you don't have to do it." So I did it,
and I thought it was great. But I've never been a bottom yet, and I'm a
bit worried about that.
What did I do for my midlife crisis? I changed my sexual orientation.
Really, I just admitted it. If! could take a pill today and change from being
gay, I wouldn't take it. I wouldn't even consider it . Up until I came out,
I would have said, "Give it to me!" So I've come a long way. Basically I ac-
cept that this is the way I am, and it's all right . Besides, I like men. In fact,
I love them.
I've been involved with religion all my life, rejected it a couple times
and gone back to it. I'm in a stage of rejection now. I converted to Catholi-
cism after I got divorced, and was very sincere about it . I tried hard to lose
myselfin it, went to mass every day for years. That was one way I got through
fifteen years of being alone. I even thought about joining the priesthood.
But when I came out I realized how anti-gay the Catholic church is. In-
tellectually, it's easy to reject religion, but when I get into periods ofhav-
ing to cope with loneliness, it's a crunch. I'm basically a romantic, a back-
wards-looking one . I like the romantics, I like their philosophy. A lot of
the German romantics converted to Catholicism and then committed sui-
cide. That was my thinking for a long time.

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92 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

NOTES

1. In "Consenting Adult," a 1985 television movie based on the novel by

Laura Z. Hobson, a college student reveals to his parents that he is gay and a re-
spectable family is devastated.
2. 4-H stands for Head, Heart, Hands, Health. Earlier agricultural clubs in
the Midwest grew into the 4-H movement during the 1910s and 1920s. The na-
tional4-H program was developed by the U.S. Agriculture Department to reduce
the social isolation of rural youth and to instruct them in modern farming and
homemaking practices as well as good citizenship. At local 4-H club meetings,
members recite the 4-H pledge: "I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart
to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living, for
my club, my community, my country, and my world." 4-H projects are exhibited
at local, county, and state fairs. Some 4-H members show cattle or other livestock
at these fairs, entering into competitions in which their animals are judged on
health, appearance, carriage, etc. Junior leaders are 4- H youth who assist adult pro-
gram leaders after completing several years of 4-H work.
3. Variations on the "wear yellow and you're a queer" theme are evident in sev-
eral men's stories. This phenomenon may be related to a meaning of the word yel-
low from the early decades of the twentieth century. In that era, to say that some-
one was yellow, or that he had a yellow streak or a yellow belly, was to say that he
was cowardly, lily-livered-a contemptible, worthless person . This connotation
may have been extended to the queer-baiting schoolyard jabs of adolescent males.
The color pink seems to have acquired similar connotations in recent years.
4. Throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration pursued government
clean-up agendas related to those of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his associ-
ates. Individuals deemed to be communist or homosexual were denied government
employment.

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 James Heckman

James was born in 1941 in east-central Indiana, where his family lived on
three rented farms during his childhood. He had an older brother and has two
younger sisters. James was married and is the father of two children. He lives
in east-central Wisconsin, where he is retired from a career in farm livestock
health.

I WAS FOUR years old when my brother Richard was killed getting off
the school bus. I liked him very much, we were good buddies. One
evening we had our pajamas on and were playing together. The next day
he got off the school bus at home and a car hit him. From that time on,
my childhood felt very lonely. Both my parents went into a state of de-
pression. It seemed like my mother was always crying or in bed. My dad
just kind of disappeared. He went out to work early in the morning, came
back for meals, and went back and worked until dark. He was never much
for words when things got difficult.
My brother became the perfect child in everybody's eyes. According
to my uncle AI, Richard would have been the greatest athlete, an all-star
in basketball, baseball, and football. According to my dad, Richard would
have been the best farmer and the hardest worker, and according to my
mother he would have been such a handsome young man, the idol of every
girl's eye. My grandmother said Richard was such a good little boy, Grand-
ma's boy. He became an angel in everyone's eyes, as it so often happens in
old Catholic families . Because I was a survivor, I didn't get all those praises,
so I tried to emulate Richard. He had played with marbles a lot, so I tried
to get into that, and he'd had a habit of chewing on his shirt collar when
he played marbles, so I chewed on my shirt collar.
Several months after my brother was killed, I got quite sick with rheu-
matic fever. I know the thought went through my parents' minds that they
were going to lose another son. I was their only child at the time. Lying
there in bed, I felt a keen closeness to them. My dad had a sad, empty look
on his face, and my mother started to cry. I thought, I better pull through
this for my parents, and I better behave.
My dad's family was all German Catholic and had been farming as far
back as I know. My dad was a high school dropout, but he was highly re-

93

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94 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

spected in the community as a very good farmer and as being honest, hard-
working, fair, and always willing to help out . When there was a need on
another farm, if there was a death or illness, he was always there. That's
the way my parents were. They were very Christian people. Not that they
were always saying prayers, but they were just very involved and got along
with people. My mother's family was Irish on one side and German on the
other. Farming was all they were ever involved in. My mother was an out-
standing cook. She baked lots of pies and cakes and was always showing
them offat the county and state fairs, where she got a lot of blue ribbons
and big prizes. She was a 4-H leader, very active in Extension Service and
home demonstration work.!
Our farm was 250 acres, primarily a hog operation, but we had a few
dairy cows and chickens and beef cattle. The land was very productive and
we cropped almost all of it. With the livestock and the fieldwork, there
was always a lot to do and I was involved in all of it. Saturday mornings,
I hauled manure . I was up early every morning doing chores, and I really
couldn't get involved in school activities because I had to go home to feed
and put bedding down for the cattle, or take care of the hogs. We housed
a bunch of hogs in some buildings that didn't have an electric water pump.
Every day, before and after school, it was my job to hand-pump water for
those blasted hogs. It probably took only about a half hour, but it seemed
like an eternity.
Come the spring of the year, I liked to fly a kite in one of the outer
fields, or go down to a creek that ran through the farm . But as soon as I
got home from school, if! didn't have my clothes changed in ten minutes'
time, my mother was yelling at me to get out there on that tractor-some
plowing or other fieldwork had to be done . If! was lucky I would get back
to the house in time to do my homework.
In the course of eleven years of 4-H club work, I completed about 120
projects. My mother insisted on all these projects so that I would stay busy
all summer. For eleven years, I showed beef cattle. I always had one or two
steers at the county fair. For seven or eight years, I showed hogs. I always
had a pen of barrows or gilts at the fair. For five years in a row I showed
grand-champion poultry. I was in the corn project, the electric project,
and 'forestry, and I did gardening for four or five years. I was an officer of
the local 4-H club, and then got involved in the county junior leaders
group . That was my biggest social outlet during junior high and high
school. It was the thing to do, and it was the one time I could get to be
with other groups of people . My extended family was very close-knit . We
always got together for every birthday, every holiday, plus I don't how many
other times.

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"I always had one or two steers at the county fair." Above, James
Heckman trains a beef animal for showing at the 1951 fair. Below, he
washes the animal in preparation for showing. Courtesy of James
Heckman.

95

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96 Part 1. Coming ofAge Before the Mid-J960s

"For five years in a row I showed grand-champion poultry." James

Heckman displays his 1956 grand-champion chicken. Courtesy of
James Heckman.

My uncle AI was a rather arrogant guy. He thought he was the best

farmer in the neighborhood. He did it bigger and better, and always had
new equipment, the best available. AI never married. He was extremely
handsome and in a lot of ways I really admired him. He had been a naval
aviator in World War II and was a nut on sports. To hear him tell it, he
was the greatest athlete that ever lived. I helped him out a lot on his farm,
morning till night. In the summer months, we did a lot of custom hay bal-
ing. Ifwe weren't baling hay, there was corn to be cultivated, and then the
wheat harvest started. AI would go on tirades-calling me a sissy and yell-
ing at me about not playing sports well enough, I would never amount to
a hill of beans because I couldn't play basketball, and I didn't know how
to drive a tractor properly. I could drive it as well as any other kid my age.
Everybody said, "That's the way AI is." They just let it happen. Now I re-

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James Heckman 97

alize he was a very frustrated and miserable person. There's not much doubt
in my mind that he was a latent homosexual, and it was never possible for
him to be his real self.
My grandfather, my mother's father, was a gem. He was wonderful,
kind, loving, gentle, and he never put any demands on me. He was AI's fa-
ther and took a lot of abuse from his own son. I used to work a lot with
him. Whenever I could, I was helping my grandfather and my uncle on
their farm, plus working on my parents' farm. They were about four miles
apart. I would jump at any opportunity to be with my grandfather, and
we would get lots of things accomplished-fieldwork, work on the live-
stock. Of course, according to AI, we were doing everything wrong. Every
so often, my grandfather and I would sit down and talk-just small talk,
or what the weather was like. He was very good to me. When I would go
to town with him, he always knew everybody on the street and had all
kinds of friends .

About the sixth or seventh grade, when I was showing cattle in 4- H, I

would see other guys and really wanted to be close friends with them. And
I just loved to look at guys. I would go to basketball games to see those
muscular players out there in short pants. I was lonely and very much
wanted to be good friends with those guys. Anything sexual I just put out
of my mind. I never looked at anyone naked, I didn't touch my private
parts, and I made darned sure I wore pajamas to bed.
Sometimes, when my parents were gone, I would admire my mother's
clothes and put them on-undergarments, corsets, girdles, dresses, the
whole works. I would put makeup on too, and fantasize that if I could
dress like this, maybe some of those guys would be attracted to me. It
really turned me on; I would get an erection. In my early high school
years, I had dreams about being like a woman for the purpose of attract-
ing guys.
I had a lot offriends who were girls, and got along very well with groups
of girls, but dating was very difficult. I always felt like a complete dud. But
there were guys I would have given anything in the world to be with. One
year, the only reason I asked a girl to the prom was because we got to dou-
ble with her best friend's boyfriend. I was just in a fog that he and I would
be sitting at the same table the whole evening. He was the only person I
wanted to impress that night. When I was a junior in high school, I was
selected to go to Hoosier Boys State. 2 I loved it because there were only
guys there, so it was okay to develop friendships with them, but I could
never quite do it.
From the third or fourth grade through high school, I seriously

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98 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-J960s

thought about going into the priesthood. Priests were not supposed to
have girlfriends-that was my defense . I would sometimes have dreams
about being with a bunch of guys in a monastery and not having any un-
dergarments on underneath my cassock. In some of the dreams I had phys-
ical contact with them. But the idea of the priesthood began to fade away,
and I decided I would just have to work hard, do well in high school, go
on to college, get a good job, and get myself established. Someday I'd find
the right girl and fall in love. That's what was supposed to happen.

My mother was rather strict and her emotions could fly apart at times,
and my dad was always difficult to reach. Except for my grandfather, I never
felt any intimacy, and I never felt my parents understood me. They loved
and cared for me, but I sensed that I was not living up to their expecta-
tions. Early on, I began to sense there was something different about me.
I didn't know what it was, but there were things that I couldn't relate to
them.
Often I wished I could be at my mother's side to cook and bake and
sew, but in German Catholic farm families only girls did those things.
When we would go visiting, I was very interested in how the house was
decorated, what type of food was on the table, how well-dressed they
were . Needlework, knitting, and crocheting fascinated me, and I really
wanted to do them . But had I done them, I would have been ridiculed for
being such a sissy. My uncle would have started it and it would have spread
out from there. Even my grandfather would say, "Oh, you don't want to
do that . That's girl stuff." My grandfather would never do anything do-
mestic, and washing dishes was the only thing my dad would ever get in-
volved in.
When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, there was a very nice and
attractive young man who lived on a farm not too far from us. He was a
junior in high school and a very good basketball player. In Indiana, bas-
ketball is king. It shocked the community when he shot himself, commit-
ted suicide. They talked about the fact that he didn't go out with girls. I
admired him and felt like I understood him. He too felt that pressure to
be the square peg in the square hole.
On the farm, I was able to bury myself in so much work that I was
tired at night. I couldn't think about going out . I was exhausted, and I
was so busy with the 4-H club and with my projects. In high school, the
kids in town would go to the swimming pool and mess around at the drive-
in restaurant . I never had time to be there . Through farmwork, I buried
a lot offantasies . I became very caring towards older people and was a dar-
ling to a bunch of old ladies. I think I was doing this to find relationships.

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James Heckman 99

The drawings on restroom walls was where I got my sex education in high
school; penises, the female organs, that's where it goes. One time when I
went over to a neighbor boy's place after school, I saw his bicycle by the
chicken house . I peeked inside and saw that he had an erection and was
having intercourse with a chicken . He must have ejaculated, because he
was really going at it. When he came out the door, I had stepped away and
acted like I had just arrived, and nothing was said about it.
I would see bulls and boars mounting cows and sows and I would won-
der, what makes them do that? How do they know what to do, where to
stick it? I would wonder how a man and woman could get together to
have a child. What arouses them? I never felt that, and I thought maybe
it was because the human race had advanced beyond those animal instincts.
At Purdue, I had a course in the physiology of reproduction in farm ani-
mals. The professor was rather blunt and to-the-point, and it wasn't until
then that things really began to go together. I was so naive, I didn't even
know about the female anatomy.
I was twenty-two or twenty-three when I began to masturbate, and
had my first sexual experience when I was twenty-five, in graduate school.
A guy approached me in the library rest room and we went to his dorm
room and had sex. I loved it, but I was so scared I was shaking. The old-
time Catholic church was wonderful at teaching guilt. I went to a priest
immediately afterwards and cried uncontrollably. "Don't worry about that,
it will pass," he told me. "It happens to a lot of guys. You'll meet a fine
girl and you'll have some kids."
Two or three times after that, the same guy approached me. When I
said I couldn't do it, it wasn't right , he tried to tell me it was okay ifit was
what I really wanted and if I felt okay about it. I had a couple of experi-
ences with a married guy in graduate school who followed me into my
room . I didn't like that, because he was forcing himself on me-although
I have to admit there was a little bit of it I liked.
I was twenty-seven when I got married, in 1968. I thought I would
grow into it, because that's what the priest told me. It was time to get
married, and she was a fine woman. I think one of the reasons I married
her was that she was a few years older than I was, like my brother, and she
seemed to be the type of woman he might have married. It sounds strange,
but in many ways I looked at her as being more of a sister-in-law than a
wife. And because my brother would have had children, I had children.
There was a time when I thought of my own children as my brother's chil-
dren.
In our early years of marriage, sex was okay. I could do it as long as we
were having children . But when my wife had a hysterectomy, sex became

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100 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-J960s

impossible for me . My wife knew something was wrong. I was in pretty

bad shape, very despondent. I had decided to suppress my homosexual
feelings, and that I would end my life if they ever came to light. I would
never accept it, and became very much a homophobe as a defense. I knew
all the dirty jokes about fags and queers. Then, when I was about thirty-
four, I met a guy-gay and good-looking-and I fell head-over-heels in
love.
I couldn't handle it anymore. I went out to the piece offarmland that
I owned, drove my car into the barn, and made a serious suicide attempt.
There was no reason why it failed, except maybe the grace of God. The
vent came loose from the tailpipe . I kind oflost consciousness, rolled out
of the car, and found myself on the ground when I came to. Mter wan-
dering around the farm for a while, feeling like the biggest failure ever, I
went home and my wife took me to the hospital. She kept telling me that
whatever the problem, she would be willing to accept it. When I got to
my third stay in the hospital psych . ward, I told her I was homosexual. She
was hurt, but there was never a thread of anger. She was so relieved to
know what the problem was. I'm not sure I would have pulled through,
had it not been for the way she accepted it .
I called my parents to ask them to come to see me in the hospital. It
had gotten to the point that I wouldn't even talk to them. They were call-
ing and sending letters, saying they cared about me and were praying for
me-whatever my problem, they wanted to know about it and would ac-
cept it. But I knew they felt absolute disgust about this issue. When we had
a little family conference in the hospital, I told them I was homosexual.
They reacted negatively, said it was just so disgusting. My wife told them
that if they wanted their grandchildren to be a part of their lives, they
would have to accept their son for who he was. They've never talked with
me about it since then, but they've accepted it. I love them and they love
me, and they see how happy I am. My dad and I have gotten closer. The
last few times we've seen each other, we've actually given each other a hug.
I told my children when they were in high school, and we have very
amiable relationships. My daughter had a lot of anger toward me, but is
accepting things very well. My son is having a tougher time dealing with
it and is not real comfortable being around me . He has always been kind
of the macho athletic type and is terribly paranoid that someone is going
to find out . I think in time he'll be okay.

On the farm, I learned to appreciate nature, and for me being gay is a very
natural thing. Some cornstalks do not bear ears of corn, some gilts do not
have babies. Normally when you raise breeding stock they reproduce, but

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James Heckman 101

not everything fits into place perfectly. On a farm, you accept that some
things are out of the ordinary. That has helped me to accept being gay.
One time, a neighbor had paid a lot of money for a bull, but it wouldn't
breed any cows. It's a natural thing-it happens in nature. I wonder what
would have happened to that bull if it had been with a bunch of bulls?
Living alone as I do, there's a degree of loneliness . Farmers are that
way too. They have neighbors and friends, but on the farm they're out
there working alone. You learn to accept and appreciate the quietness. I
love being alone sometimes, but not all the time. I like having a lot of
friends. I don't have a lot of real close friends, but I have a lot of good ac-
quaintances. I don't feel compelled to jump in and out of relationships. I
was involved in a relationship for six or seven years, and for five of those
years I was pretty much monogamous. But I don't feel the need for a re-
lationship now. I would probably be much more promiscuous ifit weren't
for this whole AIDS situation, but there are ways to get around that. I've
had some wonderful experiences in the past sixteen or seventeen years, since
I really accepted things.
Farming taught me the value of hard work. I love that good old rugged
work ethic. But realizing that I was different and that I was having trou-
ble fitting in, I engrossed myself in long hours of hard work, covered up
all of my problems with work. It wasn't all bad, because I got well estab-
lished and achieved a lot in a few years. I did well in school, and had I been
out in the open about understanding my feelings, I'm not sure I would
have achieved as much . I don't regret not knowing that I was gay when I
was growing up. When I see young kids at the bar, I sort of envy them,
that they're able to be themselves, but I feel sorry for them in a way too.
They're not going to appreciate life the way I appreciate it . It was a lot of
struggle and very lonely, but a lot of what happened to me has made me
appreciate what I am today.
Farm people are perceived to be conservative, not the activist type, not
as vocal. When it comes to economic issues, I tend to be very conservative.
But when it comes to social issues, I'm a liberal. I'm still a Catholic and
I'll probably be one all my life, but I take sharp issue with how the Catholic
church has been so detrimental to the acceptance of homosexuality. I go
shopping for the right priest to talk to. But faith is a very personal thing,
and my Catholic faith is still a strong part of me. I'm active in the church
and attend on a fairly regular basis, although I'm not as hung up that it
has to be every Sunday.
I love to go to New York City periodically. I have a friend there who
says I should live in a larger city, where I could have more of a social life.
There's a part of me that agrees with him, but agriculture is my life . I like

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working with farm people, although they don ' t really understand me. I
love their character-their sincerity, their down-to-earth honesty, their
love of nature, of things in the open. And I admire good business people,
and good farmers are good businessmen. I think the people I work with
have a pretty good image of me, but most of them don't know about my
personal life. I can't share that with them now, but when I retire I want
the word to get out to the people I've worked with-the dairy produc-
ers, the veterinarians, the feed salesmen, the guys at the co-ops. They're
going to be shocked, but their eyes are going to be opened .

NOTES

1. The Cooperative Extension Service is a national program of agricultural ed-

ucation sponsored jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state and
county governments. Consistent with an emphasis on learning by doing, personal
demonstrations are one of the methods used to promote innovative practices in
farming and homemaking among farm households .
2. Hoosier Boys State is the Indiana version of an annual program of citizen-
ship training for boys of high school age who have demonstrated leadership qual-
ities. The Boys State program originated in the Midwest in the 1930s and is di-
rected by the Americanism Commission of the American Legion.

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 John Beutel

John was born in 1943 and grew up on a succession of six rented farms near
Monroe, in Green County, south-central Wisconsin. He has four brothers, two
older and two younger, and a younger sister. John lives in the country near
Stoughton, Wisconsin, where he is a high-school music teacher.

THE FIRST TIME I fell in love with a man, when I was twenty-six, I re-
alized that I wasn't going to walk down the aisle with a woman. Through
my late twenties and thirties I had a lot of friendships with men that I
thought were relationships, but I was insecure and wasn't capable of fo-
cusing. I would lose interest and have to stray and have more sexual part-
ners. In my early forties, during a period of considerable depression, I
went through a couple of years with a psychiatrist and pulled some things
together, but I still didn't get relationships .
In the last few years I've come to the realization that a large part of my
identity has been as a teacher. Every bit of energy I had went into my teach-
ing, to the point that I ignored relationships. And my self-esteem wasn't
very high. I'm exceedingly shy and non-aggressive. I still like teaching,
and work hard at it, but it isn't the definition of me anymore. I'm begin-
ning to understand who I am and I've gained a lot of self-confidence,
whereas before I was just trying to blend in and be nice. For the first time,
I'm able to have friendships on an equal footing, and I try not to worry
so much about what other people say. I'm more likely to go to the bar and
wear what I want to, rather than what I could wear to blend into the wall.
This is sort of hackneyed, but-I am what I am. The first time I heard that
song in "La Cage aux Folles," I cried and cried.
Now I'm very much up for a relationship. I think I'm ready to talk
about the things that need talking about . But now that I'm ready, I'm
having trouble getting one off the ground. There are times when I don't
like living in the country because I'm alone, and it's lonely for me . But
there's also a part of me that says, well, you can be lonely in the middle of
New York City. So I've been back and forth about whether to move or stay
here. I really like it here-the privacy is very attractive to me-but I still
have a longing to live in a large city. But I'm pretty much set in my job
right now, and it's very difficult to move. I have the great fortune of being
103

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104 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-J960s

able to travel, and that has made up for not living in a city. I don't want
to teach in Chicago, but I think I would love living there. Some of my
friends tell me I would come running back here after two weeks.

My father came from Germany with his parents in the 1920s, when he was
twelve years old. From when they were married until I was three, he and
my mother lived and farmed with my grandparents. My first memory is
when I was two years old. We had a housewarming party and all the rela-
tives were there. My great uncle Otto played his accordion, and everybody
danced in the living room. I sat alongside the rolled-up carpet and when-
ever my grandma got the broom they did a German broom dance, and
everybody would laugh.
The farms we lived on were all mainly dairy farms. Early on, when my
parents started farming on their own, they had just three kids and things
went quite well. Riding into town to grind the feed with my dad, we'd
sing together-"You Are My Sunshine" and "Bell Bottom Trousers." We
had a wonderful rapport and I loved being with him. He had an upbeat-
ness and spontaneity that he lost after a while, as the family grew and times
got harder. From early on, before I was in school, I was often out helping
my dad do the chores in the morning. I would shake up the bedding for
the cows, feed them ground feed, feed the chickens and gather the eggs.
Every Saturday, we bartered our eggs for groceries in Monroe. We had
work horses until I was eleven or twelve years old, and I would drive them
for mowing hay, making hay, and cultivating corn.
Everybody pitched in and accomplished things together. My mother
and my older brothers or I would do the milking if dad was with the thresh-
ing crew or, later on, ifhe was working off the farm. From early on, Mom
worked jobs outside of the house for extra money. I never knew we were
poor. I knew we didn't have a lot of money, but we always had something
to wear and great food on the table. No matter what, we would eat to-
gether two or three times a day. If Dad was out in the field, we waited till
he got there, then we sat down.
Many evenings in the summertime the whole fami ly would play soft-
ball after milking, and we played horseshoes and croquet a lot. Every Sat-
urday night we took baths in a big galvanized tub on the kitchen table.
Until I was in fifth or sixth grade, we didn't have a bathroom. I was third
in line to take a bath and dry off in the middle of the kitchen. Every four
weeks, Dad would give us a haircut .
I loved going to country school-the individual attention, the nature
walks, putting on Christmas programs . When I was in sixth and seventh
grades, I got to help the teacher and I loved it, so I decided that I was

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John Beutel 105

going to be a teacher. My plan was to go to Green County Normal School,

the two-year teachers' college, and then teach in a country school. How-
ever, when I was graduating from high school they were closing the coun-
try schools down.
By the time I got to high school, I wasn't real crazy about farming. I
never sluffed or got out of doing chores, but my interest was in other places.
I really took to music, and my mother liked that very much. She was al-
most doting at times, and my father was proud too. When I did well in
high school, my parents were both very pleased and supportive, which was
a source of friction with my brothers. They were sort of rowdy in high
school, so my being serious about school and everything was seen by them
as my playing the favorite, particularly of my mother. She and I were al-
ways very close and we got along very well. There was a certain ebullience
and buoyancy; everything was upbeat.
The accordion was really important to me. In my whole life, it is prob-
ably the thing that I was best at. I started lessons when I was ten, and prac-
ticed a couple of hours a day. I was just in heaven, and my parents loved
to hear me play, particularly my mother. Once I was out on the back porch
playing, and my mom got a phone call from the cheese factory up the road
a tenth of a mile or so. They requested the "Red Raisin Polka." In music,
I could be myself and I could lose myself. My teacher said I didn't have to
practice seven days a week, but I did. Even when we were making hay all
day, I would find time for playing and practicing. If I didn't practice at
least five times a week, I was almost distraught.
My aspiration was to be a professional accordionist. I entered a lot of
amateur contests around south-central Wisconsin. First prize was fifty
bucks, and I thought that was big bucks! For two years in high school I
was state champion, and competed in the Chicago Tribune Chicagoland
Music Festival. I played classic overtures-"The Marriage of Figaro," "The
Barber of Seville" -and Mendelssohn piano concertos and a lot of other
pieces that were transcribed for accordion. During high school, I was in a
pop combo, The Rhythmaires. We had an accordion, trumpet, trombone,
tenor sax, bass, and percussion, and would play at school dances and com-
munity functions. We did "Moonglow" and "Ja-Da" and "The Darktown
Strutters' Ball."

Grandma and Grandpa Beutel were educated to about eighth grade, but
they had a real wisdom that probably had the greatest influence on my
life. It was such a thrill when Grandpa would let me hoe in his garden,
and I always mowed their lawn. Grandma would ask me to help her clean
the house, and I got to sleep on their porch. I would get to help Grandpa

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106 Part 1. Coming ofAge Before the Mid-1960s

"The accordion was really important to me. In my whole life, it is probably the
thing that I was best at." John Beutel in 1962, playing for company at home .
Courtesy of John Beutel.

decorate the Christmas tree, and if you know Germans, the Christmas tree
is it) every piece of tinsel. Grandma would often say little rhyming phrases
in German, then try to tell me what they meant. She always said, "A house
is not a home without flowers." I spoke German almost exclusively with
my two older brothers until I was three.
Grandma was sort of like a mother hen, but it was more than that. She
and I just clicked on all cylinders together. When she wanted to send let-
ters to my brothers in the army, she would have me sit down at the table,
and I would write them for her. At times I felt a little uncomfortable doing
that, but Grandma wanted it done, so that mattered. She would say, "This
is what I want to say. You make it right and write it down." One of my
older brothers loved the accordion, so I made a tape and mailed it to him
in Germany.
My grandpa was Prussian and had been a lieutenant in the German

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John Beutel 107

cavalry, in World War I, but he was very gentle and soft-spoken. My grand-
mother was in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but not really
hard-core. She told me that she would get in trouble at her church women's
group, where they would spend more time planning the fall bazaar than
studying the Bible . She said, "I'm not very popular there. I told them today,
'I'm here for Bible study. You can talk about the bazaar some other time .'"
My parents were not regular churchgoers , but 1 was. 1 went to chu rch
with my grandparents when 1 was in the upper grades and in high school.
Church was so important to me that when I was in high school I almost
committed myself to being a teaching missionary. Church was a source of
comfort, a place where I got positive strokes. I went to church camp in the
summer until I got to high school, and then I was active in the youth fel-
lowship. 1 read my Bible, I was confirmed, 1 tried to be a good person.
That's what 1 thought church was about. We belonged to a relatively con -
servative church, Evangelical United Brethren .

When I was four or five years old, 1 knew there was something different
about me because of the things I liked to do. One day, after my dad and
I had taken the cows back to pasture, we picked a bouquet of apple blos-
soms. And in the spring I would go out to the woods every other day to
make sure 1 saw the first violets. The side of a big hill where 1 played was
covered with blue sand violets and shooting stars, and the woods were
sprinkled with Dutchman's-breeches. I thought those flowers were the
most beautiful things, and I never heard my brothers talk about them. I
had some dolls and a tea set and spent a lot of time playing with one of
the neighbor girls . That was the subject of considerable scorn and teasing
from my older brothers, but my mom seemed to think it was all right .
Our menus were set- meat, potatoes, salad, vegetable, dessert. Farm
staples. I didn't do a lot of cooking, but 1 liked baking and had a knack for
it. I made a lot of jelly rolls and cookies, and I can't tell you how many
two -egg cakes I made . I helped a lot with the house cleaning, too . Mother
was very tidy, so the house was cleaned every Saturday, whether it needed
it or not. I loved to iron and we ironed everything, even the bed sheets .
The stuff I did was considered girl ish by my older brothers, but it never
bothered me eno ugh to keep me from doing it .
We would pick bushel baskets full of peas by 7:00 in the morning, shell
them by 11 :00, and have them in the freezer by early afternoon. I became
the major canner and free zer, and loved helping can peaches. Mom would
get two bushels of them at Brennan's Market in Monroe, and when they
got ripe we would have a peach canning afternoon. The same with chick-
ens and tomatoes we raised. I arranged all the jars according to color so

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108 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

they looked nice on the shelves. There was something about salting things
away-you were able to preserve those colors for the winter. I became an
excellent pickle maker. We made them in the old crocks, layered them with
dill and vinegar, and soaked them in salt water for so many days. When we
did our own butchering, I would saw pork chops and wrap them up for
the freezer, and help my mom make sausage.
Wherever we moved, we spiffed up the place-threw some sunflower
seeds along the barn and mowed the weeds and whatever grass came up.
In high school I got heavily into gardening and we had huge, spectacular
flower gardens. We lived along the main highway, and people would stop
and ask if they could walk through the garden-we had forty or fifty kinds
of annual flowers. The Farm Journal would occasionally have articles on
flower-arranging, with little projects to do. I really got into that, to the
point where I entered open-class at the county fair and won best-of-show
twice. I would have twenty to thirty entries-stem specimens, arrange-
ments for dining table and coffee table, a basket of mixed garden flowers.
I was competing with about fifteen elderly ladies and one other young
man.
The old ladies there thought I was a darling. It was a badge of honor,
something I did really well without any training. I loved doing it and just
did what came to my head. When we cleaned house on Saturday, I'd go
out and gather flowers so we would have six or eight flower arrangements
in the house for the weekend. If I liked an arrangement, I would make a
drawing of it so that I could do it again . I was ridiculed for doing it by my
older brothers and my brother just younger, but it wasn't enough to make
me quit doing it . I had the approval of my parents and my grandparents,
and that held up.
Until I got to high school, I was pretty confident of myself. When I
was in country school, everybody played softball, and we would play other
schools. I went through elementary school being a really good ball player-
r was able to hold my own in games and physical things. But adolescence
kicked it out of me. Partly because of my brothers, r lost confidence in my
athletic ability. Phy. ed . in high school was probably the worst punishment
I ever had to endure. I felt so self-conscious and uncoordinated, and re-
sented having to take it.
As a child, I didn't maintain friendships for very long because we moved
so much. I didn't have very many friends in high school because I lived in
the country, and at Monroe High School there were the city kids and the
country kids. Even some of the teachers talked down to the country kids
and were very insensitive. I had a couple shirts that I thought were really
pretty, so I wore them to school, and was quite severely heckled by several

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John Beutel 109

guys in my class, who gave me the nickname of Wop. I had no idea what
it meant, but it really pushed me down. I was very self-conscious and had
the beginnings of an inferiority complex, partly because I was from the
country. I became very much a people-pleaser, to compensate for what I
thought were flaws.

Neither of my parents ever spoke one word to me about sex, and there was
nothing taught in school, so I ended up being really ignorant about it.
I've heard my mother say that she felt that on the farm we learned about
it from the animals. I realized that the bull was let out in the pasture with
the cows at certain times, and I knew about cows being in heat, but I never
really thought much about it. On occasion I saw penetration, and I helped
deliver calves and would see pigs being born. That was about it-not much
to go on.
In fifth or sixth grade, I was fascinated by pictures in the World Book
Encyclopedia of statues of Greek and Roman gods. I drew pictures of them,
without fig leaves, and forgot to take the drawings out of my pocket when
I got home. When my mother found them, she confronted me and gave
me a swat and said that I shouldn't do that anymore. I went into puberty
very early, and it was scary because I didn't know what was happening.
Hair was coming out from places that I hadn't had hair before. The first
orgasms I had were when I was sled-riding. Coming down the hill, I'd do
belly flops on the sled and think, whoa, is this great! I didn't know what
it was, but I knew there was a big, uncomfortable wet spot on my long un-
derwear.
During high school I started to see interesting magazines and books
at a shop in Monroe, where we got our Sunday newspaper after church.
The first time I ever read anything about homosexuality was in 1959 or
1960, in a magazine called Sexology. It was basically heterosexual, with ques-
tions and answers and diagrams, but it did mention homosexuality. I would
go into the shop and very carefully read parts of it. There was a new one
every month or two, and eventually I even bought a couple of them. Two
other magazines, Young Physique and Demigods, were basically photographs
of men in posing straps.l I bought a number of them. How I got the cour-
age to do it, I don't know. One day I bought one just before a youth fel-
lowship meeting and sat through the meeting with the magazine hidden
under my shirt . When I got home the ink was all over my stomach, but it
was great. I would also buy Playboy. I found the nudity sensuous, not nec-
essarily the women.
Later in high school, I'd hide my stack of magazines under bales of
straw in a shed, and would go out there in the afternoons to take my plea-

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110 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-J960s

sure reading them and masturbating. Masturbation was a very scary thing
for me. I would never do it before a big musical performance, because I
thought it would wreck all my notes. One time I masturbated the night
before a band concert, and I was just petrified that I wasn't going to be
able to play well. I thought that I might be punished by God . I had in-
credible guilt, and masturbation made me feel more guilty than the fact
that I got off on same-sex pictures.
In one of my magazines was a drawing with an arrow sign that said,
"To Fire Island."2 I started thinking that there must be other people like
me, there must be something going on, but I still had absolutely no idea.
There were several people in my high school class that I thought were ef-
feminate, and there was always, "Wear yellow on Thursday and you're a
fairy," but I still didn't really comprehend being attracted to males. Until
I got to college, I didn't know that there were other gay people.
College was the best four years of my life, because I had no labels. I
wasn't a farmer, I was just another kid, and we had a great band, a great
music department, and I had the time of my life. The first time I was to-
gether with a guy, I was twenty or twenty-one years old, working at a sup-
per club in Monroe. I took this guy's order at the bar, and the chemistry
was all there. He talked to me a lot and asked me what I was doing later.
Mter I got off work, we drove around and talked. God, my blood was rac -
ing hard. Mter about an hour we had traveled just about every road around
Monroe and he got up the nerve to touch my leg. Then everything just
sort of happened. When I got back to my car, I thought lightning might
strike me. I was petrified.

For a couple of years now, I've been wanting to tell my family that I'm
gay. It has caused me a lot of pain, and I'm hoping for courage. The num-
ber one thing is my fear of rejection. The other thing is that I don't know
how much they understand. My family is very conservative and not par-
ticularly sophisticated . I sometimes think that I could come out to my sis-
ter, because we can sit and talk for hours. On the other hand, she and her
husband are so conservative, her husband particularly. But for all I know,
she'd say, "Well, everybody knows." I've had a number offriends who have
come out to their families, and they've said everybody knew about them
for years.
My dad and I are quite close, but I don't have a lot in common with
my family any longer, so I don't know how to relate to them. I did get a
cat so we could talk about cats, but I don't have kids, and that takes care
of quite a bit of conversation in the family. All four of my brothers were in
the army, but I had a teaching deferment . And I'm the only one in our

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John Beutel 111

family who has a college education. It has taken my older brothers a long
time to deal with that.
Being gay has been a source of considerable pain, but in some ways I
think that pain offers something greater. It's sort of a conduit to get to
another place. Being on the outside, struggling, has helped me as a teacher.
It has given me more compassion for the underdog, the ones who are hav-
ing problems. I think I serve as a great example as a gay man, in my teach-
ing and in the way I live my life. I try to be a good person, an honest and
moral person, down-to-earth. I just don't know any other way to be . Two
years ago, when I came out to my pastor, he said that I could only be ac-
cepted as a good Lutheran if I abstained. I'm not going to accept the
church's definition of me. God made me, God loves me, and I'll duke it
out with God when the time comes.

NOTES

1. Until the late 1960s and the 1970s, when explicitly gay-oriented pornogra-
phy became widely available, physique magazines such as those John mentions pro-
vided gay men with erotic depictions of the male body. Many of these publications
were produced to look like magazines for body builders and physical culture en-
thusiasts, but their intended audience was well defined.
2. Fire Island is a narrow, 32-mile-long barrier island just south of New York's
Long Island. Gay men and lesbians from Manhattan began creating a summer com-
munity on the island in the 1930s. By the 1950s, Fire Island had become an un-
derground gay mecca. The reference to Fire Island that John encountered in a phy-
sique magazine alluded to this.

Copyrighted Material
 Myron Turk

Born in 1944) Myrongrew up with two brothers on a 160-acre dairy and hog
farm near Black Earth) in Dane County) south-central Wisconsin. He mar-
ried at age twenty-five and came out at thir·ty-eight. He lives on 5-acre hobby
farm near Madison) Wisconsin. In this brief narrative) Myron describes see-
ing his own childhood being relived by his nephew.

MY DAD USED to tell me I was a mistake-that I was supposed to have

been a girl, but something went wrong. Since I was treated like I was sup-
posed to have been a girl, I was really confused about what I was supposed
to be and how I was supposed to act . Dad spent all his time with my older
brother, teaching him everything. I just couldn't work with the machin-
ery well enough to please Dad, and he was not subtle in letting us know
if we didn't do something right. I was relegated to being Mother's helper,
except when they needed help with things like milking cows, cleaning
barns, or haying. I took care of the chickens and the family vegetable gar-
den. We had a big garden and did a lot of canning and freezing. I also took
a keen interest in cooking. My mother was very encouraging and support-
ive of my endeavors, so I was willing to try almost anything.
Dad would make cruel remarks about my brothers and me in front of
friends or relatives or other people who came to the farm . He and my broth-
ers were all very slender, while I took after my mother's German side and
tended to be heavy. And probably because I was unhappy, food was a con-
soling thing in my life. Dad would make remarks like, "You got tits just
like a woman." I can remember that like it was yesterday, and it's been
thirty-five years. I became so self-conscious about my body I almost re-
fused to take phy. ed. in high school, and I would never go swimming or
take my shirt off. Even ifit was one hundred degrees, I would melt before
I would expose myself to any more comments like that.
Mother did the best she could to compensate for Dad's behavior. It's
a pretty lopsided world when you're starving for affection and about the
only place you're getting it is from your mother, but I'm thankful I got it
from somebody. My dad didn't allow my brothers and me to have opin-
ions on anything. We were told what to do and what to feel, and we were

112

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Myron Turk 113

"We weren't that far from town, but I felt isolated and lonely. That's why
the animals have been my friends. It was always a great reward to have
something alive that you could pet on the head and it would love you for
what you were and wouldn't give you a bunch of grief" Myron Turk, age
sixteen, with newborn calf, October 1960. Courtesy of Myron Turk.

never allowed to be angry. It was bad to be angry. Dad and I were distant
until I got to be fourteen or fifteen, and then it became hostile. I just got
tired of being treated like I wasn't even a person, verbally abused and
slapped around, so I got back at Dad by being smart-mouthed. It didn't
solve anything, but it gave me some increment of satisfaction to outwit
him sometimes.

I can see my brother doing to his son what Dad did to us. My nephew is
extremely good at breeding dairy cattle and keeping farm records and that
kind of thing. But my brother and Dad have ruined him as far as driving
farm machinery, because they just belittle him when he makes a mistake.

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114 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Now he refuses to drive machinery at all. Although my nephew is supposed

to take over the farm, I'm not sure he'll ever get around to doing it .
It's pretty sad-like my whole childhood is being played out in front
of my eyes. But my nephew's got it even worse, because he's an only child.
My brother isn't physically abusive, but he does a lot of the same things
to my nephew that Dad did to me . And Dad goes to the farm every day
to help my brother, and ends up doing these things to my nephew, too.
Then my mother and my sister-in-law try to overcompensate, suffocating
my nephew with attention and protection. I can see so much of myself in
him, it's scary. I'm afraid he's going to have many problems before he's
found his way in life. I hope he can persevere.
My nephew is seventeen, a big kid, intelligent, effeminate, and pretty
lonely. I think he's going to be gay. For years he got dolls and Susie Home-
maker kitchen sets for Christmas, and he's so campy it scares me. I feel it
would be out of place to broach the subject with my sister-in-law, but I
would like to be there if my nephew feels like he has no one to turn to. If
I had known somebody who was gay when I was growing up, a positive
role model, or had had access to a counselor, I might have accepted my-
self for what I was and not pretended to be straight and gotten married.

Copyrighted Material
 Norm Reed

Norm was born in 1945 in northeastern Ohio. Until he was seventeen, he lived
on a small family farm in a Mennonite farming community between Mas-
sillon and Wooster, in Wayne County. Normgrew up with two older sisters, an
older brother, and a younger brother. He was married for five years and is the
father of one child. He lives in the Cleveland, Ohio, area.

GOING TO CHURCH was my own choice. For a while, my father was

basically a drunk, and my mother was a run-around whore. It was us kids
who felt the need to get involved with church . It was kind of a haven, a
nice place to be on Sunday mornings, away from the fighting that Mom
and Dad were doing at the house. My parents were very anti-church and
would have nothing to do with the little Mennonite community. We
weren't Mennonites, but every summer I would go to Bible school for two
or three weeks at a Mennonite church. Sundays I would go to a United
Brethren in Christ church, sort of a branch of the Mennonite church.
When I was seven years old, I got very involved in praying and reading
the Bible and learning as much as I could by listening to every word the
evangelist or minister would say. I decided when I was in third or fourth
grade that I had to be a minister. When I was ten or eleven, Mom and Dad
got interested in going to the United Brethren church. I never had any
intention of getting them involved or trying to help them get their lives
straightened out, but eventually they kind of got it together as a result of
being more visible in the church community. Groups of people would come
to our house to have prayer meetings in the backyard. All through high
school, I was involved with groups like Youth for Christ. We would hand
out tracts at school, inviting kids to come to church. In college I studied
Christian education, preparing to become a missionary. Mter college, my
wife and I became heavily involved with church work. We taught in a Chris-
tian school for three or four years, and were married for five.

Dad worked in a factory full-time, but had grown up on a truck farm where
they sold vegetables for a living. We had only about six acres. We always
had four or five cows, barnyards full of chickens, and rabbits. By the time

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116 Part 1. CominlT IIfAge Before the Mid-J960s

I was seven or eight, it was my job to get lip around 6:00 and milk our
cows. T hen we would have breakf:lst and go off to school. I milked in the
evening as well. Our neighbors about a half mile to the west were Men-
nonite, and every night when the woman wou ld go out to feed their chick-
ens, she would sing church songs. During the winter her voice would echo
across the fields, and sometimes we'd go outside just to hear her sing.
We butchered chickens and rabbits every Saturday during the summer.
We would clean and pluck five or six chickens and Mom would use them
during the week, mainly for Sunday dinners. She would invite people in-
neighbors, other farmers, but the majority were people from the church.
Mter church, there were at least twent y, twent y-five people there for din -
ner. And during the week there were always lots of people there, a lot of
commotion. It seemed like our house had become the center of neigh -
borhood activities.
We had maybe three acres of strawberries and raised our own vegeta-
bles, so we all did a lot of work in the gardens. We had a tractor but we
didn't have a lot of the equipment that the larger tiumers had, so we would
go out with scythes and sickles to cut hay. On occasion, Dad would loan
his tractor out, or I would drive the tractor to help cut the farmers' fields
for them . Our farm sat in the middle oflarger dairy farms, and during the
summer we would work for the neighbors, give them a hand with baling
hay, taking care of their cows, cleaning out stalls, and anything else that
they might have to do. It wasn't because we wanted the money, it was be-
cause that was the way things were done. If a neighbor was sick or in the
hospital or couldn't tend his farm, I would volunteer to take care of his
cattle, do the milking. And my dad had a way of volunteering me to do
things when I didn't want to .
Grandma and my younger brother and I slept in the same bed for a
number of years, and my older brother was in the same room. Everybody
wore everybody else's clothes, and I always got my older brother's rags.
We did not have running water; we had a pump in the cellar. I always
wanted to get away from the farm. My grandmother on my mom's side
lived in town and I often asked her if I could come live with her. Some-
times I'd go in on Friday night after school and spend the weekend with
her, go to church with her on Sunday and then back home. I'm not sure
I liked being with her as much as I liked not being on the farm. Dad was
such a mean bastard, nobody ever wanted to be around him. He was al -
ways very demanding, rather brutal , and things had to get done his way.
He and Mom tc)ught all the tim e, and he would often take it out on us
kids. By the time I was born , my parents had gone through the Depres-
sion and the war, and Dad was supporting a family, trying to keep up a

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Norm Reed 117

small farm and his own job. I think he felt a lot of pressure and was very
frustrated.
Mom, on the other hand, was always supportive, pretty much no mat-
ter what we wanted to do. And anything that we were a part of~ Mom was
there-church youth group, Cub Scouts, school band . She was a volun-
teer cook and room mother, so she was at school every day with me and
my little brother. She wasn't overly protective, but she just had to have
that grip on us . She didn't want us taken away from the farm or the house
too much. I think getting involved with our involvements was her way of
showing how much she loved us without communicating much verbally.
As far as sitting down and talking and sharing feelings, we never did that.
On Saturdays, Mom would root us out of bed around 5:30,6:00 so
she could rip the sheets and covers off and get her laundry started. My sis-
ters helped her with the house chores. We had two great-uncles-old bach-
elors, just awful old biddies-who lived maybe eight miles from us. We
often had to clean their house, and every year Mom would make me and
my little brother clean their darned wallpaper. We always had to be busy
doing something. We could never just sit and read a book, and we didn't
have a TV I'd watch Grandma crochet and I wanted to learn how to do
that, but Mom didn't want me to learn. She didn't know how to crochet,
and maybe she thought that was something she could not be a part of.
But Dad said, "Oh, it doesn't matter," so I learned how to crochet, and
that was my hobby.
Every Saturday, the neighborhood would get together and have a
ballgame. We had a very nice ball diamond in one of the neighbors' fields,
and the fathers got together to put up the poles and a net. Some week-
ends everybody played . There might have been as many as twenty-five,
thirty people up there. We always met at our house, then up to the field
with our bats and balls and gloves. On occasion, while the fathers were
playing with their kids, the mothers would make ice cream. When we were
through playing, we'd all get together and have ice cream and cake and
pie at our house . My mom had grown up with a friend who was blind all
her life. Mom would sometimes go pick her up and bring her over to the
house. She loved my mom's fudge, and on an occasional summer night
Mom would make a big batch and we'd all sit out in the yard on blankets,
eating fudge and talking.
We had so much commotion and no privacy whatsoever in the house,
and Mom always had to know what we were doing. I just lived for the days
when they would go to a church meeting or somewhere and leave me alone
in the house by myself. Those times came infrequently. I used to take long
walks, just to be alone, and I loved ice-skating and would often go skat-

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118 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

ing at night by myself on a neighbor's farm pond. On Saturday nights I

would meet a friend at the railroad tracks, because his house was a mad-
house too. We would flicker flashlights so we could see each other com-
ing, then walk the tracks together for maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes
and go our separate ways. One of my friends in grade school lived about
two miles from us, so on occasion we'd meet at the pond or do something
together in the evening. But his parents were very strict on him too, he
had to be home, and they always questioned where he was going. All the
parents in that community had such a grip on their kids. You could never
leave the house without saying, "I'm taking a walk," or, "I'll be back in
an hour." You had to be always in the presence of your parents, for some
reason. I think it was just that they had to control what they had .

When I started school, I was kind of a mama's boy. But one thing I made
sure I knew how to do was to tie my shoes . My sisters drilled me till I got
it right . When we had gym in first grade we played in our stocking feet,
and I knew how to tie my shoes, but a lot of the cute little boys didn't
know how. Ifit was a good-looking boy, I would make sure that I was the
one who helped him put his shoes on. I'd put his foot in my crotch and
tie his shoe for him.
We were never allowed to mention anything relating to sex or preg-
nancy at home. One morning when I was about ten years old, I was lying
in bed rubbing myself, and it felt so good. I ejaculated and I was so scared
about it. I thought I was real sick, that I had done something wrong to
my body. The next day I said, "Mom, I don't know what happened, but
white stuff came out of me. " She just said, "Oh, really?"
A lot of times I would take walks so I could masturbate. It wasn't like
I could go in the bathroom and close the door, because we had no door
on the bathroom, just a curtain. I couldn't do it in bed, because my brother
and my grandmother were lying right there . It was just such a hassle; I
couldn't be alone to do anything. We were always so afraid of getting caught
at anything we did. Mom or Dad or somebody might be watching. And
then, because it was such a hush-hush thing, I felt guilty for doing it.
Sometimes, when Mom and Dad would go away for a couple hours, I
would go up in Mom's closet and dress up in her high heels and dresses.
I wasn't five or six, trying to play mama. I was twelve or thirteen, and I
thought dresses were so comfortable . I did that for a number of years and
most of the time they didn't know anything about it, until I began wear-
ing her outfits to work in the fields sometimes . It was no big deal. "Oh,
Norm's got Mom's dress on again." Once we were out in the field spread-
ing cow shit, and there I was in Mom's high heels, her white gloves and a

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Norm Reed 119

dress, with my pitchfork. They just kind of accepted it, except one day when
I was down by the barn in one of her better dresses. A damned goat started
chewing on the dress, and I thought, oh no, Mom's going to really be
pissed, so I backed away and the goat ripped it right off of me . But other
than that, no one ever said anything about it.
One day I was down at the barn fooling around and a calf started butt-
ing me. I thought, oh, this could be interesting. The inevitable happened,
but I didn't know what damage I might have done-if it was good for the
calf or not, or if it could kill him-so I didn't let him suck me off very
often. There was one guy in high school-a drum major-and maybe three
or four times we met in the bathroom between classes and jacked each
other off. He was tall, thin, and very attractive. I think that was just a sex-
ual outlet for him, but for me it went a little deeper.
I think Mom always knew that I was gay, but it was never mentioned.
Ifwe ever sat down and talked, it was always about, oh, this person's doing
this, or the grandkids are doing that, or the neighbors, or her church ac-
tivities. It was never heart-to-heart. In high school, I was going through
this turmoil; I wondered why, ifI'm a Christian and I believe in God, do
I feel this way towards other guys? There were a number of times I would
just stand at the kitchen window and stare out. Mom would come up be-
hind me and put her arm around me and say, "Norm, what's wrong? Talk
to me." But I could never talk to her. I would just say, "Oh, there's noth-
ing, nothing wrong." I didn't know anybody who was gay. In that com-
munity, they would as soon shoot somebody that was like that as they
would a mad dog. To them, it's just part of the Devil.

I met the woman that I married in high school, and we went to the same
college. She fell in love with me, and I truly loved her. I was still going
through the transition from adolescent to adult, not knowing that any-
body else like me existed, but regardless of how I felt toward other guys, I
wanted a family. The only right thing to do at that time was to get mar-
ried and have kids and become the missionary that I wanted to be. In my
college psychology courses, homosexuals were just briefly mentioned, with
no definition. Most of what was in the library was written by very reli-
gious-type people, who damned it as very abnormal behavior that could
be cured with counseling, and said that there was no excuse for being ho-
mosexual.
I got married when I was twenty-two. I had read in some book that
the best thing for a person to do if he thinks he's a homosexual is to get
married, because the homosexual feelings will subside. Within a month or
two, I knew I had made a mistake, because what I had felt toward my wife

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120 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

subsided and my feelings toward men increased. I felt guilty whenever it

happened, but every now and then, if there was an opportunity, it was
very discreetly handled, and she never knew about it. One day we received
a letter from a friend that we had both known in college. In the letter, he
revealed that he was gay. I think she was kidding when she said, "Norm,
since the two of you were such good friends, does this mean that you're
a queer toor" I looked at her and said, "1 didn't know he was a homosex-
ual, but I know that I am." I wasn't going to hide anything from her at
that point, and she just went nuts. Three years later, we got divorced.
I always tried to be so prim and proper in the eyes of other people.
When the divorce came, she ruined my prestigious endeavors in the large
church in Cleveland that she and I had belonged to . The minister came to
me and said, "There's a law on our books that if behavior like this takes
place with any of our members, we have the power to ostracize them ." He
was not at all willing to talk it through with me. He saw the Devil in me,
and if you are a Devil they don't want anything to do with you. He said,
"The only way you can enter our building again is if you present yourself
to the deacons and confess your sins before us. Ifwe decide to forgive you
and we feel that you have made an honest repentance to God for your sins,
then you would need to confess your sins in front of the congregation and
they would vote on whether they still want you in the church."
It made me so angry, I never went back. I thought, holy shit, why put
me through all of this just because I'm gayr To me, being gay didn't mean
that much. I had already gotten to the point where I felt it was wrong, but
then I felt, hey, this is me. Whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. It's
nobody else's concern. The biggest turn-around for me was how angry I
was at those hypocritical church-going people whose husbands were cheat-
ing on their wives, or whose wives were having their boyfriends in during
the day, or whose little kids were screwing in the church parking lot. These
were the church leaders, religious fanatics who have ruined the lives of
very good people because they have ostracized them or made their lives
guilt-ridden by cutting them off.
Eventually I met some other gay people, got involved with some of the
activities downtown, and started going to bars. I'd never been inside a
bar. The first gay march we had in Cleveland, I was right up in front, car-
rying a banner down Euclid Avenue screaming for gay rights, because it
just made me so angry to think that I had given my whole life up to that
point-I was twenty-seven-basically to God, to the church. Every time
the church lights were on, I had been there, picking up kids for Sunday
school, Bible school. My whole life had been wrapped around Christian
addictive behavior. One night at the baths, a very prominent person in our

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Norm Reed 121

church walked up to me and said, "Well, Norm, don't be surprised. I'm

not." He and I became very good friends. He was also a very religious
Christian believer, and he was married and had children. We spent hours
on the phone, sharing experiences and how we felt.
As I was finally coming to terms with being gay, my younger brother
came home from college and lived with me for a while. I could see that he
was definitely gay. "You can't be any different than I am," I said. "You're
gay and you're not admitting it." He said he didn't think so, I said I'd
prove it to him, and that night I took him to the baths. Mter that, he and
I became even closer and were able to discuss things. He didn't have a
hard time accepting being gay, because he never felt guilty, never liked
church, never held much stock in any of that. I don't think he ever ques-
tioned whether it was right. He was so relieved to find out about himself,
he was telling everybody. He told my parents and my older sister about
himself, and he mentioned me in there too . He had a big influence on my
being forced to better accept it within myself.
There is no explanation for my being gay. The Lord and I have an un-
derstanding, and He's just going to accept it the way it is. I have a lot of
faith in the Lord and the Bible. I believe the Bible as literally as I can un-
derstand it. I've never felt punished by the Lord for being gay. I've been
punished tremendously by religious fanatics who thought I was the per-
fect person, but ostracized me when they found out I was gay. I still be-
lieve the same way I did. I just don't practice it by going to some social
club that they call church and Sunday school. The attitude that I have
now towards fanatical religious-right-type people is probably the attitude
my dad had when I was growing up.
I grew up believing that God was very vengeful, and at the same time
I was taught that God is love and Jesus forgives. Maybe that's how I fi-
nally accepted that there's no problem with my being gay. Until the di-
vorce and the horrendous thing at church, I felt guilty. This is not what
the Lord wants; God would not condone this sort of thing. Then I thought,
well, I'll just take Him for His word, that He does forgive and that He is
a loving God. I believe so much in God's love and in the grace that's suf-
ficient for all of us through Him. He's the one that created me and gave
me these feelings. I've accepted this now for eighteen years or so, and I'm
happy that I am where I am at this point in life. I'm not afraid of anybody
finding out I'm gay, and I don't have to feel guilty or try to hide any-
thing.
I've felt some resentment toward my mom for not telling me that she
knew. I feel she should have said, "Norm, I know you prefer being with
guys rather than women. There's nothing wrong with that-there's a lot

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122 Part 1. CominB IIfA.pe Before the Mid-J960s

of people like you. Let's talk." It was up to her to acknowledge to me that

she knew, not to just keep asking me, '''vVh,n's wrong?" Had I realized I
was gay, I would never have gotten married. I have a son who's twenty-
two now. I would never undo what has been done, but it would have pre-
vented a lot of heartache, as far as the divorce and child custody. About a
year and a half ago I told my son that I'm gay. He said that he had sus-
pected for a long time. Then he hugged me real tight and held me, and
thanked me t(X teeling comfortable enough with him to let him know.
Now we can talk about anything.

I'm so glad to be away from farming. I had my fill of all the animals and
the commotion. I think that's why I live alone today. It's so peaceful. I
kind of feel bad for people who are growing up in the country, but then
in another way I don't, because it's a rich lite. We ate well, had good neigh-
bors, overall people were rather kind. In meeting really good, honest, gen-
uine people, I would say I've met the best of them by growing up in that
area. Some of those old -timers just cannot be beat. Even though they're
anti-homosexual beca~lse they don't understand it, they're still wonderful
Christian people. If some of them found out I was gay, they would say, "I
think I had a cow that was something like that once." It's no big deal to
some ofthose old -timers, and they don't even know what it means anyhow.
It was important that the cows got ted by six in the morning. It was
important that they were milked by a certain time at night. It was impor-
tant that church was attended every Sunday. Everything was important to
everybody; you had to be where you were supposed to be at all times, and
you had to be there on time. We grew up trusting everybody. Bums would
come down the road, and Mom would invite them in and make a big meal
for them, give them some extra bread , ~1I1d send them on their way. I'm
very trusting and giving, and I don't expect anything in return. If you
need it, fine, take it. If I can help somebody out, I'll do it . That's the way
that community was.
My interests were always on things other than country things. When
I was maybe fourteen, I had an opportunity to get involved in a local the-
ater where I had gotten a part in a summer play. My dad thought that
maybe it was too worldly, so he wouldn't let me be in it. It really makes
me mad when I think about the opportunities that I was not allowed to
have because it just wasn't right, or it was too far away, or it would cost
too much, or it would take me away from the routine of everyday farm
life. Other kids grew up in better homes than I did , where there was maybe
a little bit more fun and laughter. It was never any fun at home, except
those nights when Mom made fudge or when all of us kids would get to

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Norm Reed 123

throw buckets of water on each other, or just play games. Dad was always
there telling us how to do it, or that we weren't doing it quite well enough .
And Mom was always there, not necessarily domineering, but just being
there .
We never had TV and it was a sin to go to movies . Years later, when I
visited a church where I had gone as a kid, I was wearing a tie. A woman
came up to me with scissors and said, "You either take that tie off or I cut
it off." It was a sin to wear a tie to church- too worldly, putting too much
emphasis on yourself. God doesn't want that sort of thing. I just cannot
stand organized religion, to have some minister up front befooling every-
body from the pulpit.
My mom passed away about six years ago. In her memory, I thought
the whole family should get together, and we've been doing it now for six
years. When we get together, at least once a year, we have such a good
time. Every April, towards May, we meet on my older brother's place in
southern Ohio and we have a mushroom fest because, growing up on the
farm, we all went out with our bags to hunt mushrooms. There might be
forty of us, all the grown kids and their spouses and their kids and their
kids . My younger brother brings his lover with him. They ' ve been together
for about eighteen years.
I would love to have a lover like my brother has. Maybe ten years ago,
I was down at their place and at 5:30 in the morning I heard all this laugh-
ing and giggling going on out in the kitchen . I was still in bed and I
thought, jeez, they're having a party out there . So I put on my bathrobe
and went out and peeked around the corner, and there's the two of them
sitting at the table just laughing and telling jokes. They've been doing
that kind of thing for the last eighteen years-just like two little magpies.
That's the kind of companion I'd like to have . But most people whom I've
gotten involved with, there's always something that I have to criticize . Ei-
ther they're not neat enough or they're not clean enough, or they're too-
l don't know. I like things a certain way, and ifit's not that way it's just
no way at all .

Copyrighted Material
 Ronald Schoen

Born in 1947, Ronaldgrew up with two sisters and one brother on a small
dairy farm in Dakota County, southeastern Minnesota. He lives in Rochester,
Minnesota. In this brief narrative, Ronald describes why he is willing to «walk
a tight-rope)) as an elementary school teacher in a rural district.

I ENJOYED living on the farm, but I absolutely hated all the work that
was involved . My father still jokes that when he would come in one door
of the barn, I would go out the other door, heading out to the woods or
down to the river. By my late teens, I had made up my mind I was going
to teach elementary school. At that time , very few elementary school teach-
ers were men, but my parents never questioned it . They allowed us to be
who we were and to do what we wanted to do, within the confines of
Catholic doctrine.
By my second year of college, I was sure I was a homosexual. This re-
alization frightened me, as I felt it would jeopardize my career choice. It
had been instilled in me that being a homosexual was incompatible with
teaching children . The next three years of college were full of emotional
turmoil as I faced one decision after another concerning my sexuality. I
read everything about homosexuality I could secretly get my hands on in
the college library. I decided that I would never admit to my homosexu-
ality and that I would never practice my true sexual preference . I also de-
cided never to marry, as I considered that to be living too much of a lie.
Masturbation became my savior.
Mter college, I began teaching, got my first apartment, and started to
buy pornography. I had my first homosexual intercourse at the age of
twenty-four, when I was picked up by an older man on the streets of Roch -
ester. For the first time I said out loud, "I'm gay," but my obsession with
the incompatibility of being gay and being a teacher was still overriding.
Everything I did had to be methodically thought out as to how it would
affect my standing in the eyes of the rural community in which I was teach-
ing. I was certain that as a teacher I could not expect to discover a true,
loving gay relationship. That beliefleft me teeling empty and rather worth-
less, so 1 threw myself into my teaching and devoted myself to my stu-

124

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Ronald Schoen 125

dents. Fortunately, a two-and-a-half-year relationship in my late twenties

helped me open up to love and take pleasure in my sexuality.

I've never wanted to lose myselfin a large city or lock myself into a ghetto.
My sexuality is a very important part of my life, but it's not the only thing.
My profession is extremely important to me. I teach sixth-graders in a rural
school district, and one of the reasons I've chosen to stay there is that
everybody knows everybody else. It's kind of a family-that close-knit,
midwestern sense of home and community. Former students of mine who
have graduated and married now have sons and daughters in my classroom.
My sexuality has me walking a tight-rope . The more open I've become
with my gayness over the years, the harder it has become to live in this self-
imposed closet and be satisfied with my existence in the straight world.
On the other hand, my involvement in the straight world, both profes-
sionally and socially, prevents me from becoming more involved or open
in the gay community. So I'm isolated from both communities.
Even though my profession continues to prevent me from announcing
my sexuality, I've become more relaxed in recent years . I no longer feel
the desperate need to keep the secret . The number of colleagues who know
I'm gay has grown from two or three to eight or nine. Last year, when a
colleague began gossiping about my sexuality, I took the direct confronta-
tional approach rather than running scared. It probably didn't stop the
gossip, but it did a whole lot for my self-respect.

One day during the summer of 1988 I received a phone call from one of
my former students who was then in the eighth grade. He asked me to
meet him at a local park. Mter an hour of discussing minor adolescent prob-
lems I asked Chris if there weren't larger problems he wanted to talk about .
He then proceeded to tell me that he was gay, that he wanted to tell some-
one who would be understanding and not offer any condemnation. His
two previous attempts to tell someone had failed; one adult had told him
that he was just going through a phase. Another had been very affirming
until homosexuality was mentioned, then offered Chris a reduced rate on
counseling sessions given by his wife.
Our conversation in the park that day lasted for more than three hours,
and during the next four to five years I became a mentor to Chris. I helped
him establish a pen-pal connection with a gay youth in Minneapolis, and
helped him find music by gay artists, adolescent novels with gay themes,
and materials on gay history, gay organizations, and current events related
to gay issues. AIDS was a regular topic of conversation, as were his social
involvements, his crushes on classmates, and his plans for the future.

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126 Part 1. Coming of Age Before the Mid-1960s

Once Chris gained his driver's license, it became easier to maintain con-
tact with him . When a gay youth support group was established by the
gay/lesbian community in Rochester, he began attending weekly meet-
ings. Chris was in frequent contact with me during his freshman year of
college, as I allowed him to call collect whenever he wanted or needed to
talk. He came out to most of his classmates, joined the campus gay orga-
nization, and had his first serious relationship with another man.
As Chris has matured and developed his own life, our contact has be-
come less and less. It has been almost a father-son relationship as I have
watched him grow into an intelligent, articulate, and talented young man.
That I was able to help him through the uncertainties, fears, and isolation
of his adolescent years is an unparalleled reward. This experience has pointed
out to me the importance of rural and small-town gays. So instead oftak-
ing my frustration and loneliness and running to a large city, I continue
to walk my tight-rope here in rural Minnesota-hoping not only to make
a difference in the lives of my students but also, someday, to fulfill my
need and desire for the warmth of a love relationship.

Copyrighted Material
PART 2
Coming ofAge Between the
Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

Copyrighted Material
Boy in Farmyard, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Tom Rygh

Copyrighted Material
 Introduction

THE BLOSSOMING of America's sexual revolution and counterculture

movements represented the beginning ofthe end of what Henry Bauer re-
ferred to in his interview as "the dark ages of sex." Life attempted to shed
some light in a 1964 article, "Homosexuality in America," which de-
clared, "A secret world grows open and bolder. Society is forced to look
at it-and try to understand it."l This article, in a popular photo-news
magazine that was a fixture in many rural homes, presented homosexual-
ity as a seamy and unfortunate kind of life. Nonetheless, it served as an
important eye-opener for fifteen-year-old Doug Edwards, growing up on
a farm in central Indiana, and for Harry Beckner in Nebraska, who was
twenty-seven years old and married with two children.
In 1967, CBS television aired a similarly dismissive special report on
"The Homosexual."2 Newsweek described the efforts of an organization
of San Francisco clergy to overcome the Bible's "heterosexual bias" in their
ministries.3 Also that year, the television show "N.y'P.D." became the first
network series to portray gay characters. 4 "Where has Hollywood's sud-
den vivid interest in homosexuality come from?" Time asked in 1968. "It
comes from what's happening all around," replied John Schlesinger, direc-
tor of "Midnight Cowboy," a movie about a male prostitute. "Everybody
does more or less what he wants to these days, and no one says anything
about it ." However, Time observed that Hollywood's chance to enlighten
the public was undercut by the fact that "most of the homosexuals shown
so far are sadists, psychopaths or buffoons."5
In 1969, Time reported that a federal task force headed by psycholo-
gist Evelyn Hooker had concluded that "homosexuality presents a major
problem for our society largely because of the amount of injustice and suf-
fering entailed in it." Time observed that "the report comes at a time when
homosexuals are more visible and assertive than ever.... Americans can
now recognize the diversity of homosexual life and understand that an un-
desirable handicap does not necessarily make everyone afflicted with it un-
desirable. "6
Also in 1969, Time published a major article, "The Homosexual: Newly
Visible, Newly Understood." It gave the reader a glimpse of the diversity
of gay and lesbian lives, included a range of views on whether or not ho-
mosexuality was a sickness, and acknowledged the inconclusiveness sur-

129

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130 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

rounding the "what causes it?" question. "Homosexuals have never been
so visible, vocal or closely scrutinized by research," Time stated . "The mil-
itants are finding grudging tolerance and some support in the 'straight'
community." The article stated that "homophobia is based on understand-
able instincts among straight people, but . . . also ... innumerable mis-
conceptions and oversimplifications. The worst of these may be that all
homosexuals are alike." The article concluded that America was challenged
to come up with ways to discourage homosexuality without making life
miserable for "those who cannot be helped, or do not wish to be."7
The first television drama to focus on homosexuality from a non-ho-
mophobic perspective was "That Certain Summer," a made-for-TV movie
that aired in 1972 . However, television shows in the early- to mid-1970s
also portrayed gay men as sexual predators and lesbians as murderers .8 Farm
boys who liked to read and could get to a library or bookstore might have
discovered such gay-positive novels as James Kirkwood's P.S. Your Cat is
Dead 9 and Good Times, Bad Times,lO Gordon Merrick's The Lord Won't
Mind,ll or John Reid's The Best Little Boy in the World.l 2
Compared to the men who went before them, those who came of age
between the mid -1960s and the mid -1970s generally had less difficulty
coming to terms with being gay. A more liberal social climate lessened the
pressure to marry, which made it more likely that a gay man would figure
out that he really was gay before he found himself hitched. And America's
sexual revolution increased the likelihood that he could envision a life apart
from the heterosexual mainstream. Though limited in scope and usually
negative in tone, the growth of gay visibility in the mass media helped to
foster the idea of a distinctly gay way of life . But it was apparent that this
kind of alternative lifestyle would have to be lived clandestinely, or as part
of a fringe community in a large city, and neither of these prospects seemed
feasible to many men. An empowering sense of gay community and a more
open, mainstream gay identity were just beginning to develop.
David Foster gives a candid account of the emotional and sexual pas-
sions and frustrations of a highly romantic adolescent . Some may be re-
pelled by his descriptions of bestiality, but his story is an important illus-
tration of how a socially isolated teenager found an outlet for his sexual
urges. In contrast, wet dreams constituted Doug Edwards's only sexual
outlet until he learned to masturbate at age eighteen, and masturbation
was his sole outlet until his first sexual encounter with another man at age
thirty-nine. The insularity of German farm communities figures promi-
nently in what Larry Ebmeier and Martin Scherz say about the ways in
which their childhoods have influenced their lives. Richard Kilmer exam-

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Introduction 131

ines the comfortable middle ground he has found between rural and urban;
Tom Rygh ruminates on the assets and privations of his small-town life.
Mark Vanderbeek reflects on his efforts to achieve, as an urban pro-
fessional, the solid self-identity and support he felt as a Nebraska farm boy.
Abusive parents are the focus of Heinz Koenig's and Frank Morse's ac-
counts. In contrast, Bill Troxell celebrates his grandfather's gentle influ-
ence . Dale Hesterman and Everett Cooper, both recently divorced, exam-
ine their hard-won gay identities and the hurdles they faced-for Dale
extreme social awkwardness and a poor body image, for Everett the blind-
ers and baggage of a rigorously fundamentalist religious upbringing. John
Berg, never so burdened, recalls with fondness his first date-with another
teenage farm boy.

NOTES

1. Paul Welch and Ernest Havemann . "Homosexuality in America." Life:

June 26,1964, pp. 66-74,76-80.
2. Described in The Alyson Almanac. 1990. Boston: A1yson Publications,
pp.28-29.
3. "God and the Homosexual." Newsweek: February 13,1967, p. 63.
4. Described in The AlysonAlmanac. 1990. Boston: A1yson Publications, p. 28.
5. "Where the Boys Are." Time: June 28,1968, pp. 80-8l.
6. "Coming to Terms ." Time: October 24,1969, p. 82.
7. "The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood." Time: October 31,
1969,pp.56,61-62,64- 67.
8 . Described in The Alyson Almanac. 1990. Boston: Alyson Publications,
pp . 32-33.
9. James Kirkwood. 1973. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. New York: Warner.
10. James Kirkwood . 1968 . Good Times, Bad Times. New York: Fawcett.
11 . Gordon Merrick. 1971. The Lord Won't Mind. New York: Avon.
12. John Reid. 1973. The Best Little Boy in the World. New York: Ballantine.

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 David Foster

David was born in 1948 and grew up with four brothers, two older and two
younger, on a grade-A dairy farm in Manitowoc County, in eastern Wiscon-
sin. He lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

I LOVE TO go to straight bars, but I don't cruise per se . I just like to look
at guys. I usually run into somebody that I know from work and that
makes me feel confident-if anybody is wondering why I'm there, he'll
see that I'm talking to one of the gang, so I'm okay. One time I met two
really sweet guys from work at Ten-a -Two, a popular bar in town. I asked,
"Are you guys married? ," meaning were they married to women. One of
them laughed and said, "No, Dave, we're just buddies." I thought that
was kind of cute . He was answering me in a gay context, so I knew that
he knew I was gay. Usually if we're drinking, things come up and if there's
a private moment here or there they'll ask me questions about being gay.
They're curious, and sometimes it's to my advantage.
When I'm with buddies from work, I'm very conscious of how I talk
and conduct myself. I believe in blending in, maybe because I have to in
my job and in this size community. I don't go for guys that are trying to
prove a point by holding hands and walking through the mall, saying
"We have as much right to hold hands and kiss in public as straight peo-
ple do ." I just don't like that public display, proving to the world that
you're gay. I would never take part in a gay pride parade . If! see some-
body being ostentatious, earrings galore all the way up the ear or some-
thing like that , I think it's too much. I believe in being yourself, but
there's a proper time.
I've met some gay people from the bigger cities, and I think there is
such a thing as coming out too early. Coming out later is significant in
getting a broader aspect of the whole thing. I think I'm more concrete-
thinking on a lot of things, not so flitty. You're older when you're learn-
ing about things, so you think a little more and can make better decisions,
like about doing drag or taking it up the wazoo. I don't do risky things,
like public cruising.

132

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David Foster 133

Mom cleaned the milkhouse every day and did many other farm chores. I
helped her with the house-cleaning, gardening, and cooking, while my
two older brothers helped my dad with the farm chores. I preferred to
work with Mom, but when my two younger brothers became old enough
to help her, I was forced into doing some of the farm chores. What I did,
I did very well. I've always been a very thorough person, very organized
and clean. I did farmwork that way too, cleaning the barn and sweeping
the feed into the cribs. I loved side-raking hay, transforming the field of
cut hay into neat rows. When I followed the row of hay, it would bug me
if! missed any. I'd get off the tractor and take a fork and throw the hay in
on the corner. I would wash the glass block windows in the barn after
whitewashing. Nobody else would do it, but I just thought it wasn't fin-
ished-there was whitewash sprayed on the windows and it didn't look
right, so I washed it off before it cured. Once it cured, you couldn't get it
off. I was complimented for things like that. My mother would say,
"David's the only one that sweeps it that clean ." My dad liked my work-
ing for him. I never lost my temper, I never complained. We were up at
4:30 in the morning, went out there and did chores, then washed up a lit-
tle bit and changed clothes. We undoubtedly smelled like the barn when
we went to school, but we didn't know it .
We had to wear the same pants and shirt to school all week. In high
school I was a little self-conscious about that, so I would try making it
look like a different outfit by wearing a sweater with the shirt. But every-
thing was ironed, and there was no way that four boys in school were going
to change shirts every day, plus all the barn clothes. It was just too much
work. Sunday nights the kitchen table went way to one side, and Mom set
up the stuffshe needed to start right early in the morning washday Mon-
days-the old wringer washer, and the three washtubs for rinse and blu-
ing, and a scrub tub with the washboard in it . She did the socks and the
handkerchiefs on a scrub board before throwing them in the washing ma-
chine, and then everything went out on the line.
When I was little, I was such a mama's baby, always hanging onto her
leg, that she'd finally just slap me one and say, "Sit down and play." With
some of the gifts that I wanted for Christmas, Mom or Dad would say, "Oh,
that's for girls," but I still wanted things that other boys wouldn't want,
like an Indian bead craft set, a loom to make potholders, a little aluminum
tea set, and a Betty Crocker baking set. I had a big Gilbert erector set with
a real electric motor, and I really enjoyed that. I loved to watch The Wizard
OfOZl every year. It bugged me because it would start at 6:00 in the evening
and I had to go out and milk cows at that time. I was pissed off-they could
at least let me watch the beginning when the tornado comes.

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134 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

David Foster, age thirteen, with Skipper. Courtesy of David Foster.

We were a fun family and had a lot of fun times when cousins and aunts
and uncles would come. We had food galore under the big shade tree, and
played croquet. I was good at that. We got together at every meal. Supper
was when things were talked about, and we were all at home in the eve-
nings. We were tired. We all had chores to do before supper that started
as soon as we got off the school bus. We'd get into our farm clothes, feed
the chickens and gather the eggs, throw straw down for bedding, put hay
down from the mow. Putting the milking machines together was always
my job. Mter supper we'd go out and milk the cows, and that lasted some-
times till 8:00. We'd come in and do school work around the kitchen table
under a buzzing fluorescent light, watch a little TV-"The Ed Sullivan
Show," "Gunsmoke"-and then we all went up to bed about the same
time.
Our clubhouse was originally a chicken coop . I would keep it clean,
and asked Mom for some old curtains, ran a stick of wire through them,
and put them on the windows . When Mom threw out an old rug, we even
had carpeting in there. Aunt Clara lived in Milwaukee and would bring
all kinds of old dresses and purses and hats-even little bottles of

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"Putting the milking machines together was always my job. After
supper we'd go out and milk the cows, and that lasted sometimes
till 8:00. " Above, fifteen -year-old David Foster helps with milking.
Below, he pours a pail of milk into the bulk milk tank in the milk
house. Courtesy of David Foster.
135

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136 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

cologne and old lipsticks. My younger brother and I would put this stuff
on and parade around. I made a hoop skirt with binder twine and rings
from a barrel, and put a big skirt over it. I had heels and nylons and a hat.
It was wonderful. My brother liked to dress up in an old suit and put on
little wire-frame glasses. He had a cane and walked like an old man, and
we'd walk around arm in arm. My parents would laugh and take pictures.
Sometimes people would stop in to buy eggs. I was the guard when
my mom would wash her hair at the kitchen sink, where she could use the
sprayer. She would take her blouse off and had a bra on. "If anybody comes
to the door, tell them to wait." I was a good boy. We were all good boys.
We didn't get into town much, and even in town there wasn't anything
really bad going on. My older brothers went out for football and track,
but I just wasn't into that . I liked gardening, and my mom would let me
order some gladiolus bulbs or something different. One year I raised First
Lady snapdragons from seed. I started them in an old dresser drawer full
of dirt, with plates of glass over it, and I set that by the house at the south-
ern exposure. I nurtured those little transplants, and stuck them all in a
big row in the garden. They were beautiful, one of my achievements in my
teens. I was good in the garden. The care was there. I looked at things
every day to see how much they had grown. We always had a big garden-
a big row of raspberries, strawberries, always a big potato field, and a big
patch of pumpkins .

Once I asked my dad what the rooster was doing to the hen, standing on
top of her with her neck feathers in his beak, pushing his tail feathers be-
hind hers. He told me that it made the hen lay more eggs. As for breed-
ing the cows, Dad used artificial insemination-and even that was a mys-
tery. We had to leave the barn when the breeder man arrived, so I grew up
thinking that he fucked the cows.
My younger brother and I would play around with our cousins, Linda
and Ruthie, in the empty corn crib, showing off how far we could pee,
much to their delight. I kind of had a crush on their father, who was very
open about taking a leak in the barn . My dad was very prudish . If we'd
walk in on him when he was taking a piss in the gutter, he'd quick put his
hand there to cover it. My cousins' father would whip it out anywhere.
He had a big cock, and he'd just take a piss, and it kind of turned me on.
Once in a while he'd come out and help my dad do farmwork . Fixing the
chopper, laying there on the ground underneath it, his shirt would ride
up and I'd see his belly. It was erotic.
On summer nights it was almost dark before our chores were done and
my oldest brother would drive us down to Cedar Lake. On a hot night it

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David Foster 137

felt wonderful to jump into the lake. We would meet other farm boys there,
and we had a big tractor inner tube with all our names painted on it. I
painted my name close to Rick's, a cute neighbor boy. There were some
very romantic nights out there, as it got dark and the crickets were chirp-
ing. When I was old enough to swim out to the raft, we would stand around
there and get really close. I would go home and fantasize about Rick. I'd
kind of wish I were a girl and that he would love me and I could just hold
him and kiss him . Once my younger brother said, "David has a crush on
Randy." Randy was a neighbor boy who was in high school. IfI was in the
garden or mowing the lawn when he drove past our place, he'd toot the
horn of his hot rod. That just made my nipples hard-I mean, that he
would bother. He was just a doll, a heartthrob. In the yearbook it said,
"Handsome is as handsome does."
My dad rented out a barn to a man who wanted to raise pigs. Paul
was a slob and he smelled like pigs, but he was young and he was always
shirtless, and he had a gorgeous, black, hairy chest. I had a real bad
crush on him . I think my brothers knew that too. Once in a while I'd be
helping my dad milk cows and Paul would stop over in his junky car with
a SOO-gallon drum barrel of whey to feed the pigs. He'd come in the
barn and sit there and scratch his chest and spit in the gutter. It was just
so erotic to me, I wanted to grab that guy and pull him into a corner
someplace.
I was jacking off before my teens, before anything could come out . My
older brother asked me once, "Dave, when you do it, does that white stuff
come out?" I looked at him curiously and said no . I imagine he was a lit-
tle worried, but when it finally happened to me at least I knew I wasn't
going to die. I usually jacked offin bed at night and would catch the white
stuff in a handkerchief; we all had to keep one under our pillow. One day
as Mom was ironing she said, "Boys, whatever you're doing to the white
hankies, please stop. I can't get the stains out ." So we all started keeping
red and blue farmer hankies under our pillows.
Skipper was a beautiful German Shepherd . When he was just a pup, I
would take him in the clubhouse and lock the door. Then I'd get naked
and lay him on my crotch . He would lick my cock, and when I shot my
load he would lick that up, too. Skipper and I played like that all the while
he was growing up . When he got a little older I would play around with
his cock. He would be standing over me as I lay naked, and squirt his semen
in my crotch. It was clear and watery and very pungent . I would jack off
at the same time and he would lick everything up, which saved me a lot
of trouble. We did this a lot up in the barn among the bales of hay, even
in winter. One day Skipper was hit by a vehicle on the highway and his

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138 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

back was broken. I wept as Dad took him up the lane for a ride in the
truck, along with a deer rifle and a shovel.
The easiest sex on the farm was blow jobs from the calves. They're al-
ways ready when you are. The best blow jobs were from newborns. They
were very gentle, but they're born with teeth on their lower jaw. Some-
times I would put two fingers over their teeth. Butch was a Hereford bull,
just a darling, with big brown eyes and a white curly head. He was my fa-
vorite pet, and all the while he was growing up I played with him secretly.
I let him suck my cock when he was little . When I would come in his mouth
he probably thought, "Well, finally this teat is putting out." Butch grew
into a beautiful, handsome bull. Before running around with the heifers,
he was kept in a stanchion. He was used to me touching him all over, so
he never kicked when I fondled his balls. They were heavy and solid, and
soft as velvet when I rubbed them against my cheek. I would stroke his
belly where I could feel his cock still inside him. When a little bright pink
carrot came out of the hole in the middle of his belly, I grabbed it. It was
wet and hot, grew to be about twenty-four inches long, and increased in
thickness to about two inches. I was stroking the length of it with both
hands when he shot his clear, watery semen . It all happened very quickly.
Then I would go around to the front of him and rub my hands on his
nose . He would roll his upper lip back, hold his head high, and make heavy
breathing sounds.
Sunday afternoons when I was home alone I did risky things . My older
brothers had left home already, and my folks and younger brothers had
gone to visit relatives. One Sunday, I walked into the barn and called,
"Butchie," and he came walking in from outside almost immediately. I'd
heard lots of stories about how bulls can take a mean turn without warn-
ing. I put some ground feed in his manger, then hopped over the fence,
walked behind him, and fondled his balls. He kept right on eating, so I
went all the way with him, jacking him off. I would go in the pen with
Butch whenever I got a chance . I would take all my clothes off, except for
my shoes and socks, and ride him like a horse . One day, before getting his
rocks off, he turned around and started to nose around with my cock, then
put his big, wet nose on my chest and started to lift his front legs. He
wanted to mount me! I yelled at him and got the hell out of there. He
could have killed me. Soon after that, Butch was moved to another farm
to run among the heifers and breed them when they came into heat .
Before my affairs with the bull, I was playing around with heifers and
cows . When a cow stood in the gutter, it put her cunt at a perfect level to
my cock. I would wash her cunt first, then just gently play with the out-
side of her and talk to her. When she allowed me to finger-fuck her with-

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David Foster 139

out stepping out of the gutter, I took the final step . After a while I could
fuck her as long as I wanted and she wouldn't step out of the gutter. Sun-
day afternoons in winter, when it was absolutely safe, I would get com-
pletely naked except for socks and shoes. I would stick my cock and balls
inside of her, then lay my chest against her back, holding her sides with my
arms.
One time, when I was in high school, I got caught in the act when my
older brother walked into the barn. He just looked at me and shook his
head and said very calmly, "Dave, don't do that," as though he had done
it, too. And one time I walked in on my younger brother, who was sitting
on the barn floor behind a cow that was lying down. He got up quickly
and walked away from me. Anyway, I got the idea to fuck a reclining cow,
so the next chance I got I cleaned her up and laid a few burlap bags on
the floor behind her. If it was pretty risky, I'd leave my pants on-pull
them down to my ankles and lay sideways behind her, with her tail over
my hip. When 1 had more time, on Sundays, I'd get naked and sit behind
her, straddling her with her tail over my right leg. 1 had a favorite cow for
doing it this way; she would moan a little with each breath she took. One
time 1 sucked one of her teats and after a bit I was getting mouthfuls of
milk.
There were men that came to the farm to sell farm products-Watkins
products, herbicides, petroleum products, seed corn-and I always found
these men attractive. The inseminator 1 found attractive, the milkman
I found attractive. If I was home alone when the milkman stopped in to
get the milk, I would fantasize about going up to him and saying, "Would
you mind if 1 played with your cock? Would you come in the clubhouse
with me?"
When 1 was a junior in high school, I had a terrible crush on a very
athletic senior. Kevin was adorable and much more mature than the other
boys. He had a brown furry chest already. I wrote a love story about Kevin
for English class, and I kind of put me in the character of the girl. It was
about the prom-"The Infinite Prom"-and they were killed on their
prom night in a car accident . I read it in front of my English class. I used
Kevin's first and last name, and had to build up my confidence to ask him
to sign a document that gave me permission to use his name. I typed it up
real nice: "I, Kevin Moore, do hereby give James McKaye, alias Dave Fos-
ter, permission to use my full name in this piece ofliterary work . ... " He
signed it for me, so I had his autograph .
1 had such a crush on Kevin that I thought I just had to have him, or
1 had to tell him how I felt . He obviously knew how I felt. I was just a stu-
pid, silly queer with glasses. I didn't go out for any sports. I was intel-

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140 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

ligent, but not real intelligent . We had a small plot of woods with gray,
smooth-barked trees. On one of them I carved, "In the midst of life, we
are in death"-something I had read in a short story. I planned at one low
point that I would go there and commit suicide, and they would find me
by this tree. On a nearby tree I carved Kevin's name.
They were drafting really heavily when I graduated from high school
in 1966. I worked one year on the farm, but I didn't like farming that
much, so I went to work at a factory nearby and lived at home on the farm .
One summer night, when I got home late, I heard familiar bellowing com-
ing from the barn and knew my pet heifer was in heat. Heifers were skit-
tish, but I had a favorite one that was a little older and liked standing in
the gutter. I walked down to the barn. Everything was easily visible in the
moonlight . She swayed her back low and swung her tail to one side. I took
off all my clothes, she backed down in the gutter for me, and I had the
greatest fuck from her ever.
Within less than a year I was drafted. My first lucky break was that I
went to military police school instead of infantry. The next lucky break
was that I was sent to Japan. I was twenty years old when I had my first
experience with a man, in Japan. Guys talked about a fag bar called the
Peanuts Bar, and of course I had to check that out secretly. And then it all
came together, that there was more of me around than I thought. After I
got back from the service, when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, I got
ahold of a gay guidebook. I looked up Sheboygan and there was nothing.
Milwaukee wasn't too far, so I ventured down there . A lot of the places in
the book weren't there anymore, but I did find one, 1000 East, and they
had a list of all the current bars and restaurants. Then I knew there was a
whole 'nother facet of bei ng gay.

I fell in love with Keith when I had just come out . I had been futzing
around with so many guys that I finally felt like there's got to be more to
life than this . We got married, exchanged rings and everything-went
down to Page Jewelers at the mall and picked out the same band. We were
really bold about that . We had a little ceremony by ourselves with a lob-
ster dinner, and I wrote something up-"I promise you this and promise
you that "-and it went very well. We had eight or nine years together. But
I didn't want to be committed to one man and I tried to bypass the fact
that it wasn't great sex, because I liked every other aspect of it .
I fell in love with a straight man and out oflove with Keith. Jerry had
a little bit of a drinking problem . The first time he came over to our house,
it was a hot summer night and I had invited a bunch ofthe guys from work
over. I had lots of beer in the fridge, so we had a party. It got to be dawn,

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David Foster 141

the robins were singing, everybody else had left, and it was just Jerry and
me sitting in the kitchen. I put my hand on his and said, "Jerry, do you
know that I have a terrible crush on you?" He said, "Yes, I know, and I
think you're a hell of a nice guy to party with." I asked him to come up-
stairs with me. Jerry started to come over a lot and spend the night. I loved
to see him, at all hours. Guys like that will go out drinking and then all of
a sudden they're alone at the end of the night. They know where to call,
they know I've got beer in the fridge. I loved him, and I wasn't going to
say, "No, you can't come over. It's three in the morning and I'm here
sleeping with Keith." I wanted to see Jerry, he needed a friend, and I knew
that with him in that condition I could get away with murder. Keith and
I tried to work it out, living as roommates in separate bedrooms, but that
worked only for a while.
Keith and I see each other every weekend; that friendship is still there.
And he's a big part of my family. They know I'm gay, but we don't talk
about it openly. If I get invited to a family function, they'll say, "You can
ask Keith too," and he's more excited about it than I am. He's a very lov-
able sweetheart. Keith is HIV-positive. It was very heartbreaking, but that
was at least eight years ago. He sees a doctor two or three times a year and
he's doing fine. He just kind of takes it in stride, and I hope he'll continue
to go on like that. He's redoing his house, and I'm helping with that.
There's a little decorator in me, like all of us.
I get tested once a year, because I've been with a lot of sex partners in
the course of a year, but I do play safe. Every time I pick a guy up in a
straight bar and he stays overnight I think, if! had a lover I couldn't do
this. As long as I can go out and catch one and have a good time, I don't
miss having a lover. I can do exactly what I want. But I don't know if that's
really good for a person. When you live with somebody, it's give and take.
You have to listen to their music once in a while, even if it's solid Barbra
Streisand for three hours or "The Sound of Music" twice a year, which
was Keith. My aunt has been single her whole life, and she's just a bear to
get along with. I'm wondering if that will happen to me.

We always went to Sunday school and church and Bible school. I just went
along with all that stuff, but I always doubted any kind of deity or after-
life. I believe that when you die you die, just like a rabbit or dog or cat-
it's just all dark. I don't think that's necessarily bad, because you try to get
more out of life. I want so much out of life. I've always been an adven-
turer. I would dream of far-off places, the Peace Corps and going to India,
and urban places had an allure. I think Milwaukee is a great town. Other
people would like to be away from it all, in a little house in the country or

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in a cottage up north someplace . I want to be where people are-the sym-

phony or the opera or festivals . I want to be part of it. Sometimes it bugs
me to be here alone, climbing the walls. So I go out, just to be with peo-
ple. I look forward to going to work, because I have good relationships
with a lot of guys there .
I've always been a romantic. I get misty easy, and I can sit here and cry
over an opera. I'm collecting videos of operas, and they're all the same-
love and death or murder or something-but I find everyone of them fas-
cinating. I'm sitting here crying as they're belting out the songs. I've never
been to a live opera, so I'm going to try it. It's going to be a little diffi-
cult to go by myself, but once you're in there and the show starts, it's okay.
A lot of things in life you don't do because you wait too much to do it
with somebody. I don't know that any of my friends in Sheboygan would
go to an opera with me, and I don't know anybody in Milwaukee. But
maybe now I will. Maybe I'll see them, or they'll see me. Maybe I'll rec-
ognize somebody from the bar, and they'll know that we both like opera,
and we'll start seeing each other. Maybe I'll say, "Come up to Sheboygan
sometime."

NOTE

1. In the 1939 movie, The Wizard ojOz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) goes on a
fantastic journey that begins and ends on a Kansas farm. Whether the story is viewed
as a fable of being different and wanting to escape, or simply as a fascinating ad-
venture, the annual television broadcast of this classic movie was a special event for
David Foster and gay boys everywhere.

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 Doug Edwards

Doug was born in 1949 and grew up on a 560-acre grain and livestock farm
in Hendricks County, Indiana. Hegrew up with three brothers, two older and
one younger. Doug lives in the Indianapolis area, where he works with the state
environmental agency.

MY EXPOSURE to gay life has been limited, but I ' ve been around and
observed enough that I've drawn some conclusions. One is that a lot of
what people perceive as gay personality-lispy talk, faggoty manners-is
affectation . Guys are that way because they're around other people who
are that way-people who, for whatever psychological reason, want to
flaunt their differentness. And if anything has held us back, that has. I
know some people who are naturally that way, and they ' re the sweetest
people, and I have no qualms whatsoever about being known as their
friend and hanging around them. There are also a lot of guys who obvi-
ously behave that way out of affectation.
I've had a couple of boyfriends who started out acting real butch, real
regular, and doing a good job of it, and when I got to know them better
they slipped into that habit . One I met just a year ago seemed like a reg-
ular guy, but the more intimate we got the more he let his guard down
and slipped into the lispy speech. It bugged the shit out of me. I really
don't think it was his natural way. Of course, others probably view me in
much the same way. I'm accused of being butch. And to what extent this
is a pose, I suppose I'm not in a position to judge. But this influence by
association is something gay people really need to grow out of~ because it
does stigmatize us.
If anti -gay movements proliferate and there is a fascist backlash against
homosexuals, I will become an activist and I will come out. I wouldn't do
it before that. I think it serves a better purpose to be a regular person and
not rub other people's noses in your sexuality. That's one of the big things
I have a problem with in the gay rights movement historically. That's prob-
ably been more of an impediment than it has been a boost to progress for
gay people. Homosexuality is natural for those of us who are this way. We
are just as regular as anybody else, because we didn't choose to be who we
are, like a black person didn't choose to be black. The prejudice remains,

143

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144 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

and that's what you have to assault frontally. But first you want to try to
persuade people before you clobber them over the head and subdue them.
I don't like this separatist way of thinking. It's at the crux of the prob-
lem that society has in comprehending human sexuality. When you think
of yourself separately, as a minority, you've ghettoized yourself. We are not
separate . Homosexuals are a cross-section of the entire population, and
the only thing that makes us any different is the fact that we have differ-
ent objects of sexual passion. As long as you think of yourself as part of a
separate group, I don't think you have any right to complain when other
people treat you that way. I am gay, that's a fact oflife, and I do not wish
to be different from what I am. But I don't think being gay stamps me as
special in any way. That kind of self-absorption pulls us down more than
it builds us up.

My dad was thirty-six when he married, so he was well into his fifties when
he had his last one. I think he made a conscious effort to minimize his
sons' involvement in the farm, mainly because we were just tenant farm-
ers. It was not a farm that would be handed down the family, so Dad didn't
want to see us nurture the idea of staying on the farm. I think it also had
to do with his perception of the social and economic status of the farmer.
I think he felt a little inferior by it and, like most dads, he wanted some-
thing better for his kids. So he saw to it that we all went to college and
took a few steps up on the economic ladder.
Dad farmed in partnership with his brother, but Dad was the brains
behind everything, and he was pretty much a man who did it his way be-
cause it could be done better his way, rather than having someone else do
it and screw it up. I had kind of a reverential attitude toward my dad. In
some respects, he was as close to a saint as I think I'll ever know in this
life. He was a very quiet man, extremely shy, but very intelligent, some-
one who could have done a lot more with what God gave him than he had
the chance to. But that didn't matter to him . I loved him in a way, but it
was not a close emotional type of love. Ours was not that kind of family.
My relationship with my mother was a little more difficult . She was very
short-tempered, and since oftentimes Dad was in the field working when
I was a little squirt, I was around home and more exposed to her. My
mother was a very devout Christian, but my dad was an agnostic free-
thinker from a Quaker background.
We were a pretty insulated family. The folks were too absorbed in eking
out a living to get out and socialize much. I was a solitary and self-suffi-
cient child. Up to about the age of eight or nine, a lot of my time was spent
building little model cities in a sandlot or somewhere where the earth was

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Doug Edwards 145

friable . I liked building my own little world . Since we never had much
money I didn't have many toys, so I was always improvising with blocks
of wood and pieces of pipe. One day I saw a doll house in a toy catalog
and I thought, there you have a nice little house, you have little furniture,
and you can set it on a street. So I asked for a doll house for Christmas, and
Mom took me to Danner's 5 & 10 down in Danville to look at doll houses.
She didn't act embarrassed by it, and at the time I didn't know to be em-
barrassed by it. It's not that I lik<;d dolls; I liked models. My oldest
brother made a big deal out of that, and for years I was ridiculed as the lit-
tle brother who asked for a doll house for Christmas.
For a while I wanted to learn to playa musical instrument, so I lob-
bied my folks, and in my early teens I started taking voice lessons. I also
started getting teased rather mercilessly by my oldest brother about this
sissy activity, and after three years of it I finally just adamantly refused to
go to my lessons. I really didn't like the discipline of practicing, but deep
down a lot of it had to do with being pegged as a sissy.

As a five-year-old, I had a crush on a cousin who was in the navy. One

summer he was home on leave and came over to help us bale hay. Ryan was
a young, good-looking man, and the first time I saw him he was in his
navy uniform. When he was there, I didn't want anyone to fool with me
except him. I sat in a high window in the dairy barn where we were putting
the hay in the mow, refusing to let anyone else lift me down except Ryan .
That feeling for Ryan stayed with me for many years.
When I was seven or eight, my older brothers had some friends that
would come over occasionally, and they 'd usually end up having tag-team
wrestling matches in the haymow. Being a little squirt and always feeling
left out, I'd try to dart in and get involved . Of course, they'd always try
to get me to scram, but I'd keep darting back in. I wanted to be paid at-
tention to, and I was attracted to one of their older friends . I liked to latch
onto his leg and I wanted to pull his shoe off. I wanted to see his naked
foot .
One of the first sex lessons I got was when I was about eleven or twelve.
The cow pasture was right next to the house, and I was looking out the
window, just daydreaming, when I saw one Angus mount another. I asked
Dad what they were doing, but he was preoccupied and acted like he didn't
want to be bothered. I wanted an answer. "Why are they doing that,
Dad?" He said, "Well, they do that to make babies." I said, "Is that what
you and Mom do?" Snap. He lost it right there, and told me I was not to
bring it up again. He was very curt, which was uncharacteristic of Dad.
The first time I knew how it was actually done was from a brother and

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146 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

a neighbor kid who was much more world-wise than I was. One day they
told me that the boy sticks his dick up the hole in the girl's ass. I was in-
credulous. I knew girls had holes, but I didn't know much about it. I said,
"They don't do something disgusting like that!" and for the longest time
I thought, oh god, how can I ever do that when I grow up?
One day in early November of '64, just out of the blue, I suddenly re-
alized I was gay. I was a sophomore in high school and had a crush on a
guy in my class. He was the high-school jock, the best football player the
school had ever had, perfect build. I'd had little crushes on teachers and
never comprehended them for what they were, but this guy I became fix-
ated on. This was about the time that Life magazine ran its famous article
on homosexuals. It was a ground-breaking thing that was quite shocking
and controversial. Life was one of the few magazines we took. I was inor-
dinately interested in it, but I don't think I realized that what they were
talking about was me. One night after I went home from school and was
up in my bunk bed doing lessons, it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks.
My attraction to this classmate, why I never seemed to have the same feel-
ings for girls that other guys did, why I seemed like such a social misfit,
why I was so miserable . Suddenly that night I knew I was homosexual, and
from that day forward I knew I would never change.
I was having wet dreams and I didn't know what they were. I was kind
of ashamed of it . I would just get a hard-on during my sleep and shoot,
and wouldn't know what happened till I woke up. Later in high school,
I would spirit away Havelock Ellis's ancient tome, The Psychology of Sex,
to my little hideout in the haymow. There was a copy of it in my uncle's
house that my dad got through a book club when he was younger. It had
chapters on masturbation and homosexuality and premarital sex. And
that's where I learned about bestiality. I didn't learn it from the animals-
I learned it from Havelock Ellis.l
The only kind of friend that I had in high school was a fellow who was
older than me, a bright fellow, also a farm kid. I got to know him through
4-H. One reason there seemed to be mutual attraction was that intellec-
tually we were on a similar plane. But there was more to it than that; he
was a particularly good-looking fellow. But he didn't have a real sense of
humor, so he wasn't the kind of a guy that you palled around with. Our
friendship was kind of a prim, intellectual palling. But there were a few
times where I was aware of some sexual tension between us. Even though
I wouldn't think of it explicitly, I knew that I wanted to get in his pants,
and he was probably feeling the same thing. What I wanted him to do was
seduce me. At the county fair there were a couple instances of horseplay
where he momentarily let his defenses down. But he came from a very re-

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Doug Edwards 147

ligious family, so god knows he probably didn't have any experience either.
It was the blind leading the blind.
A few other times with guys that I had some attraction to, there would
be fleeting comments or gestures, but nothing that would lead to any-
thing. God knows, if they'd tried I would've shut it off, because I was scared
of myself as well as other people. But if someone had seduced me I could've
been had. In junior high and high school, I often had daydreams about
one of the neighbor farmers. I'd go out in the back lot sometimes when
he was out in the field nearby, and I'd daydream about him seeing me,
getting off the tractor, coming over, saying hi, shooting the breeze. Be-
fore you know it, I'm nailed against a rock.
I had read about wet dreams, about coming, and about masturbation,
but I did not relate them all. I didn't discover masturbating to orgasm
until I was eighteen. One summer afternoon I was up in my hideout in the
haymow. There was a little wood-slat chicken coop up there that I'd draped
a throw rug over, and the rug just happened to have a hole in the middle
of it, about two-thirds of the way down one side. Quite a few times I'd
laid on my stomach on that thing and stuck my dick through the hole-
didn't whack it off, just stuck it through there because that's what you do
with it. I guess at least that much was instinctive. This one day, I must've
been fantasizing something particularly vivid and humping away, my dick
sticking through the slats of the chicken crate. I got myself so worked up
that I did finally orgasm, and I instantly connected that to what happens
when you have wet dreams. So I sat there and got an immediate hard-on
again, and I jacked off. That's when I discovered I could do it at will. I
didn't need to hump a chicken crate, I could just sit there and use my hand.
That was wonderful. Talk about freedom, being imprisoned for so many
years and finally being free.

My dad had a good friend who was a farmer in another part of the county.
Along about the time I was in high school, the story got back to us that
his oldest son announced that he was gay. His father, who was already being
pummeled by a financial dispute in their family, was devastated. One day
they found him hanging from a rafter in the barn; he'd killed himself. I
was only vaguely aware of this story, even into my college days, but I began
perceiving the dangerous ground I walked on. Not that my dad would
have done anything like that. But it would've been real difficult for every-
body if I'd had the courage to announce it. We simply didn't talk about
feelings, we didn't talk about ourselves. God knows, you didn't admit some-
thing that you weren't quite sure of about yourself, especially ifit was sex-
ual in nature.

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148 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

Boy with Angus at Fair, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Doug Edwards

Through my college years and my twenties I dated girls regularly, and

tried to get in their pants a few times. I never succeeded, but I knew I
could get it up for one, and if she had dropped her pants I would've hooked
her, and I probably would've liked it for two or three minutes. Marriage
was out of the question. I never conceived that I could hide in marriage.
Girls scared me, frankly-the idea of what I would do if a girl got me in
bed and wanted me to have sex with her. In my late twenties I realized I
had to get off this merry-go-round of dating. It wasn't fair to the women
and it wasn't fair to me, so I quit . I began to see more and more signs of
depression, and I knew it was from loneliness and the pressure of not deal-
ing constructively with my sexuality.

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Doug Edwards 149

About the time I turned thirty, I started almost annual trips west for
hiking, and one of the first trips I took was with a fellow I knew through
work. He was two years older than me and also unmarried, a good-look-
ing fellow, an outdoorsman, interested in a lot of the same things I was.
We had done some hiking and canoeing together locally before we took a
three -week trip to the northern Rockies. Even before we embarked on the
trip, I started to fall for him. We camped at a particularly beautifulloca-
tion in Wyoming and one morning, waking up, I was laying on my back
and he was on top of me. He wasn't laying on me, but he was on top of
me looking square in my face. Just as soon as my eyes opened he went back
over on his side. The sexual tension was so thick by the end of the trip, we
were at each other's throats. I fell in love with him. Infatuation is what it
was, but that was a first for me . God, I was thinking about him all the
time, and didn't know what I could do about it. A few weeks after that
trip, I got the nerve to tell him that I loved him, but I didn't reveal that I
was homosexual. He had a hard time taking that; he was dating girls, and
it was just left at that.
That winter, the depression got quite a bit worse and I didn't know
where to turn for help. The year before that trip, I'd had major surgery,
and my doctor in Danville had been very aggressive at getting at that prob-
lem and getting it taken care of. I thought he would know how I could
connect with other people like me. The day I saw him, I told him flat out,
"The reason I'm seeing you is because you handled my other problem so
aggressively, got right to it and got it solved so I'm physically okay now.
Well, I have another problem-I'm homosexual. I'm a non-practicing ho-
mosexual." The doctor looked shell-shocked, absolutely flabbergasted, and
kept asking me, "What do you mean, non-practicing?" I could not have
anticipated his reaction at all. I thought this guy, having gone through
medical school so recently, would know how to handle something like this.
I told him, in the most specific way I knew how, what I was hoping he
would do: "I've got to talk to someone who can help guide me ." He mum-
bled around some and asked a few questions. Finally he said there was an
M .D. that he thought could help me.
Dr. Dooley practiced in Broad Ripple, a little artsy community in In-
dianapolis. At my first appointment, his questions made me uneasy right
from the start . "Was your father weak? Was your mother domineering?"
I knew I was in trouble when he went down that road. He told me that it
was going to take quite a few sessions, but he knew he could help me. "I
can make you heterosexual. My brother-in-law used to be homosexual, and
I treated him, and now he's married to my sister." Among the techniques

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150 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

he used was aversion therapy. I knew what that was, and I told him, "Ex-
cuse me, Dr. Dooley. You're trying to get me out on first base, and I'm
already on third." I didn't go back to him.
Two years later, I attempted to come out to a guy who I'd considered
my best friend in college. We'd been roommates and I had been best man
at his wedding. He was also a farm fellow. I hadn't been much in touch
with him for quite a while, but I still considered him a good friend and I
needed to tell someone. His wife had a cousin who was openly gay, and
they'd talked about him a lot, so I knew he was a little uncomfortable with
it, but he didn't seem to be totally put off. I put it to him as delicately as
I could. "You talk about your wife's cousinr Well, I need to tell you some-
thing about myself. I have something important in common with that per-
son." He knew instantly what I meant. He was rattled, but there was no
outburst, and we just left it at that.
A couple months later I was in his part of the state again. I hadn't heard
from him and I wanted to find out whether or not anything was left of
our friendship, so I called him and asked if! could stop by for a brief visit.
He said he was going to be working in the field, but they would be around
the house at noontime, so I could come on over then. I hadn't even got-
ten out of the car when he came out and met me. His dad and grand-
father and a lot of other people were at the house. We greeted each other
and he said, "You can't come into the house." I didn't even ask why. I saw
his wife at the door and his dad peeking around the corner of the house .
There's not much to say about my sexual life between 1982 and '89,
just more bouts of depression that I dealt with by myself. I didn't know
about cruising in adult bookstores or health clubs, and the thought of
going to gay bars scared the shit out of me. I did make a stab at meeting
some guys through personal ads, regular guys who had similar interests to
mine. All but one ofthe respondents were not genuinely interested in out-
door stuff, but seemed to be looking for someone to fulfill a flannel fan-
tasy. The one who was interested turned out not to have any particular in-
terest in me, but wanted me to turn over the responses of all the other
people and get us together for an orgy in the woods. I didn't want to have
any part of that, so I went back in the closet .
When I was just shy of forty, I was in a retail bookstore in Castleton
one day. The salesman that helped me I'd seen in there before-a very
masculine, hot-looking guy. He was real friendly, had a big sunny smile,
and we quickly found out that we had similar interests. Watching him write
out the special order for me, I saw his nice big angular hands and I thought,
god, I'd love to have that hand around my cock. He was just a regular guy,
and that's one of the things that I found so appealing about him . He said,

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Doug Edwards 151

"You want to join me for supper?" So he clocked out and we walked across
the parking lot to a restaurant . I began to sense that maybe something was
happening, but I was not versed in the game of nonverbal communication.
I was still averting my eyes, concealing my interest . I was scared .
TV monitors suspended from the restaurant ceiling were showing a
wrestling match, and at one point, in the middle of our meal, a guy got
up in the ring and took off his robe. He had a wonderful body, and we
both happened to look at it and then saw each other's unguarded reaction.
We finished our meal and walked back across the parking lot. I really didn't
want to leave it on that loose end and obviously he didn't either, because
he finally said, "Doug, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" I
knew what was coming, but I loved the way he put it. "Are you straight?"
We made a date and a couple days later was my first sexual encounter.
That's when I lost my virginity, thirty-nine years old .
A lot of the problem I've had in coming out, in connecting with peo-
ple, has been a personality problem-being very backward, shy, scared of
people, like my father was. I had to wait till I was thirty-nine to discover
what most guys take for granted when they're fifteen . It's a sad story, but
the first time was good. I'm grateful that it happened that way instead of
at a rest park, or at the hands of my father or an uncle. In all those years I
never even came close to having an opportunity to mess with a guy. Why
is it that I never got into a situation where I could've been propositioned,
or where someone could've just flat out come on to me? I probably did
too good a job of concealing my interest, not just acting straight and butch
like a good, manly, farm kid should, but avoiding eye contact, avoiding
anything that even hinted I was interested .
Later that year, I stumbled onto cruising. I'd gotten a new mountain
bike and was riding it around a park on the south side ofIndianapolis. A fel -
low stopped me and we started chatting, and he complimented me on my
legs, and smiled. I suddenly became aware of solitary men sitting in cars
looking at me. I went back to the parking lot and just sat there and started
watching. For months, I would go to that park and just sit and watch, never
talking to anybody. I was too scared. Then everything started falling into
place. About a year and a half later, I screwed up the courage to go into a
gay bar. Several married encounters had told me that the 501 was the place
I should go-the Levis and leather bar. I still go to the bars fairly regularly,
but I'm pretty much an outsider. I don't talk easily to strangers, and there
are some people I simply don't want to have anything to do with.

I started doing volunteer work for the Damien Center in Indianapolis a

year ago, paired up with a person with AIDS in a buddy program. My

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152 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

PWA has lived the life of a street person for many years. He's somewhat
retarded, he looks bad, and has real social problems . He likes to go to a
local mall to play pinball and shop in record stores, so I knew that would
be one of our major activities . One of my brothers recently moved into a
house nearby and works nearby. I knew he would see us out somewhere
sooner or later, and it would shock the hell out of him to see me with
someone like that, so last year I decided I'd better tell him what I was
doing and why. I also felt it was time that someone in the family knew that
I'm homosexual; I've never liked the word gay. He handled it okay, and
said he had suspicioned it.
No way I'll ever give my oldest brother the satisfaction of knowing for
sure, even though he's called me a queer ever since I was in junior high
school. He's pretty sure of it, but he has not a shred of evidence and I
don't want to give him that satisfaction. I hope he goes to his grave not
knowing for sure that I'm a queer. Ifhe finds out, that's fine-I'm not
going to slink away from it-but he doesn't need to know from me . My
other brother it wouldn't bother at all. I'm sure he suspicions, and I imag-
ine his wife does too, but there's no compelling reason for me to say any-
thing to him, so why bother?
Since Dad died and my mother is in a retirement home, I have the ma-
jority of the responsibility for looking after her needs. Our relations are
cordial, but there's a distance and a tension there because of differences in
religious and social outlook. I have a respectful regard for her-a parental
love, not an emotional love . My dad in certain respects was the kindest,
broadest, most generous-spirited man I ever knew. But he had his blind
spots and his narrowness .
Every Sunday afternoon I would go out to my folks' house for dinner.
Mom went to a conservative Christian church, and every week the preacher
was ranting and raving about some issue. A year before Dad died, the issue
was AIDS being God's retribution on the unholy, and that came back to
the dinner table . Many other times, I had rebutted things Mom brought
home from her preacher, but this time I didn't say anything. Dad stayed
silent until finally he just said, "I don't think I could stand to be in the
same room with a homosexual." I don't know ifit was just a lack of expo-
sure, a lack of compassion, or un comfortable ness about something inside
himself. Dad came from a family of all boys who, with the exception of
one, were all late to marry. Their excuses were always economic, but money
doesn't keep a man from marrying till he's in his late thirties. If you re-
ally want to live with a woman, you do it regardless of your circumstances.
What my dad's problem was, I don't know, and of course I'll never know.
It's not important now.

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Doug Edwards 153

NOTE

1. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was an English psychologist and specialist in

human sexuality who called same-sex attraction "sexual inversion." In 1936, his
multi-volume Studies in the Psychology ofSex was published by Random House, mak-
ing it available to the general public for the first time since it was originally pub-
lished in the late 1890s. Until 1936, its sale had been restricted to doctors and
lawyers. The volume on sexual inversion was the first book to present a compre -
hensive and sympathetic perspective on homosexuality.

Copyrighted Material
 Bill Troxell

Born in 1950, Billgrew up with one sister on a beefand grain farm operated
by his extended family in Clinton County, Indiana. He lives in Indianapo-
lis, but is still involved in raising registered livestock. In this brief narrative,
Bill reflects on how the gender roles of his childhood have influenced his iden-
tity as a gay man.

ANYTIME I NEEDED to get away to think my own thoughts, I'd go

walking through the woods. Often the cows would be in the woods some-
where, and part of my wandering was to connect with them. When I'd
eventually find them, over a ridge or down in a hollow, I'd sit down and
be with them. I was a part of the herd as far as they were concerned-they
were used to me . Off in the woods, lost in my own little world, I felt like
I belonged . A lot of my problems were solved sitting on a tree stump in
the woods with the cows.
I never wanted to be a tractor jockey, but I could never get enough of
working around the livestock as a boy. My dad didn't spend a lot of time
with the livestock, but I learned a lot from my grandfather and my uncles.
In the springtime, when everybody else was busy doing fieldwork, I was
much more at home with the cows-counting them and keeping records
on who was bred to who and when they were going to calve. In the sum-
mertime I was showing cattle and going to rodeos, where I was belt-buckle-
high to a lot of cowboys. That was a great attraction.
At the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago one summer,
when I was twelve or thirteen, I was introduced to a couple of steer wres-
tlers. I couldn't take my eyes off of them. In a moment of pent-up excite-
ment before they competed, one of them grabbed me from behind, lifted
me off the ground, and rubbed his big knuckles into my crew-cut head.
Watching him compete and slam his steer into the tanbark, I got excited
thinking about how playfully rough he had been with me earlier.
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

154

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Bill Troxell 155

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! Sleep-
ing 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. Mter
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 wav-
ing 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.

Copyrighted Material
 Larry Ebmeier

Larry was born in 1950 and grew up in Gosper County, south-central Ne-
braska, on an irrigated crop farm near Bertrand. The oldest offour children,
Larry has one brother and two sisters. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with
his partner, Donald Freed, 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 hap-
pen, 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 offrightening, 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 be-
come 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

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Larry Ebmeier 157

"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.

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 wayan
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 .
In my mid-twenties it started to catch up with me. I would draw pic-
tures 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 com-
munity 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.

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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 pri-
vate, not like the gay mafia that you see so much of-the outgoing, out-
spoken, 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 commu-
nity, 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 con-
fusing 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 het-
erosexual, 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

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Larry Ebmeier 159

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 per-
son. It has made me tend to be monogamous and to put value in a house-
hold. Despite all of the negative things I've had to contend with, I'm gen-
erally 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.

Copyrighted Material
 Martin Scherz

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 Wis-
constn.

WHEN I GO back home, I feel a real connection with the land-a tre-
mendous 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! 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 talk-
ing 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 rec-
ognized 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

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Martin Scherz 161

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 set-
tlement in 1854. The German immigrants, who came over after the Yan -
kees 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 some-
how 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 wher-
ever, 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 this-
tles 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.
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

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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 com-
parison. 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 field-
work 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 Build-
ing. 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 milk-
ing, 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 farm-
ing. I saw a lot of wanton brutality-like whacking animals on the head

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Martin Scherz 163

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 fam-
ily. I'd scream and kick and hold onto things to not go. I guess I was re-
ally feeling my loner oats. If! had my preferences when I was growing up,
I would rather have been with an older person. I grew up with old rela-
tives around all the time, and was always interested in hearing their sto-
ries. 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 inter-
ested 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 liv-
ing 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 com-
pany 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 Euro-
pean 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 in-
sular. 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,

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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 Fries-
landers 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 neighbor-
ing 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 offamiliarity;
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 commu-

nity in a lot of ways. What one mammal does with another was all around

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Martin Scherz 165

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 "suit-
case 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 par-
ents 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 some-
how 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 wet-
lands 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

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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 ofYukio Mishima in college because I was taking some Asian literature
courses, and discovered the homosexual themes in Mishima. 1 I 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 bar-
tender 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 re-
ally 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.

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Martin Scherz 167

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.
I knew that I liked being with men, but I wasn't sure that was how I
wanted to spend my life . I had been brought up believing that to lead a
fulfilled and happy life you got married to a woman . I never really con-
sidered other possibilities and never considered what a profound effect it
would have on me to put blinders on and try to lead a heterosexual life.
In 1985, I came out to my wife . She asked me to see a psychiatrist and at
that time we were trying to stay together, so I agreed. He really helped
me to just decide who I was and what I wanted to do. I realized that my
preference was for men and I decided that I needed to live as a gay man.
My wife didn't deal well with it, which I can understand, so we were just
kind of moving on down the road to separation and divorce.
I was having a couple of drinks with an old college friend, who I later
found out was also gay and married . He said, "You heard about Richard
didn't you?" I said no . "He's dead." I'd lost contact with Richard-my
old choir tour roommate-quite a while before that, and it turns out he
died from AIDS. That spurred me to quit living a lie. I decided that night
that I was going to set a date to get out of my marriage. A couple of months
after that I moved out and started coming out .
There 's things I probably would do differently but I'm not going to
see that time again so why bother thinking about it? I tend to do some-
thing and not look back, which I inherited pretty well from a grandmother
of mine. I'm still attracted to women once in a while, but I haven't acted
on that in a long time . I guess I'm happy preferring men. I do admit to
being a little envious of, let's say, a flaming queen growing up in East Over-
shoe, Iowa. He knows that he's going to get out of town after high school
and that he's going to wind up in Minneapolis or New York or wherever.
People like that seem to have things a little more predestined. Having come
from the other side of it, where things were so nebulous for so long, I
would rather have had them clear-cut . If I would have fallen in love with
a guy when I was sixteen, maybe it would have saved me a lot of trouble .
The thing I mainly learned is to be flexible-to roll with the punches.

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168 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

There are things you can't control and there are things you can. Every-
body's life has some winter in it and you can't control that, but you can
control what you do about it.

A part of me would really like to farm, but I'd have to do it on my own

terms. IfI had the wherewithal, I would go back to more traditional farm-
ing, such as using horses for certain things. I can envision myself doing
organic farming, and I would explore the possibilities of truck farming,
with the metropolitan areas of Kansas City and Omaha relatively close. In
the area where I was raised, the old patterns of farming are disappearing
year by year. You don't see nearly as much pasture and livestock. All you
see is corn and soybeans anymore . I don't like the direction that farming
has taken, the increased industrialization and reliance on corporate power
and corporate structure. Bigger farms might mean more production, but
the cost in human lives is far too great to be a good thing.
We've lost a lot of the independence of small communities such as the
one I come from. For the most part, they continue on a blind descent into
some kind of modern hell. The patterns of rural life have disintegrated
into a cheap imitation of suburban life. The kids are involved in the same
shit that the urban and suburban kids are . They don't have much of a sense
of community anymore. They lose their grocery store, they become just a
collection of old people living off what years they have left and wonder-
ing what their kids are up to a thousand miles away. There's a center oflife
that has disappeared, and I'm not sure what anybody can do about it
anymore . Bring in some Amish? I tend to be a romantic, I guess. The
Amish have a good way of life in many ways, and a lot of people could
learn a lot of things from societies like that. I admire them, although I
recognize that Amish culture can be oppressive to nonconformists.
You wouldn't have to scratch far on me to find out that I grew up on
a farm . There are a lot of inferiority complexes bred into rural people and
I have them too, but I think growing up on a farm is an advantage in a lot
of ways. I tend to be phlegmatic, and I'm not too impressed by things that
impress people who grew up in suburbs and cities. I tend to be real cau-
tious and conservative, not politically but in a sense of not desiring to
change radically. I'm pretty old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I've always kind
of admired village eccentrics and cranks, and I think I'd make a good one.
IfI did go back it would probably be in the guise of Old Man Scherz. I'd
show up at school board meetings and give them hell and speak against
censorship . Why aren't you letting them read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn anymore? I'd probably start going to church again, just to be a pain

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Martin Scherz 169

in the ass. You have to find your frontiers wherever they exist, and ifit's a
Bible study group, it's a Bible study group .

NOTE

1. In James Kirkwood's 1968 novel, Good Times, Bad Times (New York: Faw-
cett), the special relationship of two boys at a private school is threatened by the
headmaster, a man deeply shaken by a homosexual scandal at the school a few years
earlier. Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a prolific Japanese writer. His first novel,
Confessions of a Mask, introduced the theme of homosexuality, which recurred in
many of his works .

Copyrighted Material
 Richard I(ilmer

Richard was born in 1951 and grew up on a 200-acre dairy farm near Wo-
newoc, a small town in Juneau County, in central Wisconsin. The third of
seven children, Richard has four brothers, two older and two younger, and two
younger sisters. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he works as a pharma-
cist and collaborates with lesbian friends in raising his son.

IF I HAD stayed on the farm, I would have never dealt with being gay. I
would have probably gotten married and had sex with men on the side. I
think a lot of gays don't leave the farm, so there's probably a lot of people
out there who are doing that. So many people there are alcoholics, and I
think that's what a lot of gays gravitate towards, to kind of deaden their
feelings. The mode of socializing and entertainment around there is ei-
ther the church or the bars or television. There's not much else going on .
lt would have been very lonely and stifling. I feel lucky that I had the abil-
ity to leave and to deal with being gay. I know how hard it was for me, and
I'd been to college, I'd traveled, I'd been around people who had very dif-
ferent values than what I'd grown up with.
For a lot of people in the country, there's basically a lot of hard work
and not a lot of time to philosophize about their sexual identity. And there's
not a lot of resources, not a lot of people around to talk to. Nothing gave
me even an inkling that there were gay people out there. Being gay was
beyond most people's comprehension. They heard little dirty rumors, but
nobody would talk about it, even though probably half the families there
had children who moved away who were gay or lesbian . Now it's kind of
whispered about. "So-and·so's daughter, she's in Madison, she's one of
those." Maybe it was whispered about when I was growing up, but I never
heard it. My father's attitude is similar to a lot of people's in those com-
munities. Anybody can be your buddy, friend, neighbor or whatever, as
long as they're not too open about what they are. I'm really open about
being gay, but my family kind of hides it from people.

"I'm nothing but a dumb farmer" has been my father's theme through-
out his life. He always had another job besides the farm; otherwise we prob-

170

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Richard Kilmer 171

ably would have had a poverty-level existence. He worked as a mechanic,

so it was pretty much up to my mother and brothers and sisters and me to
run the farm while he worked during the day. Maybe it was from listen-
ing to my father, but I always felt there was a stigma attached to being a
farm kid. Some of the kids I hung around with were from town, so I just
didn't feel with-it. I would milk the cows in the morning, and if! didn't
have time to take a shower I smelled like the barn at school, and they would
make comments on that. And our clothes were a little different.
The people who lived in town seemed to be more sophisticated. They
had more money and nicer things. My parents were very frugal. Other
kids would talk about going to movies, but it was really uncommon for us
to go to a movie . They would talk about going out to eat, but I was six-
teen or seventeen before I ever ate at a nice restaurant . Once or twice a
summer we would go to a drive-in for a hot dog or a hamburger, and then
we'd have to share with our brothers and sisters. They'd all be divided into
pieces. I couldn't have a whole one myself because my mother knew I
wouldn't eat it all.
When we were younger, we had to do the housework because my fa-
ther was at work and my mother did the milking. We took turns washing
the dishes and cleaning the house. I liked doing that. When we were done,
we were expected to help with finishing the milking and washing the milk-
ing equipment. As we got a little older, seven or eight, we were milking
cows. That was one of my favorite jobs. Eventually we were milking thirty-
five or forty cows. I felt like I could understand the cows more than any-
body else could. I could kind of sense if a cow was sick; there was just some-
thing off about the way she would stand or move. Anytime my father would
beat a cow, I would have trouble dealing with it .
I kept records on the cattle and was always upset that my parents
weren't more interested in keeping better records or getting registered
cattle. For me, it was easy to know every calf and every cow, to know
who their mother was and who their offspring were . I would say, "That
cow's mother was so-and-so, and that's why she's such a good cow. How
do you know which ones to keep if you don't remember who their moth-
ers are1 You want to keep the ones that are out of the good cows, not
the ones from the cows that are mean or don't milk very well." Every
year, my father would sell half of the heifers before they had their first
calf. I would say to him, "Take those five heifers and hide them some-
where so the cattle buyer doesn't see them . They're out of your best
cows. He's going to pick your ten best ones, and you're going to be left
with the ten that are okay but not great. You're not helping your herd
by doing that ."

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172 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

We went to the neighbors one day when one of our heifers was miss-
ing. They said, "Well, if you can identify it, we'll give it to you. Otherwise,
it's ours." I said, "Well, it looks just like this . .. ," and sure enough it did.
It amazed my parents that I could describe every animal to a tee, but it
was just a given that I would know those things. It was the same in school.
It was a given that I would get A's and my brothers would get mediocre
grades. My older brother would say I was always the favorite of my par-
ents, that everything I did was wonderful and everything he did was not.
It's just that I really enjoyed doing the work; I really cared, and he didn't.
I was fastidious. "No, that's not clean enough, you've got to clean those
better. And this is a mess, you've got to pick this up." I could be a little
bossy about things, just a little tyrant.

If a Catholic married a Lutheran, it was a scandal. You married in your

church or you didn't marry. People were so conservative and so racist, mak-
ing comments about niggers all the time. We even had a priest who would
make comments about how black people were taking over the world. He
wouldn't preach it from the pulpit, but he would preach it in people's
homes. They had no experience with blacks at all, except maybe through
relatives who lived in Chicago or Beloit . All my uncle would talk about
was how bad the niggers were in Beloit. From six or seven on, it was sick-
ening to me. One of my cousins would say, "Why do these people hate
like that?" Everybody else seemed to be oblivious to it.
I felt like a fish out of water, because I had such different ideas and feel-
ings about things . Why would I think it was wrong, from early on, that
people made racist remarks? Maybe it was because I felt I was different and
didn't fit in. From my earliest memory, I knew I was gay, so I always had
this part of me that I had to hide . I thought if people knew, they would
never think I was this wonderful person, so I overcompensated by being
a dutiful son- getting good grades, being polite, not drinking, doing the
things I was supposed to, going to church and being the altar boy. I felt
it wasn't fair that my mother would be out working on the farm and then
she would have to come in and cook the meal while everybody else sat
around. So I became her helpmate, setting the table and doing those kinds
of things, even as I got older.
We kids would play for hours in the woods, building dams and forts,
and we had secret spots that we would go to - rocks and caves and streams.
We liked to play on cliffs that overlooked the stream. It was a big drop,
and we would be crawling all over them. We had a secret trail that couldn't
be seen because the trees covered it. We could duck behind the trees and
there was a narrow ledge that would take us down to the stream . It felt

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Richard Kilmer 173

like kind of a magical spot. We built a little cabin on top of the clift~ under
a ledge that was the cliff above it.
From fourth or fifth grade, kids were using the word queer. If you
wore white sox, you were queer. Of if you wore a certain color shirt on a
certain day, you were queer. But sissy was the word they would use more
often. I would be called a sissy when I played with girls, but I didn't let
it bother me . My older brother used to call me the little woman when he
was mad at me. "Your eyes are too big. You're like a woman." I think he was
jealous because I was well-liked and I always did everything right. He was
drinking at fifteen .
If you're under ten or so, it's pretty normal for a boy to be doing house-
work. But if you're over ten, you'd better be out doing men's work, driv-
ing a tractor and that kind of thing. I wasn't real thrilled about driving
tractors-it was just too overwhelming-but I liked doing the things that
I could kind of daydream while doing, like raking hay. I did the harvest-
ing work, but it was messy and smelly, with all the machinery and the fumes
and the noise. I'd be covered with dirt and chaff, and it would be down
my back.
In Future Farmers of America, I showed and judged cattle, and I was
involved with 4-H for quite a few years. It was good for me because it was
based on farm projects, but it was also social and broadened my horizons.
When my younger brothers came into 4-H with me, I pushed them to do
more than they would have probably done on their own. When I got se-
lected for Badger Boys State and for Trees for Tomorrow camp, it was not
because I had anybody pushing me to do it. I drove myself to do the things
I did. My parents were supportive but they weren't encouraging. Unless
I did something bad, whatever I did was okay. With a little more push, I
think I could have accomplished more .
My grandpa, my mother's father, was really into tramping through the
woods. We'd go on long hikes and he would tell far-fetched tales about In-
dians and whatever. I really liked hanging around and going fishing with
him. My aunt Evelyn broadened my view of the world . She encouraged
me to become a pharmacist, and I think part of it was because she's a hy-
pochondriac. She had kind of wild ideas about things, and people thought
of her as eccentric. She was interested in bird-watching and other things
that people around there had no clue about.

My father was disappointed that I didn't take over the farm, because none
of my brothers showed the interest that I did. But I just didn't think it was
for me . I needed to get away and see what else was out there . I was going
to college and I wanted to travel. I knew that it would be really hard for

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174 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

me to live on the farm, but in another sense I wanted to. I really wanted
to be a veterinarian, so I could be involved in farming but have an educa-
tion and be more mobile . But there wasn't a vet school in Wisconsin, so I
went to pharmacy school. That way, I figured, I could live in a rural com-
munity, have a hobby farm, and travel.
Later, in high school and in college, I decided I should make a con-
certed effort to start dating women . I really liked some of the women I
dated, but the sex was not satisfying and I always felt I had this thing that
I was hiding from them . When I got out of college, I started a commune
near a little town I worked in . My friends from college moved out there
and it was a lot of fun for three years . We had horses and all the pets that
I had wanted as a child. The town was very religious and family-oriented,
and they thought we were very strange, all these men and women living
together.
In 1977, I took a year off and went on a bicycle trip around the United
States and Canada. At the end of the trip I came out . I'd heard that gay
people lived in big cities, mostly San Francisco and New York, so I moved
to San Francisco. My plan was that I would get in contact with my family
eventually, and if they came to visit I would pretend I was straight. There
was no way I could integrate being gay into my life as it was. I had to leave
my former life and start this new life . My sexuality was like another per-
son, it was not me. To me, being gay was just sex, and it was a total reve-
lation to me that gay people in San Francisco were having relationships,
not just sex. I was blown away by all the gay people, and the whole scene
felt so threatening . I was looking desperately for somebody to talk to, and
that's when I got involved with the Unification Church-the Moonies.1
They were willing to invite me over and listen. I was looking for this ideal
life where I wouldn't have to deal with my sexuality.
When I wanted to go home for Christmas, the Moonies said that if I
left, I'd never come back. I said that was a chance I'd have to take. Back
in Wisconsin, I was talking with my brother about the Moonies and why
I was going to go back out there, when it dawned on me. "You know,
Chuck," I said, "I've decided I'm not going to go back to the Moonies.
I'm going to deal with being gay instead." He said, "Oh? How do you
know that?" I said I'd always known. My parents were pretty freaked out
that I had joined the Moonies. When I went to see them on the farm, I
told my mother that I had decided I wasn't going back, and I wasn't going
to get married either. I was going to deal with being gay. She was real calm
about it and said she had always known . She said I needed to tell my father,
so we told him. He was totally numb, and for the next few weeks he
wouldn't talk about it. My mother was so upset, that's all she could talk

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Richard Kilmer 175

about. She went to a priest that we had when I was a kid, the racist pig, and
he said that I was going right to hell and that there was no hope for me.
My mother said that my father cried all night the first night, and that
he said he would sell the farm and use the money ifit would make me bet-
ter. I said that was not what I needed or wanted, and that it didn't work
that way. My mother talked to another priest they'd had. The rumors
were that he had to leave town because he had an affair with a woman. He
said that if I hadn't lived in Madison, that bed of sin, I wouldn't be that
way. She just needed to pray for me. In desperation, my mother turned to
the parish priest they had at that time. She didn't want to do that, because
she didn't want people in Wonewoc to know. He said that if God hadn't
wanted her son to be that way, he wouldn't be that way-so that's the way
God wanted it to be. Then my mother was okay with it, and not too long
after that my father said to me, "You are the way you are. You need to do
what you need to do. But I don't want to talk about it, okay?" I said that
was fine .

All of my boyfriends have been very well-accepted by my family. I was in-

volved with Jose for seven years, and the first time we went to visit my fam-
ily on the farm we camped, because we didn't want to stay in the house.
Tl:e next time we visited, we were going to camp again, but it was rain-
ing, and my mother suggested that we sleep in a bedroom that had only
one bed in it. Mter that, when we would visit, that was our bedroom. But
Jose was very religious. "We can't have sex in your parents' house. That
would be sacrilegious." I said, "Oh, come on! Either they expect we're
going to do it, or they assume that we wouldn't. One way or the other,
it's not going to matter to them." The next morning my mother came
into our room after milking the cows, sat down on the bed, and started
talking to us. It was such a shock!
Jose and I lived in New York City for a year. That was a mind-blowing
experience, living on West 48th, about six blocks from Times Square . I felt
claustrophobic, like there was no way I could get out. There was a little
community garden where I'd spend my free time. It was really hard. I felt
so far away from the country. Jose said, "You know, you're really not
happy here. Maybe you should go back to your parents' farm for the sum-
mer." The next day I walked into work and gave two weeks' notice. I came
back to Wisconsin and spent the summer on the farm, then got a job and
moved to Madison. My aunt and uncle wanted to get rid of their farm,
which is a half a mile from where I grew up, so I bought it on a land con-
tract. If I ever want to go back to the farm, I have a place.
My father has liked all of my gay friends because they've always been

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176 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

Right, Richard Kilmer with his parents and two brothers in the spring of 1956. Courtesy of
Richard Kilmer.

interested in him and what he was doing. He takes it as a good sign if peo-
ple don't treat him like a dumb farmer. He would have difficulty dealing
with them if they were talking about being gay or showing any affection
in front of him, but if you don't speak about it or make it obvious, then
he's fine. It's the way he deals with a lot of things in life; "I just don't want
to know about it." My older brother is not real supportive, but it doesn't
bother me . One of my younger brothers says I wouldn't have to be this
way if! didn't want to be. But I'm not going to change his mind, so it's
not worth arguing about. My other brothers and sisters have all been real
supportive. They all came to Madison for the first Gay and Lesbian Visi-
bility Alliance march.
A couple offriends had been to the 1987 march in Washington, D.C.,
and they wanted to do a march in Madison .2 Their enthusiasm swept me
up, so I helped put together the first march, on May 6, 1989. I think there
were seven thousand people. We worked for a year and a half to get it to-
gether. There was a lot of publicity, and I was very open about being in
the news. The Madison newspaper comes to my parents' town, and there

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Richard Kilmer 177

"When I got out of college, I started a commune near a little town I worked in.
We had horses and all the pets that I had wanted as a child." Richard Kilmer and
Merry Legs in the autumn of 1976. Cou rtesy of Richard Kilmer.

was my name. I wanted a lot of people to march, not just lesbians and gays
but also families and friends, so I asked my family to come and march. I
told them how important it was to me, and they came. My older brother
didn't, but the rest of my family did, and we all marched together. I was
totally shocked that my father came. He was very uncomfortable, but he
did it. The weather was very cold and the speeches were a little long, but
it felt very good. It was kind of an affirmation of my life.

I could go live on my farm, but I don't. I would probably be supported

in the community because I have roots there, but I still have some under-
lying fear. I know there are lesbians and gays living around there, but
they're very isolated. One of my cousins is gay and he still lives there. He
works at a cheese factory and is very open about being gay. He has been
harassed on the job, but he gets along pretty well. In rural areas, people
who are openly gay are shunned by the other gays and lesbians. They won't
associate with them because that points the finger at them, and they want
to keep their identity hidden, even though everybody probably knows all
their little secrets anyhow.
Madison is so accepting, in certain ways, even more accepting than
New York City. In New York you could do what you wanted, everybody

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178 Part 2. Between the Mid-l 96 Os and Mid-l 970s

was anonymous, but it felt oppressive. Here in Madison, people know each
other. It feels like it's kind of the in-between spot for me. I can have a gar-
den here. It would be wonderful if I could have chickens and a goat . It's
not living on a farm, but I don't want the isolation of the farm . I like hav-
ing lesbians and gays around me, having that sense of community. So I'm
kind of on the fence, not a farmer but not a city slicker either.
Being from a farm, I always felt kind of different, and that seemed to
give me strength to deal with being gay. It's that same sense of not quite
belonging. In certain ways, growing up on a farm and then moving to the
city was like being from a different country and moving to the United
States. I feel like I grew up in a different culture. It seems like gay people
who grow up in urban areas are better off, better educated, and better
able to function in the world. The city is their territory and they're more
familiar with it.
There's something about the way you order your life that's different
on the farm. This time of year you need to do this, and this time of year
you need to do that . You don't think about anything broader, you just go
along with the flow. You're more isolated and think about everyday kinds
of things. You know that there are certain times of year that things need
to be done, so you can't go and do other things. There's a little bit more
responsibility and a more rigid schedule. You've got to be there twice a
day to do the milking, even if you want to go do something else. You watch
the temperature and you watch the seasons. Rain means something dif-
ferent to me than to somebody who grew up in the city. I think of the
farms and the land, and I think, oh my goodness, we really need the rain.
Somebody who grew up in the city thinks, oh shoot! I wanted to go to
the beach today.

I want to be looked upon as a very good citizen-all of those things that

I want people to associate with being gay. Some gay people want to flaunt
and be really outrageous . That's just not me. It may bring about some
change, but in the long run the people who plod along are going to make
more long-lasting change . Everybody who's lesbian and gay should be as
open as they can . People need to know that we're out there. I definitely
don't agree with people who stay in the closet and lead dual lives. In that
way I'm more radical, but I consider myself a moderate . I know people in
the radical fairy movement who think I'm pretty yuppie. But I grew up in
the hippie days, I started a commune, I was a Moonie. I'm not even close
to being a yuppie.
Since I came out, my goal has been to share my life with somebody in
a forever kind of monogamous relationship. My dream was to be in a re-

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Richard Kilmer 179

lationship with a farmer, or somebody who really wanted to be on a farm.

In that situation, I think I would have really enjoyed living in the coun-
try, working outside, and being around animals. Dairy farming would have
been very fulfilling. But to do it alone would be too lonely, and once you're
isolated there you don't meet people. I've been in one relationship for seven
years and one for two years, and I've dated other people. Being gay gets
in the way of a relationship, because you have to deal not only with your
own feelings about being gay but also with the other person's feelings.
Jose grew up in a Catholic family, and then became a born-again Chris-
tian . He had a lot of stuff to deal with about religion and being gay, and
it had a huge effect on our relationship and the way he felt about himself.
My son Micah is with me two days a week. I agreed to donate my sperm
and to be co-parents with his mothers, lesbian friends who I love like my
family. My major concern at the beginning was that he wouldn't recog-
nize me as his father because we would see each other so seldom. But we
have a wonderful connection and we get along very well. He's a very bright
and confident child. He may get a lot of grieffrom other people about my
being gay and his mother's being lesbian, and I have a little concern about
how he'll deal with it. But he's not going to get any more grief than I did .
He's surrounded by so many people who love him, and he's got so many
opportunities. Maybe I indulge him a little too much. "You want a big
hamburger? Fine. You only eat three bites? Fine." When I grew up, I had
a third of a hamburger when we would go out to a drive-in.
At Micah's age, I was climbing in a tree or playing in the creek. I could
have fallen off a cliff or been washed away by a flood . My parents were
working away somewhere and had no idea where I was. I don't even like
Micah to be in the backyard by himself. I want to know where he is every
second. I'm thankful for growing up on the farm . It felt very free to have
all those wide open spaces, and I hope Micah can get some feeling of that
freedom from going to my farm.

NOTES

1. In the Unification Church, founded by the Korean evangelist Sun Myung

Moon, the religious and political conformity of "Moonies" was strictly enforced.
2. The second national March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights was
held in October, 1987 Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the nation's
capital to draw attention to the need for gay civil rights and for more action against
AIDS. It was the largest gay and lesbian assembly up to that time, as the first na-
tional march had been in 1979.

Copyrighted Material
 Heinz I(oenig

Heinz was born around 1952, the sixth of six boys, and grew up on a Wiscon-
sin farm . He lives in the Minneapolis area. This brief narrative is adapted
from a letter sent anonymously in which Heinz stated, (Yin interview is im-
possible. After all these years I am still a victim ofbeing agayfarm boy." Heinz
recounts being rescued from abusive parents by a gay man.

DAD WORKED US so hard that all my brothers had run away from
home or joined the army by the time I was sixteen . My sixteenth birthday
was marked by a demand from my dad that I drop out of school and help
him on the farm . Since school was my only pleasant time, I begged him
to let me continue . He said I could, as long as I could get all my chores
done. I got up at 4 A.M . so that I could finish chores by the time the
school bus arrived, then came home at 4 P.M. and worked until 8 before I
could begin my schoolwork. I didn't have any time to cultivate friendships
and envied those kids who did.
One day my guidance counselor, Lloyd, called me into his office to
talk about college scholarships. When I asked my dad to sign the applica-
tions, he tore them up and told me in no uncertain terms that college was
for queers and draft-dodgers. When Lloyd called me into his office a cou-
ple weeks later and asked about the papers, I told him what had happened.
I began crying and told him about my life at home. He embraced me and
held me as I sobbed. It was the first time I could remember anyone show-
ing me physical affection.
When Lloyd took me home to talk with my parents, my dad struck him
and threw him off the farm . I was then taken to the side of the barn where
I was tied hands above my head, my pants were pulled down, and I was
beaten with his wide belt until blood oozed on my back, buttocks, and
thighs. When my screams became too loud, he stuck his bandanna in my
mouth and tied it in place with a bit of rein. I was left tied up outside all
night, only to be cut loose at 4 A.M. and told to get to work. He threw me
a pair of overalls and told me to get used to them because that was all I
would be wearing from now on; my school days were over. My mother
kept her mouth shut, having been abused by him for years.

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Heinz Koenig 181

My blood stuck to the overalls. By that evening I was too tired to do

anything but sleep, so I went to my room and he locked me in. I set the
alarm for 2 A.M . and woke before it went off, climbed out the window,
and got to Lloyd's house by 5. He called the police, who took pictures of
my condition. Lloyd pressed charges and the police arrested my dad. At
the hearing, my father said that Lloyd was a homosexual who had beaten
me to steal me away from my family. My mother was afraid to dispute his
word and agreed that Lloyd was filling me with all sorts of notions. I told
the truth and Lloyd told what he knew. One of my brothers told how dad
had abused him too. The court said that I should be placed in a foster
home until I was eighteen, and the judge okayed Lloyd's request that I be
allowed to stay with him.
As it turned out, Lloyd was gay, but he didn't force anything on me.
In the evening we would watch TV or I would do homework and he would
kiss my neck and tell me how proud he was of me. I slept with him almost
every night-not sexually, but for security. When I got a scholarship to the
University of Wisconsin, Lloyd paid what it didn't cover. In Madison, I
began to trust people and settled into a good lifestyle. That was in 1970.
Lloyd is dead now, but my parents are still alive and I still live in fear of
them. I lead a life that is very closeted.

Copyrighted Material
 Tom Rygh

Tom was born in 1953 and grew up in southern Wisconsin on an 80-acre farm
near A1'lJyle, in Lafayette County. Hisgrandparents, who migrated from Nor-
way, came to the farm in 1912. Tom grew up with two older sisters, an older
brother, and a younger brother. He lives near Monroe, Wisconsin, and works
as a psychiatric social worker and a writer.

SOME GAY MEN from the farm want to completely erase that part of
their lives. I've been through that phase. After high school, I couldn't
make tracks away from the farm quickly enough. I didn't even tell people
where I was from . I thought that the only way you could have any class
was to be urban. My big goal was Madison or Chicago . I thought any-
thing having to do with being gay was going on in the city, in a gay
ghetto. Sometimes I still feel that way. But when I came back to the farm
and got weaned away from the city, I started to appreciate the feeling of
elbow room, being out and away from the city, sort of sitting on the side-
lines observing life. But it's a really ambiguous feeling . There are some
things that I like about being out here in the boondocks, and there are
some things I hate about it, and there are still some times that I really
wish I were back in the city.
IfI had grown up in the city, I'd have probably been happy to stay there
and maybe life would've been easier. It's much easier to make contact and
network there, and there's more social support. I sometimes feel like I'm
missing out on a chunk of my identity, but I'm not sure I want to go back
to living in the city. I'm not sure I'd know how to integrate . Even though
I'm living in a predominantly straight rural community, I feel very com-
fortable with my sexuality. And in some ways I teel freer out here, in terms
of being my own person. I'm not sure how much I identify with the gay
mainstream, whatever that is. Politically, I'm quite liberal and progressive,
but the bar scene is kind of difficult for me. It's been probably a couple years
since I've been in a gay bar. When I'm out mingling, even though I'm en-
joying myself, I feel like I'm missing a beat now and then . I get nervous and
feel intimidated. I don't feel part of it somehow- I teel kind oflike it's them
and me . But then, I don't know how much I identify with any group .

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Tom Rygh 183

If you grow up in New York or even Madison, you're probably a little

more street-smart. You're more social, you have the right haircut and the
right things to wear, and you're always hip to what's happening. That's
something I never will be, and at one time it bothered the hell out of me.
When some gay people find out that I live in a hick small town an hour
outside the city, they don't want anything to do with me . Many city peo-
ple never venture out into the country, but growing up on the farm, you
sooner or later have contact with the city, so you get both worlds eventu-
ally. It gives you a full circle of experience.

The farm seemed to be steeped in history. It was the first place in the New
World for the family, where everybody learned the American ways. There
was a big, elegant, old-fashioned house up on a high hill looking over the
Pecatonica river valley. My grandparents hadn't added running water, elec-
tricity, or central heating, and we lived like that for several years before my
father slowly added those things. Before we put the plumbing in, I car-
ried water into the house from the outside pump. Splitting and carrying
in wood for the furnace was another of my chores. Walking over the hill
to play with the neighbor kids, there was a feeling of freedom and elbow
room. And there was a profound sense of security. You never worried about
anything. You had the whole world at your feet, playing along the river,
with all these places to hike and explore.
My grandmother on my father's side lived with us for a while. She spoke
Norwegian, and she spoke so little English we kids kind of held her in awe
and were afraid of her. She certainly wasn't mean to us, but she was very
stern. Ifwe'd say the wrong thing, one glance would be enough to put us
in our place. She was kind of mysterious, sort of a paragon but unattain-
able completely. She looked worldly-like something from the outside
world-and she was the epitome of grace under pressure. In Europe she
had been a city woman, and even here she always looked sophisticated com-
pared to the other neighborhood farm women. She dressed nicely, and she
didn' t talk or act like them. I think that's where my father got ·his haugh-
tiness from . On the one hand, he was very liberal. "We don't care what
the neighbors think, we'll live the way we want to live." But there was an-
other part of him that was like my grandmother. The neighbors had to
think the best of us. We always had to be prim and proper and in our Sun-
day clothes, so to speak.
We had beef cattle and pigs, and we raised corn and hay for the live-
stock. When I was really young, my father and his brothers would do all
the fieldwork and the heavy stuff. As I got older, my father and I did most
of it. Being very stoically Norwegian, my father didn't talk much, and that

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184 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

"Being very stoically Norwegian, my father didn't talk much, and that was how we were sup-
posed to be." Left, twelve-year-old Tom Rygh on the farm with his father and younger
brother. Courtesy of Tom Rygh .

was how we were supposed to be. But when my brothers and sisters were
helping out, we would kind of turn it into a party, laughing and joking.
My father was kind of a perfectionist, and things had to be done on his
schedule, so I really didn't have much say-so or flexibility. Whatever had
to be done, I just did it. As I got into my high school years, farmwork be-
came a pain in the ass. It was drudgery. Day after day, you'd get up in the
morning and never see the outside world. But in the summer I liked being
outdoors and getting the sunshine and fresh air.
I went to a one-room country school up through eighth grade. All
those years, I had only one other person in my grade, my cousin. We were
all little white Protestant kids and one Catholic kid. The twenty-nine or

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Tom Rygh 185

thirty of us kids would be in the schoolhouse and, on stormy days, it would

feel like its own little world. In first grade, I did a lot of bicycling, hiking,
and exploring with two boys, my best friends. We would explore old live-
stock pens, climb up in the trees, lick little blocks of cow salt, and end up
taking off our clothes and examining each other, looking and touching.
Mter that, I went to a different one-room school, so I got split from those
two boys until high school. Three or four years later, I took the cousin
that was in my grade out to the chicken house and asked him to take his
pants down so we could look at each other. He did it very hesitantly and
was very uncomfortable, so that was the end of that.
I saw my parents kiss maybe once, and not much touching beyond that .
Sex was a taboo subject. Once, for whatever reason, my older sister had
typed the word "fuck" on a piece of paper and thrown it into the waste-
basket. My mother found it, and the whole house went into silence and
shock for three or four days. When I was in first or second grade, we kids
found a stack of dirty magazines that somebody had thrown by the rail-
road tracks that ran behind the farm. That was just like a gold-mine find.
They weren't so much pictures, but writing, describing sex between a man
and a woman. We took them home and I read them over and over. Any-
thing like that I could get my hands on, I latched onto. When the Sears
Roebuck catalog would come, I'd turn right away to the underwear pages.
We went to church almost every Sunday, and confirmation and Sun-
day school and Luther League. I was raised believing in God and the scrip-
tures and all that, but when it came to the things I wanted to do or was
doing with other boys, it didn't even cross my mind that it was against the
Bible or that I was committing a sin. In confirmation, I read the chapter
on sexuality over and over again, just to read about the body parts.
I went through grade school with Brian and got along with him very
well. He was a year or two older than me and I always thought he was kind
of hot. He told stories about going home with this guy and that guy, and
humping each other. When I was thirteen or fourteen, my older brother
and I went to Boy Scout camp in northern Illinois. One night, all the boys
were crowded around the tent that Brian was in because he was jerking
himself off and producing semen. It was fascinating.
My older sister had a novel called Compulsion) a crime mystery drama,
and the back cover said something about two of the main characters hav-
ing 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 stum-
bled 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

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186 Part 2. Between the Mid-l 96 Os and Mid-l 970s

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 swim-
ming 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 countr y 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 them-
selves 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 join-
ing in . A neighbor boy talked about their hired man who would have the
calves suck him ofT. 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 iden-
tity 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

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Tom Rygh 187

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 offriends, 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 re-
ally 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 fiancee. 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 fi-
ancee because he was a good Catholic and couldn't do that till after mar-
riage, 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. Mter the wedding, he went out and
bought a bottle of sherry and brought it to our room. I was getting a lit-
tle 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 night-
shirt, 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 under-
shorts off? I said I would ifhe 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.

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188 Part 2. Between the Mid-l 96 Os and Mid-1970s

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 work-
ing 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 .
Mter 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 when-
ever 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 wait -
ing. If she's going to be busy tonight, that means we can get together.
Mter three or four years of that, enough was enough . I still see Jake, al-
though 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 [or me to talk about stufflike 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 ob-
vious, and she has no problem with that at all. I'm sure she knows about

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Tom Rygh 189

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 think-
ing 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 ifI 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 fur-
ther 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 commu-
nity, 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 upbring-
ing; 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.

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190 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

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 any-
where-in the bookstore or the bar or on the street corner. In the coun-
try 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 ar-
rows and had no interest whatsoever. Mter 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 tryon 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 break-
fast 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 to-
gether 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 Fri-
day night, a little bit more self-reliant. But it works a lot better if you've
got a partner.

NOTE

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.

Copyrighted Material
 Dale Hesterman

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 fa-
ther of one child. He lives in Ohio.

ON THE FARM, there is a different sense oflife 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
oflife going on, that you and I will Jive and die but that won't really change
anything. Seasons will still change and flowers will still bloom and die.
We were on a big hill and could see for miles, and there wasn't another
house in sight. As far as we could see, we owned it . There was one spot in
particular over by the barn, where the bank sloped down and the wind
was forced up through the intersection of the bank and the overhang of
the barn. On windy days you could stand there with your coat open and
just lay against the wind. Behind the barn, where the bank sloped off, there
were thousands of rock fossils . As long as the bull wasn't in that field, it
was fun to sit and look at those fossils. I would roam the fields and the
woods with a dog I grew up with, my best friend.
Even though we could see for long distances, we could always hear cars
coming before we could see them. You could hear the wind. You could
hear yourself think. Nobody came that way, no one paid any attention. I
miss that privacy. I felt like I was invisible wherever I went, that I could
do and be and think whatever I wanted . Now, I could spend a week in my
apartment and never walk out the door. It's very much a refuge for me.
That sense of freedom is kind of exciting. It pushes everybody out farther,
and I can say who can come in closer.

My dad hated his factory job, but he stuck with it until he retired because
he couldn't make enough on the farm. The three of us boys all had daily

191

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192 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

chores and helped with harvesting the crops. I hated it all. We were always
land-poor, so there wasn't much money. The house was never fixed up very
well. Farming was too hard a work for too little return . My dad was not
one to teach you things. He would tell you to do something, and if you
did it wrong he would get disgusted . "God damn it, I should have done
it myself!" We all worked in the garden, and I usually did the yardwork
because I liked doing it-mowing, planting flowers, doing the trimming.
My room was always neat and clean while most of my family was very clut-
tered, and I got great pleasure out of tidying things up. I would go through
and clean the house periodically as a favor to my mom .
When I was maybe five years old, I crawled up on my mother's lap to
kiss her. She turned away and said, "Don't ever kiss me on the lips." I have
no recollection of my mother ever kissing or embracing me, or saying she
loved me. And I certainly never had any of that from my father. I had a
strong sense of neglect, that my parents didn't really care and weren't in-
terested in me . I was very close to my grandmother, my father's mother,
and spent lots of time with her, weekends and summers. From her I learned
about touching, hugs, and kisses.
My parents never had much comment for us on what we did, but it was
clear I had brains and that was a source of pride for them. They gave me
a dollar when I got straight A's . That was the only sense of uniqueness I
had. I wanted so badly to be different, to stand out . Through the sixth
grade I went to a country school and things were clicking along. I had all
these buddies of mine from school at my sixth grade birthday party. We
had those little horns with the thing that unrolls and rolls back up. All of
us were standing under the light in the center of the room blowing them
at once and they all shot out and got tangled up with each other, and we
just laughed and laughed .
Everything fell apart in seventh grade, when we merged with other
schools in the area and went to a different school, where the country kids
met the city kids. I felt awkward, didn't fit in, didn't make friends easily.
My freshman year of high school we merged again, and they put us in
tracks. I went college prep and most of my elementary school friends went
vocational, so we split up and I was kind of a loner. The high school was
twenty-five miles away, an hour bus ride in the morning and an hour at
night, so it was hard to go to many activities.
My parents didn't go to church but they were always willing to take
us, so I went regularly from probably the fifth grade 011. I would go to
Sunday school and vacation Bible school and all the Christmas things.
Those were the only opportunities I had to socialize with other kids until
my sophomore year, when I started an encounter group that a local church

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Dale Hesterman 193

was doing. The group met for six or eight weeks, and I did two years' worth
of maturing in that period. I had been very naive, unaware of what other
people thought of me, unaware of puberty. The group opened me up to a
lot of things, but it was devastating. I became aware that I was different
from everybody else, I was a sissy, people were making fun of me, I needed
to grow up. I was despondent and embarrassed about how immature and
unsocialized I was.
The minister took an interest in me, so I felt like there was somebody
who cared. One night, I left a note for my parents and ran away. I was
going to go stay with the minister and try to work things out. But he lived
twenty-five miles away. I'd walk by farmhouses and mean farm dogs would
start chasing me, barking and growling. I was scared to death. Finally I'd
walked five miles and got out to the blacktop highway, but there was no
traffic at two in the morning. It was terrible. I kept walking and walking
and thought I'd never get there. So I stopped at a house, woke them up,
and told them my car had run out of gas way down the road. Could I call
someone to get me? I called the minister, he took me to his home, and I
went to bed. The next morning he made me call my parents to tell them
I was okay. My mom was real upset. She'd called my dad home from work.
Of course, they wanted to know where I was. When they came to get me,
the minister talked with them, tried to get them to understand that they
should show me some attention, talk to me. My mom stared straight ahead
and was kind of shaking, and looked like she had been crying. The only
thing my father said was, "Look what you've done to your mother." They
took me to school, I went home at the end of the day, and it was never
mentioned again. I vowed to myself never to hurt them again.
When I was sixteen, I was working at McDonald's so I couldn't go
camping one weekend. Our family did a lot of camping together, and this
was the first time I didn't go. There was a note on my desk when I got
home from school that Friday: "It's really sad to go on this trip without
you. We have always enjoyed going with you. I know you can't.always un-
derstand, and I don't tell you much about my feelings for you, but every-
body has to guard their heart in their own way. Just know that I always
love you. Mother." I realized then that my parents did care. It was just
that they couldn't show it in ways that I needed to see or feel it. My fa-
ther's father died when he was five and his mother had to raise four boys
in the Depression, so there wasn't a lot of time to give him the things he
needed. He was alcoholic in my early years, quit drinking when I was about
six. My mother was raised in a very strict environment with seven younger
brothers whose father had been raised in abusive foster homes.
I picked up some friends in the encounter group, but just when that

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was feeling good we moved and I started my junior year at a different

school, where I had trouble making friends . That summer I went to a
church camp that turned out to be kind of an evangelical, quasi-funda-
mentalist camp. I got saved and my world turned around . I became this
wonderful person. I wasn't sulking anymore, I wasn't prone to depression,
life felt better. I made a lot of friends in a Christian youth group and be-
came a youth leader in the church . I really had a good time my senior year
of high school with my Christian friends . We would have wild prayer meet-
ings at the house. Thirty youth would come over and we'd be on our knees
whooping and yelling and all praying in loud voices at the same time. My
parents would be sitting in the other room smoking cigarettes and drink-
ing coffee, wondering what the hell was going on, I'm sure. But they were
just thrilled-I was a good kid, a model person in the church. I visited the
shut-ins and carted them all over.

When I stayed with my grandmother, my uncles had magazines like True

Confessions, only geared towards men. I never read the stories, but the
sketches that went with the stories had very masculine men-hairy chest,
shirt open or maybe off, muscular, tanned, rugged. In high school I would
see guys and wish I looked like them-a tall slender guy who had gor-
geous hair, the football guys, or the jocks who were good looking and
very masculine. I was probably physically attracted to them but I ratio-
nalized that I just wished I looked like them . In a health book we had in
the house, the section on homosexuality talked about studies that had been
done, and one had found that men whose right testicle hung lower than
the left were more prone to homosexuality. I looked at mine and, dog-
gone it, the right one was lower than the left.
I went to a Christian college in Kentucky and was again very much a
loner. Late in college I had my first awareness that maybe I was gay, but I
didn't linger on that thought. Mter I'd finished college, I stopped at an
adult book store one night on my way to work, but I couldn't get the nerve
up to go in. A week later I got the nerve up, went straight to the rack of
gay male pornography, bought a magazine, and shot right back out the
door. If there was anybody else in the place I never saw them. I looked at
the magazine in the car and threw it in the trash before I got home.
About four years ago I was finishing up my Ph .D. program and think-
ing, I am gay, I am married, I have a child. I have made my bed and I have
to lie in it . A year later I was thinking, there's a support group for people
who are coming out, maybe I should check it out . Flakiest group of peo-
ple I ever met! They all had some bizarre quirk about them, and after about
four sessions I decided if this is being gay I think I'll pass. A year later I had

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Dale Hesterman 195

the chance to move to San Francisco. I wanted to go and my wife didn't.

I was feeling like, this is it-do it or die, come out now or you might as
well kill yourself because it's no good living this way. I felt I couldn't put
it off any longer because it wasn't fair to my wife for us to get out to San
Francisco and for me to come out to her there. So I came out to her.
Two years ago, when my wife and I decided to separate, I came out to
my parents and my brothers. I sent my parents a letter and they called me
the day they got it. "You're our son, you'll always be our son, that will
never change ." But it has never been discussed since. I brought it up again
when my parents came to California to visit. We had stopped at McDon-
ald's and when I brought it up my dad said, "Well, coffee's gone. I guess
we should get back on the road ." My mom asked me when I first knew.
I told her college was probably the first that I was made aware of it and
didn't suppress it so much, but I didn't let myself be fully aware of it until
two years ago. I'm hopeful my mom and I can talk some more about it.
My parents' best friends were at my dad's funeral. They've been best
friends since my parents were married, and this woman is my mom's clos-
est friend. We received a flower arrangement from this woman's son, but
it was from the son and his roommate, a man. I said to my mom that it
was odd that his roommate would send the flower arrangement, too, and
she said, "Oh, he's been with him quite a while now." I said, "Do you
think he's gay?" and she said, "Yeah, I think he probably is. I've always
thought that."
I asked her if she and his mom had ever talked about it, and she said,
"Oh, no. I would never bring it up in case his mom doesn't know. I don't
want to be the one to tell her because she might not accept it. I know his
father wouldn't accept it so I figure it's just best not to talk about it." I
said, "That's kind of odd . Here you've been friends all these years and you
both have a gay son and you've never talked about it," and she said, "Well,
it's not my place."

When my wife and I told my daughter we were separating, we told her I

was gay. In the months leading up to that, I had bought her several kids'
books on the issue and we'd read them together and talked about gay peo-
ple. She had grown up with a lot of lesbian friends of my wife, so she had
no problem with me being gay, but she had a problem with the fact that
her parents' marriage ended because I was gay. The same holds for me. If
I weren't gay, I'd still be with my daughter on a daily basis. That's been
the most painful for me. If there's anything I resent about being gay, it is
that. Sometimes I sit and cry and say over and over, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
I'm sorry.

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196 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

But what I did I would do over again. Congruence in life is really im-
portant to me. I do have times where it's like The Best Little Boy in the
World,- if you could take a pill and be straight, would you? He says no way.l
I can't say that all the time. I like finally being who I am, and if! think of
me in this place, inside this apartment, I'm fine with who I am . But the
minute I step out of here, I'm reminded that I was never one of the guys,
and I think maybe if! could have taken a pill and been straight I would've
been one of them. It's definitely a straight person's world out there and
it would be a whole lot easier to function in it if! were straight . Or when
I think of my daughter, I think maybe all this pain wouldn't have hap-
pened. On the other hand, if I could have come out a lot earlier maybe I
would never have married and I wouldn't have had to go through all the
pain of divorce and loss.
My former wife and my daughter are my strongest support system. I
talk with them at least twice a week. It's a little difficult in that I know my
former wife still loves me very much. I don't think she harbors any mis-
conceptions about us getting back together, but I know if! find a partner
it will be a second round for her. He will become my best friend and I
won't talk as much with her. I'm thinking maybe I should pull away a lit-
tle bit and not share as much with her. If! do that gradually, I think it will
be less painful if I find someone else.
I became very good friends with a guy I met in California, in a support
group for gay men who had been married or were currently married. He
and I had a lot in common, and about nine months later we had sex on
the beach at night. I have never felt anything like that. It was wonderful,
incredible-like circuits got plugged-in that had never been plugged-in
before. For the first time in my life I felt normal. And then about a month
later I met a guy who swept me off my feet . Not only was it an incredible
sexual intimacy but I also felt an emotional intimacy. He told me he loved
me, he loved this and that about me, and we had so much fun. He said
and did all the right things. I found out a few months later he didn't mean
any of those things, but it was the first time in my life I ever felt loved in
a whole way. I have no doubt about my former wife's love for me-the
depth and the greatness of it-but it never felt whole.

It's this odd paradox within me, to want to be unique and different on
one hand and on the other hand to want to be like everybody else, to feel
like everybody else feels. I always have felt badly that I was never one of
the guys. I was never athletic, J never hunted, I never understood the thrill
of talking about pussy and tits. Now, as I try to become part of the gay
community, I still feel different . Most of the gay men I talk to had early

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Dale Hesterman 197

sexual experiences, as often with male adults as male teens. I didn't even
know anybody who was gay. And when gay men talk about sexual activity
of a casual nature, I haven't done that. Part of it was morality and part of
it was that from high school on I've had an extremely negative body image .
I feel okay about my face, but I think my body is very ugly, almost gro-
tesque. I have not had sex with very many men, in large part because I
can't imagine anyone would find my body attractive.
When I went to bars in San Francisco, a lot ofthe guys wore very skimpy
shorts, and ninety percent of the younger ones would have their shirts off
and had well-developed chests and great tans. I finally quit going to those
bars because I would be so depressed. IfI'd grown up in the city and been
part of a group of guys, maybe I would have developed more of a sense
that everybody has different bodies, they come in all shapes and sizes, and
that's okay. The locker room was the only exposure I had to boys' bodies,
when I cowered in a corner, quickly changed for gym, and always avoided
taking a shower.
Outside my office is an expanse of lawn, and in the summer lots of
guys go there and play ball or frisbee. They're in shorts, shirts off, very at-
tractive. Some gay guys love to sit and watch them, but I don't. It's de-
pressing to me, like the bar scene. I wonder if that's related to growing up
where it's not part of your experience to look at other people. In the city
or suburbs, people sit on their porches and watch their neighbors. They
ride buses and trains and stare at others. We never did that, and it's un-
comfortable for me to do it now or to think of somebody doing it to me.
When I'm home, the blinds are closed ifI think anybody can see in.
I've spent much of my life working very hard at being a sociable per-
son. I often get down on myself because I wish I was more gregarious. If
I go into a group where I don't know anybody, I'm very much a wall-
flower. When I get together with a few close friends, I'm the life of the
group. I wish more of that part of me could come out in other social set-
tings. IfI'd had more opportunity to learn about developing friendships
and relationships, not being shy and backward, I might have come to grips
with this sooner. It has just been within the last two years that I've turned
my self-concept around. Body image is still a problem, but I feel good about
the kind of person I am. If they could meet me and get to know me, I
think a lot of people would be interested in me, not just in terms of a re-
lationship but friendship too. I would like to meet somebody just like me.
That's how good I feel about me.
What I face now is the same issue I grew up with-how do you meet
people? The frustrating thing about being in this small community is that
there aren't many opportunities, and after a while you feel like you've met

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every gay man in town. I'm not comfortable with the bar scene, although
I don't mind going out with a group of guys for a good time. I love ob-
serving, and there's something about being with a bunch of other gay men
that's really thrilling. There's something about the chase that goes on in
the bar that's fun, but nine times out often I'm not part of the chase. To
go to a bar and never get hit on is devastating to my almost futile effort
to build up my body image . But my friends always say it's hard for any-
body to hit on me because I won't give them a chance. Somebody could
stare at me for half an hour and I'd never look at them . There's still that
sense of feeling awkward, not knowing how to relate socially and meet peo-
ple. And there's a fear that I haven't figured out yet . What am I afraid of?

NOTE

1. John Reid . 1973. The Best Little Boy in the Wo rld. New York: Ballantine.

Copyrighted Material
 Frank Morse

Born in 1955, frank was one of seven children on a small livestock and crop
farm near Poynette, in Columbia County, in south-central Wisconsin. He was
married and the father of one child. At the time ofour interview, Frank lived
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He died in 1993 from AIDS-related causes.
The farm where Frank grew up had very rocky soil. For several weeks each
spring, Frank and his siblings had to pick the rocks from the fields, load them
on a flatbed wagon, and haul them to a ditch. Many wagonloads of rocks were
dumped in that ditch each spring, and the dulling, oppressive nature of that
work haunted Frank for many years. In the last few years of his life, he made
a kind ofpeace with that rock-picking and all that it represented by selecting
colorful rocks from the farm of his childhood and hauling them to his home in
Milwaukee to create borders in his backyard garden.
This brief narrative describes FranFs relationship with his father.

MY FATHER WAS a section foreman for the Milwaukee Railroad, so he

worked away from the farm five days a week. Mter work, he'd go to the
bar. As far back as I can remember, Mom would wake me up early in the
morning to go out and do chores before school. Mter school, as soon as
I got off the bus, I would do chores again until dark. And the whole sum-
mer was farm work. I was very angry about being charged with all those
responsibilities, but Dad was off at the bar drinking, so I just did the work.
I didn't have a choice. If! didn't do what had to be done, there would be
physical reprimand.
I grew up in a very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. I would cower in
my bedroom, afraid that Dad was going to come up with his five-foot
leather strap with a big brass buckle. He'd hit us with that a lot . Mom was
always the enabler. She would not make any judgments about Dad. He
knew how to discipline us boys and keep us straight. She was protecting
herself, making sure she didn't get reprimanded or physically assaulted.
All through high school I liked to keep the garden and lawn nice, and
Dad didn't think I should be spending as much time on that as I was. He
would bitch me out and tell me to get my ass out in the fields . Then he
would be very critical of the way I did the farmwork, even though he wasn't
there to teach me or to supervise. He'd tell me I wasn't feeding the hogs

199

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200 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

"I grew up in a very disfunctional, alcoholic family." Frank Morse, age four,
sits on his mother's lap, next to his father and sister. Courtesy ofJoy Morse.

enough, I wasn't keeping their pens clean enough, I wasn't cultivating the
corn right . He demanded that I cultivate a big field of corn when I was
only eleven or twelve years old. When I fell asleep on the tractor and drove
through a fence, I was beaten. When I started talking about going to
college, Dad was very much against it. The day I actually packed my car
to leave for college, he finally understood that I really was leaving, and we
got into a fistfight. I beat the living shit out of him and drove away.
In college, I got to be a very heavy drinker, and when I was drinking
I could be just like Dad. A few years ago, I gave up alcohol completely. I
was very conscious that when I was angry or sad, I'd stuff all those feel-
ings down myself with beer. As a child, I was very angry about my dad's
drinking. I yearned to have him recognize my performance and my achieve-
ments, but it never happened. In high school, he never attended my foot-
ball games, track, wrestling, or plays. He never said, "You've done a good

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Frank Morse 201

"All through high school I liked to keep the garden and lawn nice, and Dad
didn't think I should be spending as much time on that as I was." Ten-year-
old Frank Morse kneels in the family vegetable garden. Courtesy ofJoy Morse.

job," or "Thanks for doing that," or "I'm proud of you. " Part of my yearn-
ing to be with a man is yearning for that kind of recognition. I want a man
in my life who will give me that.
One day, in 1981, while my father and I were talking about the farm,
he had a heart attack and died in my arms. For me, there was no grieving;
it felt like the right time for him to go. Now, sometimes, I miss him and
feel a need just to be with him, or to say, "Hey, Dad, look at all the achieve-
ments I've had in my life." I know he would be proud of me, and I know
that he probably wouldn't say it. What ifhe had found out that I'm gay?
Part of me thinks he might have been very accepting. I think, deep down,
that's one of the things he struggled with-that he wanted to be with a
man. Since I've found out that one of his drinking friends was gay, I've
wondered what went on.

Copyrighted Material
 Mark Vanderbeek

Mark was born in 1955 and grew up with two older sisters and a younger
brother in southeastern Nebraska, near Adams, in Gage County. The farm
was predominantly a grain operation, with some livestock. At the time of our
interview, Mark lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and worked for a printing
company as an electronic prepress specialist and Macintosh consultant. Mark
killed himself in 1994 in the midst of what he described as ((an ongoing strug-
gle with clinical, hereditary depression." In this briefnarrative, Mark describes
how his rural and small-town roots continued to shape his achievement-cen-
tered identity.

MY BROTHER DAN is the heir to the throne of the family farm, and he
can have it . I have a feeling my parents would have been pretty thrilled if
I had wanted to farm, since I'm regarded as more of a perfectionist . Ac-
cording to my dad, when we went out to do fieldwork during planting
season, I knew how to prepare the field s just perfectly for him. But Dan
is pretty much a perfectionist now, too. Some people might think he fell
with his proverbial ass in the butter, but I'm not envious. Dad is suppos-
edly retired, but even in retirement he lives and breathes farming. He goes
out to the farm every day, come hell or high water, and kind of manages
and manipulates things. Dan has had to learn to finesse that and some-
times has to undo my father's damage.
It was pretty well-known, maybe even from kindergarten, that I was
going to be an artist . I just exhibited that talent and it took root . God,
the number of times I grumbled about being out on that fucking tractor
going back and forth over the fields. And the number of times I grum -
bled about getting dirty with grain dust. My mom says that's why I
didn't become a farmer. I don't like to get dirty. My parents indulged me
when I'd put up resistance after three weeks straight of going out to the
field. Then it was time for me to do something else for a couple of days.
But that doesn't mean when there were emergencies I didn't pitch in. It
was a group effort, and I still feel a part of that effort today. My parents
haven't the faintest idea what I do in my career, but it's kind of expected
that I will keep up with the price of grain, and how much rain they get,

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Mark Vanderbeek 203

and I do keep track of that stuff. It's second nature, something you never
lose.

Even though I didn't grow up in Adams, I considered myself an Adams

person because I went to public schools there, and I had a very strong
sense of community-of contributing and sharing. Sports, academics, and
everything were very competitive, and when you did something, you did
it as much for the glory of Adams as for your own enhancement. In my
class, peer pressure and cliques were virtually nil, and the pecking order
was minimal. We all tolerated each other's idiosyncracies and respected each
other's space. The teachers instilled that in us.
In high school, anyone who had any athletic ability went out for foot-
ball and basketball, because it was important for Adams to have outstand-
ing teams . Not being a jock, I still felt a part of all that. I was student man -
ager for the football team all four years, the right-hand man to the head
coach. And I made posters that went up around the high school building
the week prior to each basketball game, to help build up enthusiasm. They
purchased special poster-making supplies for me, the whole nine yards . It
was regarded as a significant contribution, and that's quite a big deal for
someone who's not a jock.
It wasn't until I was a senior, second semester, that I actually had a
study hall, because I always had every minute of school filled up with some-
thing. I often had to split band and art classes because both sides were say-
ing, "Mark, we need you!" I saw myself going to school to prepare for
other things, not knowing specifically what, but it was all in preparation
for something else. Mrs. Harrold, my trig and geometry teacher, could be
a feisty, unyielding person to other people, but I always thought of her as
someone who would not accept less than your best. Mrs. Knowles, my
choral teacher in high school, was a godsend. Under her wing, I got my
love of classical music-my first and last love-and the sense that you are
what you set your mind to be .
I lived a totally celibate life in college, and I have a certain amount of
regret about that. I was so dead-set on getting that 4.0 GPA that every-
thing else was out of the picture . I just hammered away at it, relentlessly.
I might have been dodging the issue too-kind oflike I needed to resolve
one issue at a time. The first issue was my career, or purpose in life, and
after I got my first job I was permitted the freedom to pursue the other
aspects of my life. That's one thing that's been out of sync in my life- the
ability to juggle several things at one time.
A lot of gay people spend their lives just grazing the surface . Then there
are the over-achievers, who have a subconscious need to prove their worth

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204 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

Mark Vanderbeek, age three, and his sisters, left, Sandy, and Pat.
Courtesy of Sandy Coons.

in society. I tend to be an over-achiever. At times it's a blessing and at times

it's a curse, but I don't want anyone at work to ever have reason to say,
"Not only is he gay, but he doesn't do above and beyond the call of duty."
You can call me a faggot, you can call me any slur you want to, but don't
ever call me a sluff-off or someone who doesn't put out 110 percent. It's
definitely a trait I picked up from my father. He would say, "Count your
blessings for every day you can work."

Growing up in a small community, I had a strong sense of identity-the

farm, the small town, the small school. I've heard other people say that

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Mark Vanderbeek 205

when they realized they were gay, they felt like they must be freaks of na-
ture. But being gay never really caused me great inner conflict, because
I've always had a fairly strong sense of who I am. I'm an Adams kid, I go
to Adams school. When I was in doubt or turmoil about something, I had
those things to prop me up and tell me, "Hey, you're okay. This issue will
be resolved."
I grew up in quite ordinary circumstances and the most "wholesome"
of settings. I always knew I was gay, I've always been comfortable with it,
and I certainly have no regrets about it. I've taken my lumps like every-
one does, straight or gay or whatever, and I wouldn't trade places with
anyone. I've gotten this far to understand who I am. I would just as soon
stay on track and find out what's ahead. Despite what people in New York
or Los Angeles might say, I don't consider Nebraska the middle of no-
where. I think the Midwest is a wonderful place to be. Omaha is like a sec-
ond home to me, other than Adams. It's very much a sense-of-commu-
nity type city, the focal point being Omaha, with the suburbs looking to
it. I feel a little lost in Kansas City, with the core city kind oflanguishing
and the suburbs taking over. Not having that core to identify with is kind
of baffling to me.

Copyrighted Material
 Everett Cooper

Everett was born in 1957 in southeastern Indiana and grew up on a dairy

farm in that region. He has one younger brother and three older sisters. Everett
was married twice and is the father of three children. He lives with his hus-
band in Wisconsin and works as an optician.

DADDY WAS ONLY too happy to finally have a son, but I think there
was something about the gentleness of my nature that frightened him and
he just pushed me away. I was a model child, really responsible. It wouldn't
have occurred to me to back-talk my parents or not do something I was
told . When I was quite small, my dad's younger brother would throw me
up in the air, and I was just terrified . It was a great game of teasing, and
jesting between my dad and his brother, what a sissy I was. It was com-
municated to me very strongly that I was somehow inferior as a male.
My brother Andrew was appropriately macho. He was the hunter and
the trapper, so Daddy thought he was wonderful. By the time Andrew was
nine, my father had given him a real .22 rifle to hunt with . When our par-
ents were gone, Andrew would get the loaded rifle out and keep my sis-
ters and me just terrified, teasing us. Daddy was so approving of Andrew
that nothing was ever done about it.
My earliest recollection of my father is being beaten with a belt when
I was three or four. I was crunched down in a corner, trying to shrink away
from him, and my mother stepped in between us and told him, "You're
not going to do this to him anymore ." I spent all of my growing-up years
trying to do things which he would approve of, but none of it was ever
quite enough to make him move back towards me . When my father's rac-
coon-hunting cronies would come over, he would tell them about An-
drew's hunting exploits and accomplishments. There was no mention made
of me-I was just an afterthought . It just wasn't in me to be macho and
tough, so Daddy couldn't approve of me . It was appalling to me that An-
drew actually took pleasure in killing animals.
Before we had real horses, Andrew and I rode stick horses. They didn't
even have heads, come to think of it . With no television, we had seen only
a few cowboy shows at other people's houses, but with that bit of inspi-

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Everett Cooper 207

ration we had invented some cowboy games. There were no girls to be

damsels in distress, so I would play the damsel and then play one of the
cowboys as well. Andrew refused to ever be the damsel. I would put my
mother's and sisters' discarded nylons on my head for long hair, and wrap
a cloth around me for a dress. When Andrew was nine and I was about
twelve, the cowboy games gave way to real live horses.
I became involved in the dairy operation because both my parents had
outside jobs. A hired hand had been taking care of the milking, but he
wasn't doing it to my dad's expectations, so he fired the guy. I could see
that my parents were in a bit of a pinch, so I volunteered to do it until my
dad could find somebody to take over. The entire dairy operation became
my responsibility at about twelve or thirteen, and I milked the cows morn-
ing and night until after I graduated from high school. There were times
we had as many as seventy head of cattle on the place, but we never milked
more than maybe fifty at a time. I was out milking the cows at 5:00 every
morning, and after school I got on the bus and went right home to do the
milking. It was an awful lot of work, and restricted me from being in-
volved in much at school. By the time I got to my senior year of high school,
I was getting pretty tired ofthat much responsibility. Daddy sold the cows
as soon as I went away to college because he couldn't depend on Andrew
to take care of them.
In addition to working in factories, my father was a part-time pastor of
a small church . Our home and church life was very fundamentalist evan-
gelical-Church of the Nazarene . We went to church probably three times
a week, and we had spring and fall revivals where we went two weeks
straight every night. We had hellfire and damnation preachers who came
in and thundered at us. I believed everything and took it very much to
heart. Everything was so structured within the framework of right and
wrong as defined by the church . We purported to love "fallen mankind,"
but we really didn't . We saw ourselves on a plane above them, and they
were the riffraff who deserved to "die in a Devil's hell," as the evangelists
put it. We were prejudiced against anyone who wasn't Christian, to our def-
inition . We purported to love the sinner and hate the sin, but that wasn't
reality. A favorite topic was, "He that looketh on a woman and lusteth
after her in his heart has already committed adultery." So I made good
and sure that wasn't going to happen to me.
We had no television, because it was sinful, and my dad didn't like for
us to listen to radio music. In those days, my mother was happy enough
that she sang a lot of the time. I picked up on this, and from the age of
four or five I would get up on an old seed separator that sat out in the
barn lot and sing at the top of my lungs . We were three-quarters of a mile

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from the nearest neighbor, and a few times they called and asked, "What's
that noise over there?" They couldn't identify it as singing. They thought
somebody was screaming. "Everett is out on the seed separator singing
again ." Hymns were all I knew-"Rock of Ages," "Amazing Grace ." By
the time I was ten years old, I knew almost all the hymns in the book and
could sing them word for word, without a book in front of me.
The first time I sang in the first grade of school, the music teacher
stopped the whole class and said, "My gosh, you really know how to carry
a tune, Everett." From that day forward, nothing could stop me. I sang
at civic events, at weddings and funerals, and at hootenannies. I was the
first person from my high school to win the All-State Choir Award. My
mother saw that I had this claim to fame, and arranged for me to take pri-
vate voice lessons during my high school years. I even had a contract from
a recording studio in Tennessee that was going to put me on the road.
Then I made the mistake of getting married, and the rest is history.

Once when we had a calf born, Daddy said I could have it . From day one,
I let April suck my hand . She grew up and had calves, and even as a cow
she and I were really close. To me, the cows weren't the numbers on their
chains around their necks. They all had names and very definite person-
alities. If I'd be really upset, I could go out into the pasture where April
was, and lie down, and just bawl my eyes out. She would look around at
me like, "It'll be okay."
Mother would be there for me if I needed to talk. She was very aware
that my father and I didn't have a closeness, so she tried to be more to me.
When I was fourteen or fifteen, she told me that Daddy was so excited
when a son was finally born, but then not very long after it was almost as
if he became jealous of my relationship with her. We were very close, but
she wasn't the smothery type . She would make a big deal out of my ac-
complishments at school-singing, playing the piano-so that I felt like
there was something I had done well . A couple of times when my mother
made my dad come to open house in grade school, he would tell my male
teachers, "If Everett does anything wrong, be sure and give him a good
paddling board, and be sure and send a note home with him and I'll take
care of it again when he gets home ." That just didn't make any sense, be-
cause I wouldn't have dreamed of getting in trouble .
My teacher in third and fourth grades was the first male teacher I had.
I absolutely adored him because he was the first man who reached out to
me and said, "Gosh, you've got it on the ball-you're a great student, you
participate well, you're intelligent." He said those things to me, not in so
many words, but by the way he treated me. I needed that, because I was

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Everett Cooper 209

missing it so much from Daddy. I needed a man to say, "You're worth some-
thing." Sometimes I wonder what would've happened to me if that one
man hadn't given me a sense of worth.
As we got older, I became more Mother's boy and Andrew became more
Daddy's boy. My oldest sister and I were more Mother's children, because
we were model kids. Andrew and my second sister, Sally, were the two rene -
gades, and they were my dad's kids. Before Andrew was born, Sally and
Daddy were so close that he referred to her as his Little John. She was the
tomboy of the three girls, the one who rode the tractors with him . She
started calling me "queer" at about seven or eight. I had no clue what it
meant, but I knew it was derogatory. My mother would become insane
with anger and slap her in the mouth.

In the first grade, the school building was so archaic that the restrooms
were concrete shanties at the back of the playground. I had gone to the
restroom in the middle of class one day, and I heard somebody come in
behind me. When I turned around, an older boy was standing there fully
exposed from his waist to his knees. That was the first time I'd ever seen
adult-size genitalia, and I was absolutely mesmerized. But I was scared,
and when I ran out of the restroom he tried to cut me off.
I saw Tarzan on TV when I was seven, eight, nine and I thought his
body was so beautiful, and that I'd like to touch him. Sometimes at the
end of a day of baling hay, my dad and brother and I would skinny-dip in
the pond to clean off before we came home. I thought Daddy was ab-
solutely gorgeous and would like to have touched him, but I knew from
what I didn)t hear from everybody else around me that what I was feeli ng
was not quite normal somehow. After I went into puberty, all the boys
were laughing in groups and talking about kissing girls. I had girlfriends
too, but I recognized that I really would like to be holding hands with a
boy. I was excited about being in gym class, because I knew we were all
going to be in the shower together. But I was concerned that I might be
embarrassed by an inadvertent erection.
My mother introduced us to Zane Grey novels, and I really got into
them. I always found myself identifying with the heroines, wanting to be
where they were, in the hero's arms. My mother told me how disgusted
she was by a book she was reading about two guys who met in the war.
One introduced the other guy to his sister, and when they came home
from the war, the sister and the guy got married so the two guys would
be available to each other.
Andrew and I and a friend who was a year older than I found a place
we called "the cave" in a very secluded woods. There was a waterfall, and

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back under it was a large eroded area that had the appearance of a cave.
We camped out there a few times. Where the waterfall came over, a pool
had collected where we would go skinny-dipping. We played erotic games,
grabbing each other. Around the time I turned thirteen, our friend in-
troduced Andrew and me to masturbation . He didn't let us see him mas-
turbate; he just brought the semen over in his hand after he 'd done it. We
were mesmerized, just couldn't believe it.
Andrew became especially interested in the changes that happened to
me when I went into puberty. We slept in the same bed and when I was
fourteen and he was eleven we began to masturbate together-ourselves
and each other. There was a lot of rivalry and antagonism between us by
day, but at night it was almost as if we were lovers . There was a very defi-
nite Jacob and Esau scenario going on. My brother initiated most of this
sexual activity, under cover of darkness, and we never spoke about it . We
did this almost every night until I left for college.
When I was somewhere between thirteen and fifteen, we were at my
grandma's and there was a news report about gay men in a park some-
where in California. The family got all up in arms, saying "Kill the per-
verts," and that kind of stuff. At that point I realized something happened
between men, and it smacked of what interested me. I knew it was called
Sodom and Gomorrah from the pulpit, but I really didn't know what it was.
Until my junior year of high school, I felt really guilty about mastur-
bation-that I was going to lose my mind or God was going to kill me or
something. I began to get away from that when I had my first major crush
on a guy, my best friend during my junior and senior years of high school.
God, I was so madly in love with him I would've sold my soul. For one of
our English classes we had to keep a journal, and he would let me read his.
He was involved with a girl, and was having sex with her every weekend.
I kept his journal till I was twenty-four years old-not because I cared
what he had been doing with a girl, but because I was in love with him.
When I was sixteen, I was dating a girl and I thought I might want to
kiss her. I knew Andrew had kissed girls, so I asked him-when you kiss,
do you suck or blow? I don't remember that he was really able to answer
my question. But I never tried to kiss anybody else until I went off to Olivet
Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois, where a girl from Pittsburgh
taught me how to kiss . Dating was the thing to do, so I dated girls that
first year of college . It was the first time I didn't have to worry about my
parents watching or about having to go home to milk the cows. There
were a fair number of gay men at this fundamentalist college. A friend
showed me a picture he had found of his roommates, ministerial students,
in a sexual setting. He and I had much the same type of religious upbring-

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Everett Cooper 211

ing, and when we looked at that picture we looked at each other and it
was like a light went on-oh, okay, this really does happen . He and I never
did anything, but I wondered if he was gay.
When I went home at Christmas that year, I was dating a black girl. I
told my parents I was dating a girl. Could I bring her home sometime?
Sure. During the course ofthe conversation it came out that she was black,
and my dad went totally berserk. It upset me so much that when I went
back to college I collected my things and ran away to New Mexico for six
months, where I lived with my older sister. She had a television, so I would
see the news and Phil Donahue and other shows where homosexuality was
talked about. I began to put the pieces together, but I still couldn't make
a transition, so I went back to Indiana, got together with my high school
sweetheart, and got married. That was what you did in that culture, and
I guess subconsciously I thought getting married would validate that I
was okay, and all this stuff would just kind of fall away.
Within a couple of months after my first son was born, his mother and
I had a conversation in which I told her that not only was sex between us
not anything like I expected, it was terrible. She wasn't satisfied, and I
wasn't satisfied. I told her about what had gone on between my brother
and me, and she was so frightened by it that we never mentioned it again.
We were only nineteen, for heaven's sake .
We went ahead and had two more children, and the whole marriage
was really bad. It was crazy that we were together; all we ever did was argue.
Maybe she didn't know how to get out. And yet she was bright enough to
figure out what I couldn't. She called everyone in my family and told them,
"He's gay. That's why I kicked him out." It was vicious and vindictive.
Other than the conversation we'd had years before, she had nothing on
which to base that . I was married to her for seven years and never had sex
with a guy. Whatever fantasies I had were with men, but I didn't have any-
thing except the masturbation experience with my brother to go on. My
family believed her, so I turned around and got married again, partly, I
guess, to convince them-and myself-that I wasn't gay.
Mter my second wife and I were married, I found out that men meet
in parks, public restrooms, and bookstores. I had heard this years before,
but didn't have enough sense to act on it. Then, driving through a park
in Colorado Springs, it dawned on me-there were all these single guys
driving around, there must be something going on. I started sunbathing
there and a guy came running by and stopped and looked at me. I made
some inane comment and we started talking. The first time we made love,
it was like-this is it! This is what lovemaking is supposed to be . God, it
was wonderful. We wound up falling in love with each other and had a re-

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212 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

lationship for two-and-a-halfyears. I didn't know what it meant to be in

love with somebody-to eat, sleep, breathe, and think about them twenty-
four hours a day. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and he was maybe thir-
teen years older. He was married, too.

I want to come out to my family, although my mother has said on more

than one occasion that she would rather one of her kids would die than
tell her they were gay. The thing that keeps me from telling them is not
that I have any guilt or bad feelings. I could quite happily go in and say,
this is what I am-take it or leave it. And it's not that I think my mother
couldn't deal with it, not even the fear that she might tell me to get out.
It's just that my mom has had so much sorrow-my brother's alcoholism
and his being in jail, and my sister Sally, who has driven her insane for
more than a decade with vicious, hateful stuff. I don't need to come out
to them to validate me to me. I'm okay with who I am. But it would just
crush the life out of her-one more great big sorrow-and why would I
want to do that to my mother?
There are people at work I've come out to, but with some of the peo-
ple in my family I wouldn't be surprised if they would pick up a gun and
shoot me. So I'm just playing it by ear. My dad could get real deadpan and
order me out of the house, or he could beat me to a bloody pulp. He has
in recent years, without even looking angry, hauled off and punched peo-
ple-knocked them down and hurt them. If they all find out inadvertently,
or suspect, it won't bother me. But I know I'm going to tell my brother.
He turned to drugs and alcohol when he was still in high school, and when
he was in the marines he brought home pictures he took of guys in his pla-
toon that could be described in no other way than homoerotic. And me-
thinks he doth protest too much sometimes. It's important to me to talk
to him about it. He could pick up a gun and shoot me, but I don't think
he will. He may deny it outright and tell me I'm disgusting, or he may
open up and say, "Yeah, let's talk about it."

So much of the time during junior high and high school, the pressure to
conform, to be masculine, ate at me a lot. IfI'd had an inordinate amount
of teasing on any given day, I would get real melancholy, and would some-
times go out in the woods to cry or to fight things out inside myself. And
I enjoyed riding my horse in the openness and expanse of the fields. It was
almost a gift to be able to get away and think my own thoughts-to ride
free and unrestrained. I often wondered if my school friends in town were
ever able to get away from everything and get in touch with themselves.

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Everett Cooper 213

And I've often thought what a pity it is that my own three sons haven't
had the privilege of growing up on a farm.
This summer, my oldest son asked me how I felt about something with
reference to homosexuality. I gave him my opinion, and he just looked at
me kind offunny and said, "Daddy, are you gay?" I was not expecting the
question, so instead of answering it I asked him, "If! were gay, would that
change how you feel about me? Would that change the openness of our
relationship? What would it do to you?" Next summer, I'm going to tell
the boys. In the event that any of them are gay, they need to have role
models, to understand that it's okay. It's very important that they know
this as early in life as possible. And in the event that none of them are gay,
maybe they'll reevaluate the prejudices and biases they're picking up from
other people.
I have some frustration and anger about the friction between my reli-
gious upbringing and coming to grips with my sexual orientation-about
being forced to be stuck in a lie, about the unfairness I've experienced in
disentangling myself from my most recent marriage, about being thirty-
five and just now coming out . And by god, I'm so sick of other people
dictating. Trying to come to terms with my own sexuality, I've had to
shed almost all of my religious beliefs; they just won't fit with it. The farm
has given me another backdrop, something else to move back to. I think
of myself as a Christian deist at this point, with a real appreciation for
God's creation, as opposed to just worrying about religious practices. I
believe the true religion is to be as kind as you can be to others. With so
much hurt and hate in the world, why do we want to inflict more on each
other?
When my second wife and I started going through the process of di-
vorce, we told close friends and our pastor and his wife that I was gay. At
no time did anybody say, "Wow, this is interesting. Tell me more about
it." They just put up walls. I have a real deep sorrow that people don't
want to know. It's not a matter of, "Oh, I didn't know that-that's neat
to know." It's, "Don't tell me, because I don't want my mind changed.
I'm comfortable being antagonistic and prejudiced against you." It makes
me very sad that a lot of people think we're all a bunch of perverts run-
ning around. And not only do they think that, but they choose to think
that-they choose not to know the other side of it. I would like somehow
to become politically forceful in changing that perception.
For a long time, especially in my adolescent years, there was such a lot
of guilt, and then when I was married there was a lot of resentment. Why
can't I be normal? Why did this have to happen to me? Once I was able
to shed my fundamentalist beliefs, I came to realize that whether you're

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214 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

straight or gay, you're made in the creator's image . I'm put together
pretty amazingly, and as different as I am to so many others, there's noth-
ing wrong or bad about the way I am . Now that I've stopped worrying
about what if and why not, I look at the beauty of the relationship I had
with the guy in Colorado Springs . I think in some ways same-sex partners
are far more capable ofbeing real in a relationship, because they understand
more closely where each other is coming from. The physical love and spir-
itual communion I have had with other men have been far superior to
what I have observed in heterosexuals.
If! could snap my fingers tomorrow and become straight, I wouldn't
do it. I'm very happy the way I am, and I want to find somebody to share
that gladness with. I don't want anybody right this minute, because I need
to spend some time with myself. But if the right person came along six
months or a year from now, I could see myself making a commitment to
a relationship. I would like a monogamous relationship because I think it
makes sense in terms of one's health, but I would like a relationship more
than I would insist on it being monogamous. I wouldn't want a relation-
ship that was real clingy and where I had to be constantly affirming the
person. I've been through that with both of my marriages. But I would
like to have somebody to do things with, to go to bed with at night and
curl up and cuddle with. I'm real cuddly.

Copyrighted Material
 John Ber:g

Born in 1957, John grew up on 300-acre mixed livestock and crop farm near
New Ulm, in Brown County, south-central Minnesota. His older sister and
brother were grown-ups during his childhood. John lives in northeastern Iowa
and works as a librarian. This brief narrative describes how he responded to
his emotional and physical attractions to other males, from grade school through
high school.

WATCHING THE TV movie of Cinderella, with Lesley Ann Warren, I

was very taken with the handsome prince and thought how lucky I would
be if I were Cinderella and could land him. Sometimes when my parents
weren't around, I would get into my sister's wardrobe and put on her
bridal gown and veil, pretending I was getting married, walking down the
stairs with the long gown trailing behind me. Sometimes I would go out-
side with my sister's dresses on and pretend to be a woman visiting the
city. I'd sit on one of the farm implements and pretend I was driving some-
where. The pole barn would be a restaurant where I'd have lunch, and
then I might go to the chicken barn to visit with the girls and do some
shopping.
It was typical for my mother and father and me to go for a drive on
Sunday afternoons. As we drove around they would look at other farmers'
fields, chatting and listening to polka music on the car radio. My father
was always very interested in seeing how his crops compared to other farm-
er's crops. I would sit in the back seat, day-dreaming and waiting for the
ice cream that we would stop for about mid-way through the trip.
On our drive one Sunday, when I was twelve or thirteen, my mother
had to return some dishes from Ruthy and Les's wedding that had taken
place the day before. It was the first wedding I had ever gone to and I was
very happy about going. Both the bride and the groom had dressed in
white, and Les was stunningly handsome in his white tux. He was a farmer,
so he was very sunburned. His face and hands were ruddy and his hair was
slicked straight back. Watching him during the ceremony and the recep-
tion, I thought how lucky Ruthy was to have a nice man like that-a man
like I wanted to have. When they left for their honeymoon, I was almost
jealous that she was going to be the one with him. Sitting in the back seat
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216 Part 2. Between the Mid-1960s and Mid-1970s

of the car, looking out the window, I was day-dreaming about what it
would be like to be alone with Les. He would be driving the car and I'd
be sitting right next to him, like a boyfriend and girlfriend would do.

Kevin was a couple years older than I and lived on a farm maybe ten miles
away. The summer before my sophomore year in high school, I saw him
doing some field work. He was shirtless and very tan. After that, I would
ride my bike past his farm, hoping to see him. That fall, Kevin's sister and
I were working on a school project with two other students. I planned it
so the group would meet at her house, and maybe I would get to see
Kevin. After we finished with our project we were sitting around in the
living room and Kevin's mother served us bars and soda. It was harvest
time and apparently Kevin had been working pretty hard that day. I was
hoping he would get in from the field before I had to leave.
Kevin came into the living room shirtless, wearing tattered, snug-fit-
ting jeans. He usually worked shirtless and always wore long pants. He
was a little taller than I, very slim and muscular, blonde hair, blue eyes,
and very tan. He kicked off his boots, pulled off his socks, and reclined on
the couch to watch TV This was my first chance to talk to him. Seeing
that he was interested in farming, I geared my conversation to that. How
was the work? Was it pretty hot? How were the bushels running? Kevin
seemed to pay pretty close attention to me and made good eye contact, so
I went home fantasizing about how wonderful our conversation was, and
hoping we would meet again.
A few weeks later I had built up a bit of nerve to ride my bike to Kevin's
place and invite him over to my farm. Much to my surprise, he said, "Sure,
let's get together tomorrow." I had our date all planned. I needed to get
Kevin upstairs to my room so my mother wouldn't be able to horn in and
become the focus of conversation. The next day, waiting for his arrival, I
cleaned up my room, getting everything as spotless as I could. I dusted
my dressers and even refolded all the clothes inside. I planned a menu of
finger foods-crackers and Cheez Whiz, popcorn, and a selection of soft
drinks . I had a phonograph, and wondered what kind of music Kevin
would like. I had David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, and one country-west-
ern record.
Trying to figure out what to wear, I went through four or five changes
of clothes . I settled on a newer pair of jeans and a nice shirt, but not too
dressy. We had a long driveway and I sat on the front steps of the house
watching each car go by. Finally, Kevin turned into the driveway and I felt
faint. I didn't know what to do-should I run out and meet the car, or sit
casually on the steps and look macho, farmer-like?

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John Berg 217

Mter Kevin and I had talked in the driveway for ten or fifteen minutes,
my parents came out of the house and we visited with them for a short
time. In order to break away from them, I invited Kevin to go for a walk
around our farm. We had just built a new farrowing barn, my father's pride.
I explained all about the stainless steel pens and the slat floors, and the
whole process from breeding to farrowing to working with the feeder pigs.
Kevin was quite taken by this new building, so I showed him some of our
other farm buildings and we walked through some fields .
Mter an hour or two of looking around, Kevin said it was about time
for him to get home. That was not my plan, so I suggested we go up to
my room to listen to some records. We sat cross-legged on the floor, the
hors d'oeuvres on the floor next to us. My emotions were running very
high, but I tried the best I could to make eye contact with him . When I
put on a David Cassidy record, I said, "You might not like this," but he
said he was a Partridge Family fan, too. In no way did he mock or tease
me. He ate my munchies and listened to my records and we had a good
time . I wanted him to really like me and to come back a second time.
There was an electric energy. I wanted Kevin to touch me and to hold
me, and I wanted to touch him. I was really thirsting for that kind of at-
tention and affection from another male, but I didn't know if it was ap-
propriate or how to get it. I was certainly drawn to how Kevin's jeans fit
him, but I think what I really wanted was his attention and validation-
for him to see me as a male on an equal level with him. When it was time
for Kevin to leave, I walked him out to his car and told him how much I
had enjoyed the evening and that I would like to do it again. We never did,
but there has always been a fondness in my heart for Kevin and my first
date with a man.

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
PART 3
Coming of Age Between the
Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

Copyrighted Material
Feeding the Calf, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Gary Christiansen

Copyrighted Material
 Introduction

THIS ERA SAW major mass-media attention to homosexuality, in print

and on television. Sergeant Leonard Matlovich's discharge from the Air
Force after he made it known that he was gay became a Time magazine
cover story in 1975. Superimposed on the cover photograph of Matlovich
in uniform were the words, "I Am a Homosexual," in large, bold type. In
addition to detailing Matlovich's case against the military, the article de-
scribed "the gay drive for acceptance" and America's response to gay peo-
ple coming out of the closet. It provided a snapshot of urban gay culture,
the diversity of gay lifestyles, as well as legal, medical, and religious per-
spectives. Time concluded that civil rights protections for homosexuals
made sense, but that the "anything goes" attitude that fostered tolerance
of homosexuality threatened our society's well-being. l
The main event of the decade was Anita Bryant's 1977 campaign to
"save our children" by repealing a county gay rights ordinance in Florida.
Her efforts and the reactions they provoked generated unprecedented dis-
cussion, debate, and gay community organization nationwide. In Rhode
Island, Aaron Fricke's determination to take his boyfriend to the high
school prom generated nationwide publicity in 1980. Several major-stu-
dio movies with strong gay and lesbian images appeared in 1982, includ-
ing Making Love, Personal Best, and Victor/Victoria. Also in 1982, Wis-
consin became the first state in the U.S. to institute a wide-reaching gay
rights law. This period also saw the election or appointment of many openly
gay and lesbian individuals to local, state and national offices. By the mid-
1980s, AIDS had become a powerful force for gay visibility in the mass
media. This was exemplified by the jolting announcement in 1985 that
actor Rock Hudson had AIDS.2
Meanwhile, at the library or bookstore, farm boys in search of them-
selves might have happened upon Patricia Nell Warren's gay-positive nov-
els, The Front Runner,3 The Fancy Dancer,4 or The Beauty Queen. 5 In ad-
dition, James Kirkwood's Some Kind ofHero,6 Andrew Holleran's Dancer
from the Dance,? and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City 8 presented ho-
mosexuality in a way mass-market publishers had never done before. Also
appearing were informational books about being gay, some written for gay
men and lesbians, others for their parents, other family members, and friends
seeking understanding.

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222 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

For many of the men whose stories are presented here, coming of age
between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s meant that they would come
to grips with being gay between their teens and mid-twenties. Very few of
them would marry, and these marriages would be short-lived. "It took me
till I was twenty-five," Rick Noss lamented. "I wish I had come out when
I was younger." Yet many men only fifteen to twenty years older than Rick
would have considered themselves fortunate to have been able, in their
twenties, to figure things out and proceed forthrightly to continue cre-
ating their lives as gay men.
These younger men were generally more inclined than those who went
before them to inform their parents and other family members that they
were gay. In many cases this revelation was provoked rather than self-ini-
tiated, but in all of these cases the response was a matter-of-fact statement
of being gay. "When I realized I was gay, I didn't try to run and hide from
it," said Gary Christiansen, who sent a coming-out letter to his parents
and siblings when he was twenty-five. "Even though I knew my parents
weren't going to like it, I knew that was just the way it was."
Those who were not open with their families about being gay seemed
to be in unspoken but mutually "agreed-upon" standoffs on the issue. Todd
Ruhter: "I'm sure [my parents] probably have a good idea, especially as I
get older and I ' m not marrying, but they don't bug me about it .... As
long as they don't actually know it, it's not real." Connie Sanders: "I sus-
pect that on some level everybody in the family has an inkling. My par-
ents are probably doing major denial." Richard Hopkins: "How can they
not know I'm gay?" None of these men was attempting to camouflage his
life in order to appear to be heterosexual; they simply had not yet taken a
proactive approach to revealing their homosexuality. That they intended
to do so someday was often apparent. Unlike those who had been gay farm
boys before them, these men were more likely to be empowered by a sense
of gay community and by being able to envision and create a more open,
mainstream gay identity for themselves.
David Campbell plans to move back to the country, in pursuit of the
large garden, animals, and isolation that city life does not allow. For Jahred
Boyd and Steve Gay, country life is already a reality. Rick Noss describes
his strong sense of belonging-both in Omaha's gay community and back
home on his parents' farm. After years of "lies and lies and lies," Richard
Hopkins contemplates telling his parents that he is gay and HIV-positive.
Lon Mickelsen describes his ongoing task of reshaping a life of approval-
seeking conformity into something more healthy and fulfilling. As the
wounds of a defiant and abuse-filled childhood continue to heal, Steven
Preston finds fulfillment in hobby-farming with his husband.

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Introduction 223

Connie Sanders ruminates on the incongruity of the southern Illinois

farm culture of his boyhood and the gay culture of his Chicago commu-
nity. Mter years of striving to be a parent-pleasing son, Ken Yliniemi cred-
its his ex-wife with helping him develop the stronger self-identity that led
to his coming out. Randy Fleer and Clark Williams reflect on the influ-
ence of anonymous sex in their lives. Joe Shulka embraces gay activism,
both in Minneapolis and in his hometown, while maintaining close ties
with his family. For Todd Ruhter, being openly gay is incompatible with
the family and hometown ties that are so important to him .

NOTES

1. "Gays on the March ." Time: September 8, 1975, pp. 32-37, 43.
2 . Events of 1977 to 1985 described in The Alyson Almanac. 1990. Boston:
Alyson Publications, pp. 35-41.
3. Patricia Nell Warren. 1974. The Front Runner. New York: Morrow.
4 . Patricia Nell Warren . 1976. The Fancy Dancer. New York: Morrow.
5. Patricia Nell Warren . 1978. The Beauty Queen. New York: Morrow.
6. James Kirkwood. 1976. Some Kind of Hero. New York: New American
Library.
7. Andrew Holleran. 1978. Dancer from the Dance. New York: Morrow.
8 . Armistead Maupin. 1978. Tales of the City. New York: Harper and Row.

Copyrighted Material
 David Campbell

David was born in 1958 and grew up on a farm in central Ohio, with two
brothers, one older and one younger. He lives in the Columbus, Ohio, area where
he is co-owner of a floral business.

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS me knows I'm a mommy's boy. Sometimes I

rebelled against what she'd tell me, and we fought, but for the most part
it was a good, close relationship. My mother always had a large vegetable
garden, and flower gardens, and I was always so happy to be out there
helping her. I preferred doing that over some of the other things that had
to be done. One year I had chicken pox when she was planting the gar-
den. I stood at the kitchen window, watching her and crying because I
couldn't go out there.
I know my daddy loved all three of us and my mom. He was a big,
handsome man, very nice, always working and very involved in the com-
munity. He was on the library board and the county board, and we were
all very involved in the Methodist church where he was a lay minister. He
loved watching Ohio State basketball games at night, and when I'd hear
him cheering I wanted to be out there watching TV with him. But we had
to be in bed at 9 :00.
Until my father died when I was nine, we farmed about eight hundred
acres and had about one hundred head of Holstein dairy cattle. Except for
one hundred acres and a few head of cattle, my mother sold our share of
the farm to my uncle and grandfather who had been in partnership with
my father. We farmed that hundred acres and raised a few steers for our
own use and to make a little money. My brothers were more involved with
the equipment and the plowing and planting, and I was more involved
with feeding the livestock.
The night my father died, my aunt was staying with us at the house and
my uncle had taken my mom to the hospital. My father had a brain tumor
and had been hospitalized for a couple of months . He was thirty-four and
my mom was two or three years younger. I looked out the bedroom win-
dow and saw my uncle basically carrying my mom into the house. She was
devastated, but she came in and talked to us . In a way, his death made us

224

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David Campbell 225

all a little stronger, and it made us very aware of money. We never wanted
for anything, but we never had a lot. Everybody pitched in at the house-
cooked and did dishes and the laundry. I cooked more than my brothers
did because I enjoyed it, and Mom relied on me to do that.
In high school I weighed 285 pounds, so I wasn't involved in sports at
all. I was too big to play anything other than football, and I was really too
fat to play that. I was class officer, Future Farmers of America president,
band president, on the student council. My brother was an officer in FFA,
and I was expected to follow in his footsteps, as he was expected to follow
in my father's and uncle's footsteps. A lot of things were expected of us in
a fairly small community, and in a family where everyone was always in-
volved in the community and the church.
I need to write a letter to my FFA advisor to tell him how much he
helped me. I hated him but loved him because he pushed me to do so many
things that I never would have done otherwise. He pushed me into pub-
lic speaking, pushed me to run for office, to be on all kinds of judging
teams and apply for all kinds of awards and scholarships. I never wanted
any credit for anything. He pushed me to run for state FFA treasurer, which
I was and enjoyed very much. I loved traveling all over the state, speaking
at banquets and presentations.
Mter my first year in college, I went on a diet and lost one hundred
pounds. I started feeling better about myself, and started running and
swimming a lot. At the gym one night, a man approached me. It was very
exciting, because I realized there were other people who had the same feel-
ings I did. I enjoyed what we did and I wanted to do it again, but I was
very embarrassed and felt cheap. I would flirt with men at the bars here
in Columbus, wanting to have sex but afraid to go home with them.
I had just graduated from college when I met Cal at a bar and we started
seeing each other. He went with me to the farm a lot; he enjoyed garden-
ing too, and Mom would always set an extra place for him at Sunday lunch.
She assumed he was just a friend from school. Cal and I were together for
three years. Not too long after that I met Michael, and we had a relation-
ship for seven years.
When Michael and I broke up I moved home for about a week till I
could find an apartment. Mom found a card I had saved that was signed,
"Love, Michael." She showed me the card and said, "What does this
mean?" I told her she didn't want to know, and she said she did, so I told
her he was my boyfriend. She said, "You were right. I didn't want to know."
But she wanted to talk about it, and she wanted me to see a psychologist.
I said, "Fine, I'll see a psychologist, but I think you need to go with me,
because I don't think there's anything wrong with the way I'm feeling."

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226 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

The psychologist told my mother, "If David doesn't want to change, there's
nothing I can do to change him, and there's nothing you can do to change
him. You'll have to accept that." And he said, "1 think I'm finished see-
ing David, Mrs. Campbell. You can come back as many times as you feel
necessary."
The whole family always gets together for Sunday lunch at my mother's.
By now they all know I'm gay, but I don't flaunt it and we don't talk about
it. IfI bring a guest to lunch on Sunday, they don't say anything about it .
I don't think it's that big of a deal to them. We're all very accepting of
each other, to a large extent . My mother doesn't approve of my being gay,
but she says she wants me to live my own life and be happy. She has asked
me periodically if I 'd consider dating women, and I say, "No, I don't want
to, and I don't ever care to ." I say it kind of snippy, not to be disrespect-
ful but only because I've said it so many times.

Everybody in my family is pretty much goody-two-shoes. I've always

wanted to be accepted and liked by everyone, so I've always been kind of
a middle -of-the-road person. In growing up, I was always just agreeing
with people and doing what they told me. I would never say anything real
controversial, because I didn't want to be an extremist, I didn't want to
alienate anyone. I didn't like confrontations, and I never was in a fight.
When I've been in arguments with somebody I've been living with, I've
always ended up crying.
Keeping a clean public image is important to me. I try to be just a per-
son, rather than an openly, politically gay person. I think I'm a lot more
responsible than a lot of gay men. I'm not somebody who goes flitting in
public, advertising the fact that I'm gay. I don't think of myself as a barfly
or a very effeminate faggot who walks down the street. I don't think I'm
a butch person either. I just think of myself as a person. I don't wake up
every morning thinking I'm gay, I don't read gay publications, I don't
surround myselfwith gay things, but I'm comfortable with being gay. For
the most part, I just live my life day-to -day, and the gay part never enters
into it.
Here in Columbus, I don't worry about telling people that I'm gay,
but back home it's an issue. I go home a lot, but I avoid going into town
so I don't run into somebody at the grocery store and have them ask, "Are
you married! How many kids do you have!"-all those kinds of questions
that people you grew up with tend to ask you. But that hasn't kept me
from going to high school class reunions, which I've enjoyed very much .
The first time I went was my tenth year. I really wanted to go because I
was one hundred pounds lighter than I was in high school and I felt good

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David Campbell 227

about myself. No one knew me when I walked in, and I just talked to the
people I wanted to talk to.
When I went away to college, I came home on weekends and during
the summer. I still have a huge garden out at the farm every year. I go out
there at least three or four times a week in the summer. Once I was off the
farm I didn't think I'd ever want to go back, but now I would love to live
out in the country again. I've always enjoyed having animals, and I like
being away from a lot of other people. As soon as I get this house finished
and sell it, I'm going to build out there. I'd like to have animals and a
huge garden, raise all my own food, build a fifteen-foot wall around the
entire thing, and let no one else in, ever, unless I invite them in-and that
would be very infrequently. I'm serious about this-my self-sufficient lit-
tle commune.
I don't want to be by myselfforever, but I don't want somebody around
just to have somebody around. I want companionship and a feeling oflove.
Sex would be fine, too, but that's not a big concern. My life doesn't re-
volve around sex like I think a lot of people's lives do, straight and gay. I
would love to find somebody who has the same interests I have. I can go
out and work in the garden from sun-up till sundown, never see anybody,
never eat, and just be so happy. I lose all track of time, and I get mad be-
cause it gets dark and I can't keep working. It would be great to work in
the garden with somebody else right beside me who felt the same way. But
I don't think that will ever happen, as strange as I am .

Copyrighted Material
 Jahred Boyd

Born in 1959, Jahredgrew up on a mixed livestock andgrain farm in north-

western Minnesota. He lives on a small hobby farm near Webster, Minnesota.
His partner afnearly ten years, Terry Bloch, died in 1992. In this briefnar-
rative, Jahred describes what it means to him to be gay and rural.

I'VE LIVED IN the Twin Cities, and I think so many gay men's lives
there are so superficial. They are so concerned about things that don't re-
ally matter, like where they live and what they wear. I'm real content with
where I live, and if! have a clean tee-shirt and jeans on, I'm fine-I don't
feel awkward at all, no matter where I go . I guess I'm more down to
earth, very common, and when I go to parties where it's all urban people
I feel like I'm the country boy. Once I went to visit my friend Alan in San
Francisco. He had invited people over, and then we were all going to go
out to eat together. Alan was a little uncomfortable introducing me be-
cause 1'm midwestern, from Minneapolis, just like Mary Tyler Moore; we
don't know anything! When all these hardcore city people started talking
about where we were going to eat, they asked me if! liked sushi. I said I'd
never had it. You've never had sushi? It was as if! 'd said I had grown up in
Antarctica. It didn't bother me at all, but Alan was uncomfortable, like
they were thinking I was just a hick. So I asked if any ofthem had ever had
lutefisk, and not one of them had even heard of it .1
I decided as a kid that I was going to live on a farm when I grew up. I
hated the mechanical stuffwith a passion-vehicles, tractors, machinery-
but I enjoyed taking care of the animals. I did all the livestock chores, and
if an animal was sick, I gave the shots. With the heifers, ewes, and sows, I
was good at delivering the young ones. When I was three or four years old
I would deliver lambs by myself, and when the ewe would knock me down
I'd get right back up to take care of the lambs and get them to suck. Ifa
sow had pigs outside in the winter, we'd bring them into the house. Mom
says that when she'd get up in the night, I'd be up taking care of them.
It takes a special kind of gay person to grow up in a rural area and want
to stay there, and I'm more that kind of person than my partner Terry is.
He could be a city person very easily. Terry needs to have people around

228

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Jahred Boyd 229

"I decided as a kid that I was going to live on a farm when I grew up." Jahred
Boyd takes a walk with the pups in the spring of 1994. Courtesy ofJahred
Boyd.

a lot more than I do, like most of my friends and acquaintances who live
in the Cities. I enjoy having company, but I also enjoy being by myself. A
lot of the people who stay in rural areas are like that, and it's real hard for
gay people who grew up on the farm and want to live on the farm to find
someone who also wants that. My friend John says that when he goes out
with someone and brings them out to his farm, he can tell by how they
act the minute they get out of the pickup if it's going to work or not. Most
gay people from the city think living in the country is isolating, and they
just can't handle it. It is a simpler life on the farm, but whether you're on
the farm or in the city you have to come to terms with the fact that you've
really only got yourselfin life, and if you don't make yourself happy some-
one else isn't going to make you happy. Too many people clutch onto some-
one else, looking for security and acceptance.

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230 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

I think I would have been a real good farmer because I really enjoy just
going out and doing the chores. I thought about going into dairy farm-
ing when I bought this place. I could buy my hay and feed and just take
care of the animals. What a good life that would have been. To me, farm-
ing is real relaxing and doesn't even seem like work. But I'm kind of a
workaholic, and I think that comes from growing up on a farm . It's hard
for Terry to get me to go anywhere on a vacation because I just don't trust
other people with the animals. They're my responsibility, and if something
happens I feel guilty. No one but Terry would put up with that. Someday
I'd like to have a farm or ranch for young gay runaways and gay~ whose
parents have kicked them out, an oasis where they can get away and not
worry about straight people or being closeted. They could stay here and
Terry and I could be surrogate parents until they're able to get on their
own feet. They need positive role models, and they need to see that rela-
tionships can last.

NOTE

1. A staple of Scandinavian cuisine, lute fisk is dried cod which is tenderized by

soaking in lye, and then rinsed before cooking.

Copyrighted Material
 Steve Gay

Born in 1959) the ninth often children) Steve grew up on a dairy farm near
Waterloo) in Dodge County) southeastern Wisconsin. He lives and farms up
the road from his parents) place with his lover, Jim Lawver. Steve and Jim)s
life as a farm couple is the focus of this brief narrative.

MY MOM AND dad are from the old German straight-and-narrow school
of thought. I haven't had much ofa relationship with them since myold-
est sister took it upon herself to tell them I'm gay. I talk to them, but I
don't get invited to holidays or anything with the family because they
don't want Jim there. I let it be known that if Jim was not welcome to
come along with me, I preferred not to come at all. Jim has pretty much
come out to everyone in his family, and I've been included in everyone
of their holidays since we've been together. His whole family comes to our
place for Easter every year, and last year they were here for Christmas too.
Jim and I have been together for eight and a half years. We were in-
troduced by a mutual friend at Rod's, a gay bar in Madison. We were prob-
ably in lust when I asked him to move in with me after a couple of months.
It wasn't until about a year later that we really started to get to know each
other, so we've had a lot of rocky roads. I think the way my family reacted
probably made us stay together more than anything. Mter my father found
out about Jim and me, he said, "How long do you think this is going to
last anyway? You know, gay relationships don't last very long."
At one time, Jim and I were the gossip of Waterloo. "There's two gay
men living outside of town." In a small town it spreads like wildfire. Being
as open as I am, it doesn't bother me that everybody knows and thinks it's
their business. In a small town that's what you've got to put up with. Maybe
a year ago, there was some gossip going around that Jim had AIDS . How
that got started is beyond me, but I guess everybody's got to be talking
about something. I think they're done talking about us now. Hell, there
are lots of gay people living in Waterloo that they don't even know about.
Jim and I used to go to a pub near town-kind of a rough and tough
bar that gets a lot of farmers and roughnecks. I think most of them knew
we were gay. A couple times when we've been there and heard things said
about us, I've looked right back at them . There's one idiot who was a year

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232 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

"1 always had a thing for stuffed animals." Steve Gay, age five , with his growing collection.
Courtesy of Steve Gay.

behind me in high school who was really drunk one night, and he was say-
ing things like, "Hey, Gay, why don't you come over here and suck my
cock?" When I looked right at him, he looked the other way. I thought,
you're just a drunken asshole-but I couldn't believe that the other peo-
ple there who knew me didn't tell him to shut his mouth. A couple of
them were fairly friendly with Jim and me, but they just sat there and let
him say what he wanted to .

I've always wanted to farm, but not driving tractors or milking cows. I en-
joyed working with livestock, and I really liked hogs. When I graduated
from college in 1981, I came back home to the farm because my dad had
a good opportunity for me to get started. For me, hogs are a pleasure to
work with, at least for another fifteen or twenty years. Jim works for me
and has to take orders from me when we're working outside. We're to-
gether twenty-four hours a day, which is very stressful at times. Sometimes
we want to wring each other's necks, but it's nice, too, because we're on

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Steve Gay 233

the same schedule so when we have time off we can go and do things to-
gether.
It seems like a lot of our gay friends put Jim and me up on a pedestal.
They think so much of us and of the fact that we're on the farm and that
we've been in this relationship for so many years. We don't feel like we're
anything special, because we know everything we've had to go through
to get here. Through a lot of hard work and dedication, this is what we
have. Fifteen, twenty years ago, I would never have imagined that I would
be as happy with my life as I am now, and that I could be the way I am.
We can be something society says we can't; we can act like we're married
and have a total life together. When a farm feed company holds a meet-
ing, the invitation is usually addressed to the producer and his wife. Most
of the time, my invitation is addressed to Steve Gay and Jim. They prob-
ably have an awareness that we're gay, but it's never talked about and I
never make a big deal out of it. I just kind oflet things go as they go, and
people can think what they want. As open as we are about it, I don't know
how many people really know.
Our gay friends think it's just wild that we're pig farmers. There are
probably more gay farmers than we realize, but most of them aren't open
about it like I am. I guess it's just the strong-willed part of me that some
people have and some don't. You've got to say, hey, my life is going to be
what I want, it's going to make me happy. If other people don't want to
contribute to that, well, then they won't. If they can't handle it, that's too
bad. It takes a lot of will and self-determination to go against your family
and friends-to make people see you differently than they used to . It takes
some gay people a long time to build up to that. They have to feel so much
torment and depression to make them finally do it. And some people just
can't do it . Instead they'll torment themselves for the rest of their lives,
for the sake of all those other people.

Copyrighted Material
 Rick Noss

Rick was born in 1960 and grew up with two younger brothers in north-
central Iowa, near Sheffield, in Cerro Gordo County. The farm was about
450 acres when Rick was born, and itgrew to about 800 acres. It was mainly
a grain farm-corn, soybeans, and oats-and a hog operation. Rick lives in
Omaha, Nebraska, where he works for a bank.

EVENTUALLY, I would like to live on about five acres outside of town, so

I could have a couple of large dogs and maybe even a few farm animals.
Farming doesn't interest me, but life on a farm does. I like the openness
and solitude, but I would have to be in driving distance of an active gay
lifestyle.
I wouldn't give up growing up on a farm for anything. Farmers are
there to create. Their whole life is built on growing and maturing and
harvesting. I value life a lot, and there are a lot of people who don't.
Another thing is pride . Driving through farming neighborhoods, you can
tell who takes pride in their farms and who doesn't. It doesn't take much
to let the buildings get run down, or for weeds to grow up around the
buildings, or for corn to grow up in the beans . My dad built his farm up
on his own to where it is today, and his fields were always clean. Every
summer, as a family, we walked all our beans and pulled out all the weeds
and volunteer corn. I would feel not only that I was letting myself down,
but my parents as well, ifI did a bad job at my work or whatever I did. I'm
closer to my dad now than I've ever been, and I've never admired a per-
son more for the work they've done . A farmer has to do everything-be
a veterinarian, a businessman, a laborer, a bookkeeper. Dad never went to
college, just graduated from high school and started out on his own.
We raised about a thousand hogs a year, but Dad never really pushed
us to become involved in the day-to-day farming operations . We'd help
with special projects, like vaccinating pigs or sorting pigs to take them to
market. If Dad asked us to do something, we'd do it, but he was very much
of a perfectionist and preferred to do things on his own. I always felt kind
of out of place, like I could never live up to the expectations he would set
for me. But with each kid, Dad mellowed out a little bit, so each one down

234

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Rick Noss 235

the road got a little more involved. When he was younger he could han-
dle it all himself, but as the farm grew and he needed more help he would
take more time to explain things clearly and show how it needed to be
done.
I liked working with the livestock, especially my own projects. My
brothers and I would raise our own calves or pigs, and I would get into
awful arguments with my dad over how he treated the pigs. Once one pig
bites another pig's tail and gets the taste of blood, it will eat and eat until
it kills the pig, or chews the tails off all of them . It can get to be an epi-
demic. Dad would just take a metal bar and knock the pig's teeth out so
it couldn't do that anymore . I would scream at him . I thought that was
the most cruel and awful thing . That was probably the one time I felt like
he thought I was a wuss.
I'm not a mechanical person, and I found the fieldwork really monot-
onous-going up and down the rows and never seeming to get to the end
of it. When I was cultivating I would get caught up in my own thoughts,
start to daydream, and wipe out rows of corn . We had an old Allis Chalmers
tractor that I hadn't driven all that often . When I was ten or eleven, I was
taking a load of bales over to my grandparents' place, and I forgot I had
to hit the clutch before the brake . I was pounding on the brake but the
tractor wasn't stopping, and I ran the tractor into a telephone pole . Dad
yelled at me, and I thought, oh my god, I've failed! He always gave me
the opportunity, but I never wanted to go out and do anything after that.
I never felt like he put me down, but I was always kind of in awe of what
he did, and I put a lot of pressure on myself.
Mom was a lot more jovial and outgoing than Dad, more the friend in
the family. She was the one who really got us interested in sports. Her whole
family was very athletic; two of my uncles played minor league professional
baseball. When Dad was out working on the farm, Mom would be hitting
us fly balls in the yard. Growing up in a small town, we had the oppor-
tunity to participate in about anything we wanted to. In high school, I
was in baseball, basketball, track, speech, band, choir, Future Farmers of
America . I had the most success early on in speech. I got the top ratings
in original oratory.
In FFA my freshman year, one of the competitions was to memorize
the FFA creed and present it. I didn't want to do it, but they talked me
into it because I was in speech. By the day I was to go to the contest, I had
managed to memorize it, but that was about it . I didn't know where I
wanted to put the most emphasis, where to pause . With my other speech
work I would rehearse and nit-pick and edit. I knew I wouldn't do the
best job I could, so I didn't want to do it. I told my mom to call my FFA

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236 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

coach and tell him I was not going. She said, "If you want to do that to
your teacher and your team, then you have to do it." I called and used the
"I'm sick" excuse, and I was embarrassed for a week or two. l
By the beginning of my junior year in high school, I was six feet tall
and my success in athletics kind of took off. In basketball, I was the cap-
tain of our team my senior year. In track, I always ran the mile and had
just mediocre times, but in my senior year I developed some speed. I ran
hurdles and tied for the best time in the state in our class. When we had
districts at our school, I thought I was a shoo-in to make it to state, but I
hit the last hurdle and fell. I was devastated, but my track coach picked me
up, put his arm around me, and said, "You're still one of the best hurdlers
we've had. Now I need you to run in a relay for us." I thought, god, give
me a break, I'm grieving here! But I ran that relay and we placed in it.

Sheffield and Rockwell were archrivals in everything. Sheffield didn't have

a Catholic church, so I would go to catechism classes in Rockwell on Wed-
nesday nights with my friends from Sheffield. By sixth grade, all my friends
were dropping out, so I was the only Sheffield kid there, with fourteen or
fifteen Rockwell kids. I was starting to get picked on. Whenever we had
to memorize a prayer, the Rockwell kids would never have it memorized.
I would, but I would tell the teacher I didn't, and when I would read out
loud I would pretend like I didn't know a word, just so I wouldn't stick
out and give them anything else to pick on me about. It got pretty bad
for a while; I was so uptight, I was checked for stomach ulcers. One time,
on the way to catechism class, I jumped out of the car when we stopped
at a stop sign, and was going to walk the eight miles back home. Finally,
during the class, I raised my hand and asked the instructor if I could go
to the restroom. I left the church building, went to the local grain eleva-
tor, and called my grandpa to come get me. He took me home and I never
went back.
My mom was raised Methodist, but Dad wanted his kids to be Catholic.
He and I are both very stubborn, and we would butt heads on a lot of is-
sues. My last year in high school, we were having one of our go-rounds. I
had decided I was not going to go to the Catholic church and Dad said I
was. One thing led to another, and I decided to leave home for a while,
so I stayed with a friend in town for a few days. Dad and I finally reached
a compromise where I would go to the Catholic church two times a month
and to the church of my choice two times a month. If it was a five-Sun-
day month, I'd go to the Catholic church the fifth one.
I checked out quite a few churches that I could get to-Baptist,
Lutheran, Methodist. I'm glad Dad and Mom gave me the opportunity

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Rick Noss 237

to explore those other churches, because if they hadn't I might have just
chucked the Catholic church altogether. As time went on, I realized that
even though I had some fundamental differences with the Catholic church,
my major beliefs were still more Catholic. I haven't gone to services in
quite a while, but I still consider myself a religious person. I still say prayers
before I go to bed at night. I'm not sure I would classify myself as a strong
believer in organized religion, but my belief is there, as far as a supreme
being or whatever.

In Cub Scouts, all the other guys would be drooling and slobbering over
the girls in Playboy and Penthouse, but it wasn't really doing the job for me.
But it really turned me on when they'd have pictures of a man and woman
having sex. I always thought it was just the act of sex, but now I think it
was because there was a man in the picture . On one Webelos expedition
we were playing "Truth or Dare," and one guy pulled down his pants and
said, "Truth or dare." I said, "Dare," and he said, "Lick my penis." I said
I wasn't going to do it, and they said I had to. They forced my head down,
but they didn't make me do it. I remember thinking that night that I
should've tried it. In fifth or sixth grade, I'd have friends stay overnight
and we would sometimes wrestle around and touch each other, but we
never really experimented with each other. When I was a freshman, I was
in the same locker room as some of the seniors, and I was intrigued by the
guys who had hairy chests, or more hair anywhere on their bodies.
I always had a date for the prom and things like that, and I enjoyed
holding hands and kissing with a girl, but I never tried anything farther
than that. I was very naive, as far as sex, and I sensed a differentness in my-
self. I masturbated a lot-often with Penthouse magazine, reading "The
Forum"-and I would think about some of the guys in the locker room.
I knew my friends masturbated, but I didn't know if they were thinking
the same thoughts. It bothered me, feeling like I was different but not re-
ally knowing how or why.
I didn't date much in college. I felt that I was really ugly, and that no
one would want to date me. In the dorm room next to me were two very
attractive guys, John and Andy, who were supposedly gay. I knew the words,
like gay and faggot, and I knew they liked other guys, but I didn't really
grasp what that was about. They had a friend who was also supposedly gay
but who was not attractive to me. I had a party in my room and they were
all invited. I got really drunk, and this other guy supposedly took care of me
and put me to bed. I took a lot of razzing from everyone about that . Later
on, he and I had a drink together, and I'm sure he was hitting on me. It ex-
cited me but at the same time it repulsed me. I never spoke to him again.

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Mter college, I started teaching school and lived with two other sin-
gle male teachers. I saw the movie, Making Love, advertised and wanted
to see it so bad, but I did not want them to know. 2 We only had one televi-
sion, so I watched it at 3:30 in the morning. I was in the living room with
the lights turned off, really quiet, leaned over, listening to the TV I just
sobbed at the end of it . That was my first inkling why I was different. Mter
that I knew I was attracted to men, but I didn't know I could really do
anything about it. Where would I 100k1 I didn't know there were gay bars
and gay athletics. And I'd never had sex with a woman, so I certainly wasn't
going to try to have sex with a man. I just thought I hadn't found the
right woman yet. But I would often think back to John and Andy and that
other guy in college, and wish I had pursued something further, or at least
found out what that gay thing was about.
My third year of teaching, I was the head volleyball coach and Dee was
my assistant. We were going to a party one night, and she asked if! wanted
to go dancing. I said I did, and she said, "I want you to know that where
we're going to dance is kind of different ." We went to The Max, in down-
town Omaha, and I was just in awe. There were probably eight hundred
people in there, men dancing with men, women with women, and women
with men. Mter that, Dee and I would get home from volleyball trips at
midnight, drive to Omaha to dance for an hour, go to breakfast with all
our new "gay friends," and get home at 4 A .M. to be ready to teach at 7:30.
We were running ourselves into the ground.
At The Max, the brother of one of my students asked me to dance. I
said no. I found out later that another guy asked him if I was gay, and he
said, "Well, I'm pretty sure he will be, but I don't know ifhe is now." The
guy gave him his number to give to me, but I said I didn't want it. A cou-
ple of days later, I called him up and said, "I'm not going to take his num-
ber, but you can give him mine." We wound up going out for dinner. I
took Dee with me, and he took his friend Andrea. I felt pretty comfort-
able with that, so then he and I went out on a date, and things just went
from there. Suddenly, at twenty-five, I knew why I had felt different for
the past ten or twelve years. I often wonder how much longer it would
have taken if Dee had not asked me to go dancing at The Max.

I wish I had come out when I was younger. I have no doubt that if I had
grown up in a city I would have come out in high school. It would have
been tough for me to come out in my small-town high school because you
can't hide anything. If there had been another gay person I was having a
relationship with or just fooling around with, someone would have talked,
and if it gets to one person in a class of thirty-two, it gets to everyone. I

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Rick Noss 239

In contrast to Christmas 1990, when his parents traveled to Omaha to meet

his boyfriend, Christmas 1965 brought Ricky Noss a fancy Western gun-
fighter's outfit . Courtesy of Rick Noss.

knew practically everyone, my dad was president of the school board, my

mom was involved in several organizations, and my parents were in three
bowling groups, two card clubs, and booster club .
I've told my parents I was probably always gay, but I had no exposure
to gay influences growing up in a conservative German Catholic farm fam-
ily. There weren't even stereotypical gay people on TV that I can remem-
ber. It kind of surprises me that I didn't take advantage of the opportuni-
ties that were presented to me when I got to college. I guess I just held
back because I wasn't sure what to expect, or what I wanted, or even what
it was. It took me till I was twenty-five and it was right in front of me,
where I just had to reach out and say, "Here I am-take me." I was read-
ily accepted into the gay community here in Omaha.
When I came out, I decided I couldn't be gay and be a teacher. I was
a very hands-on teacher and it made me very effective; kids wanted to per-

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240 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

form well for me because I was their friend . I hugged my kids, I had slum-
ber parties at my house for kids to come over, watch a sporting event on
TV, order pizza, play cards. Ifword had gotten out that I was gay, no par-
ent would have allowed their junior high boy to come over to 'my house.
They would have thought there were ulterior motives. So I quit teaching.
I am extremely happy the way I am now, but if! had a choice I don't
think I would choose to be gay. I've worked hard at becoming a good gay
person. When I came out, I went through a period of putting my party-
ing and social life ahead of my work life. I was just basically being a tramp-
going to the bar every night, sleeping over at someone's house, and drag-
ging my butt into work every morning. I was in a state of euphoria, and
I wanted to experience it all. Thank god I'm through that! Maybe it's a
stage that most every gay person goes through, or maybe it's just me, be-
cause I came out so late, but I wish I would have had those opportunities
when I was in high school. I think it would have made it easier later on.
I've become what I think is a responsible gay person, and I like that.
I'm a productive person; I've got a good career, insurance, and a savings
plan for the future. I've got a great core group of friends-the friends I
met the first few months I was out-but I've never had a real long rela-
tionship. I dated one guy for nine months, one guy for about two years.
The person I'm with now, it's only been about four months, but I would
really like to see it develop. If I had been heterosexual, I think I would
have been at this point seven years ago. Being gay has kind of set me back,
as far as my personal goals. But now that I'm here, I enjoy it and I'm ac-
tually kind of proud of it. I've come through. And now that I've gotten
my own life in order, I can go beyond that and do things for other gay
people, like volunteer work and political work.
In 1990, I was Mr. Gay Nebraska, and I started getting a little polit-
ically active, going to some fundraisers . But I still wasn't comfortable
enough to say, "Hi, I'm Rick Noss, Mr. Gay Nebraska. What are you going
to do on issues related to hate crimes?" I thought I could do it, but when
I got into it I couldn't. We had a few really good role models for that in
Omaha, but they're getting older now, and they're burnt out. We need
people my age and younger to pick that up, and so far no one has stepped
forward, so I want to try to do that. This weekend I'm volunteering my
time at the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and I've got my application in to do
public speaking for Nebraska AIDS Project. I would love to do that.
I'm only out to my mom, my dad, and one of my brothers. When my
youngest brother came to visit me one weekend we went to a bar in Coun-
cil Bluffs that's straight except from one to two in the morning, when it
becomes gay. I introduced him to a bunch of my friends at the bar and

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Rick Noss 241

asked him how he liked them. He said he didn't think they liked him be-
cause they weren't.talking to him. I said they liked him, they just didn't
know what they could say around him because they knew he didn't know
I was gay. He said he knew that's what it was, and we just laughed and
talked. I don't think I could have that kind of conversation with my mid -
dle brother, but I'm sure he's figured it out .
I'm sure my other relatives have figured it out too, but if they want to
know, they can ask me . If they do, I'll say "Yes, I am," and then we can
go from there . But it's not something I'll just come out and say if they
don't have the nerve to ask. Everyone knows at my job at the bank, and
I've had no problems. My friends at work and the people I know who are
straight ask me how my boyfriend is, and when he went into the hospital
the bank gave me time off. I think I'm doing a lot of good in that respect,
promoting gay awareness, and if I can do that with my friends, maybe
they'll tell their friends. That's what we need now.
When I came out, I thought there was no way I could ever tell my par-
ents. I thought they would disown me, especially my father. They came to
visit me one Labor Day weekend, and I was planning to go to gay bowling.
When I said they couldn't go along, they were just crushed. I said, "I'm not
very good, and you know how I hate it when people watch me do some-
thing that I'm not very good at. You go shopping and I'll meet you later."
But I had made the mistake of telling them where the bowling alley was,
and at the end of the third game they came in. I said, "Oh my god! My par-
ents are here," and it spread down twenty-four alleys. There's nothing more
hilarious than watching a hundred gay guys try to act straight. They tried
their darnedest for me, and my parents didn't say a word about it .
Dad and Mom were taking off the next morning, so I wrote them a
note . It was a chicken way out, but I did it . I told them to read it on their
way home, and that I was going to be gone all day. They said they started
to cry when they read it. The first thing they thought of was AIDS. The
second thing was that they would never have any grandchildren . They
wanted to come back and talk to me, but they knew I wasn't going to be
home, so they left a message on my machine . My dad called me at 6 :30
the next morning to make sure he caught me, to tell me he loved me and
he didn't care. He called me and wrote me every day for a week, and my
mom called every day. There were great periods of adjustment-maybe
more for them than for me. First of all, they said they just didn't want me
to bring my boyfriend home. Two years ago, they came down to Omaha
to meet my boyfriend for Christmas. I guess that's what family means to
me-you overcome what you might not agree with or understand, but
they're still your family. I can't describe how much they mean to me be-

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242 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

cause of that. I've always had a sense of belonging. I've always known, no
matter how bad things are, I've got a home.

NOTES

1. The FFA creed that Rick memorized was written by one E. M. Tiffany and
adopted at the third national convention of the FFA. It is a gem of inspirational
oratory from the early decades of this century :
I believe in the future of farming, with a faith born not of words but
of deeds-achievements won by the present and past generations of agri-
culturists; in the promise of better days through better ways, even as the
better things we now enjoy have come to us from the struggles of former
years.
I believe that to live and work on a good farm , or to be engaged in
other agricultural pursuit , is pleasant as well as challenging; for I know
the joys and discomforts of agricultural life and hold an inborn fondness
for those associations which, even in hours of discouragement, I cannot
deny.
I believe in leadership from ourselves and respect from others. I
believe in my own ability to work efficiently and think clearly, with such
knowledge and skill as I can secure, and in the ability of progressive agri-
culturists to serve our own and the public interest in producing and mar-
keting the product of our toil.
I believe in less dependence on begging and more power in bargain-
ing; in the life abundant and enough honest wealth to make it so-for
others as well as myself; in less need for charity and more of it when
needed; in being happy myself and playing square with those whose hap-
piness depends on me.
I believe that rural America can and will hold true to the best tradi-
tions of our national life and that I can exert an influence in my home
and community which will stand solid for my part in that inspiring task.
2. Making Love ( 1982) was a widely advertised movie in which a man reveals
to his wife that he is gay.

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 Richard Hopkins

Richard was born in 1961 and grew up with three older brothers on the fam-
ily farm in central Indiana. It was primarily agrain farm, about 450 acres,
but they also raised horses and other animals-cattle, sheep, and chickens. Rich-
ard left the farm when he got married in 1979. He lives in Indianapolis with
his best friend, Keith, and continues to parent his two children.

I GREW UP in a big, old, two-story farmhouse . Having the finest house

on the road was not important to Mom and Dad. What was important was
that you worked hard and everybody was taken care of and you ate and
did what you wanted to do. Growing up that way made me realize how
hard it is to get things and to maintain what you want. Nothing was given,
everything was earned. We were very structured in the work we had to do.
You may have done a lot of bitching about it at the time, but at least at the
end ofthe day you felt good because you'd done it. Baling hay, you're sweat-
ing your balls off in the hayloft, one-hundred-plus degrees and chaff all
over you. But when you're done, you go in and take that shower. There
ain't nothing feels better than a shower at that point. And then you get
something to eat and you relax and you know you worked-you can feel
that you worked .
After I got married, I was going to college and working part-time and
then going to the farm and working. I knew I didn't want to farm, but it
wasn't the chore it was when I was growing up. I could see some value in
it. I never got around to completing my college education, but I'm a suc-
cessful businessman today. I do okay. Farming taught me how to work, to
get by, to take care of myself. There's no question I know how to bust my
ass if! need to. And it taught me to be responsible. When you say you' re
going to do something, you do it . It's not just lip service . And it has re-
ally made me appreciate the finer things in life . This is a wonderful house,
and Keith and I have nice things, and they mean more to us because we
worked hard for them. A lot of people think things are owed to them.
Nothing's owed to you.
In high school, all my friends were driving Camaros and Monte Car-
los, and I was driving a fricking baby blue '62 Ford Falcon, little junk car.
It was about to drive me nuts. "Why can't they buy me a car? Everybody

243

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244 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

else is getting a car. It's so unfair!" I hated my parents at times, going

through it. I never felt like I had any money. It took me until I had a fam-
ily of my own and was trying to earn a living to realize-how the hell did
they do it? Four kids and a farm that was relatively small-I know they
didn't have any money. How they were able to do that, and do it well, re-
ally amazes me.

My oldest brother didn't like to do the tractor work, but he was really into
the horses and tending the barns. My next-to-the-oldest brother, Ray, and
I did the fieldwork . He was my favorite brother. I started riding tractor-
plowing and disking and cultivating-when I was in the third grade. No-
body thought I could do it, but it was just something I wanted to do;
you're always trying to make your dad proud of you . I enjoyed it at first,
but it didn't take long for the fun to wear off and for me to think, "Gee,
this is a bitch, doing this all day long." During planting season, I was rid-
ing the tractor in the fields, weather permitting, from 7:00 in the morn-
ing until 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 at night .
My dad always did the planting because he didn't think we could drive
straight enough. He was a very difficult man, a hard man to please, but I
was always trying to make him proud of me. When you're fourth in line,
it sometimes doesn't seem like you're getting a lot of attention. I guess
that's why I wanted to start farming as early as I did-to gain some at-
tention . Dad showed no emotion except for when he was mad, and when
he'd get mad he'd take his farm hat off and hit you with it . He'd never put
a hand to you, but he had a temper. One time I saw him lose it and break
a scoop shovel over a horse's head. We worked together all day long dur-
ing planting season, and you always kind of hated to tell him if you broke
something. Ray could do everything and just whiz right through it, but
I had an innate ability to find every rock in a field and break a plow point
or a disk blade or something.
Ray was quiet, cool, a good guy, and I always wanted to be like him,
but he always wanted to be somewhere else. You could just tell farming
was not what he wanted to do, and as soon as he was graduated he was
married and gone. All my brothers, the minute they reached eighteen, they
were gone. That kind of left the farming to me, because the brother be-
tween Ray and me would never drive a tractor, period. He had a fear of it
or something, and Dad and Mom never made him do it. I resented the
hell out of that, but it was my fault-I said I wanted to do it. But dang!
Day in, day out, dealing with the breakdowns and this, that, and the other
thing.
When we weren't in the fields, the horses kind of took up the rest of

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Richard Hopkins 245

the time . We stood three or four stallions at stud service, so we had breed-
ing mares coming in all the time, and we trained and boarded horses. I
was big into horses, and I was good. I showed pintos and paints for na-
tional points, and I marvel at how my parents had the money for me to do
that, because horses are an expensive hobby. You can make money show-
ing, but not if you're a kid. I was out there for the fun of it, getting the
points. Mom and Dad hired a trainer for me and he hauled me around to
horse shows almost every weekend from April until Labor Day. We'd go
to shows all over-Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio. We'd
leave on Friday night and get back Sunday night. It was a lot oHun.
He was a real cowboy type, just a real good guy, and I was really tight
with him-that first love type of thing. I was fourteen, fifteen, and he was
nine years older. We engaged in quite a bit of sexual activity through two
summers. We'd do the full gamut, but there wasn't the mature lovemak-
ing that goes on when you get older-the kissing and the whole range of
passion. It was more the act. I never had anal intercourse with him, but
he did it to me. When I got my own driver's license, Mom and Dad dis-
missed him, but I don't think they ever had a clue I was doing anything
like that. The whole time, I had my girlfriends and was doing everything
to keep Mom and Dad happy.
There was always work to do, so we never took vacations, but we got
to do all the activities we wanted to do in school. My oldest brother was
very musical and he loved the horses. Ray was very athletic, a great bas-
ketball player and cross-country runner. He was kind of a wild one, really
good at partying. My brother who's just older than I was a great football
player, and any free time he had YOll could find him in town playing pool.
Basketball was my thing-I played all the way through school-and I
loved music and was fairly good at the saxophone . In the seventh grade I
got moved up into the high school jazz band because they needed a sax-
ophone player. That put me in with an older group and they all liked me,
so I was getting asked to do things with them. That's when a lot of decep-
tion crept in . I lied to my mom a lot to get to do all kinds of things I knew
they wouldn't let me do. I wanted to go to a REO Speedwagon concert
in Terre Haute when I was a seventh grader, and I knew they wouldn't let
me go. So I concocted a really elaborate school trip, and she bought it and
I went . I started drinking beer here and there . "No, I haven't been
drinking." Driving tractor all day, I started smoking, and I'd lie about
that, too.
Some friends had given me tickets to a Doobie Brothers concert on
the night of my graduation day. After the graduation there was a recep-
tion at the farm, and all of Mom and Dad's friends were there, but who

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the heck cared? So about an hour and a half after that started, I said I had
to take a buddy back to his house, and I never came back. I went to the
concert, and then I had to explain that one . Mom and I were close, but I
caused her quite a few problems from time to time .
Mom and Dad really tried to instill responsibility and religion. My dad
smoked, but I never saw him touch alcohol-never in the house. Mother
never smoked, no alcohol. We had a solid church upbringing, and Mom
was the real drive behind church. She taught Sunday school, she taught
vacation Bible school, she did the youth group. I was the first one out of
my brothers to join church, and I went every Sunday. I played the piano
in church, did the youth group thing on Sunday nights when none of my
other brothers were going, did Bible school until I was too old for it and
then helped out with it, went to church camp. In the back of my mind it
was always to make Mom and Dad happy, especially Mom. I never wanted
to upset them.
When I got married right after high school, it carried on. I became a
deacon at the church, my wife and I took over a youth group on Sunday
night, I was on the church board. When the divorce happened, all of a
sudden I woke up thinking, "Where are all these people who are supposed
to be there for you when things are going bad?" I walked away and didn't
go back to church for a long time.

I learned sex from my brothers. We never talked openly about it, but each
one of them had sex with me from when I was about ten to fourteen, fif-
teen. My two oldest brothers had a bedroom by themselves, and my brother
just older than I shared one with me. With my oldest brothers it would
usually happen when we were changing clothes after school. When they'd
get horny they would just come in and pull it out and expect me to give
them a blow job, forcing my head down on it . I was quite a lot younger
and smaller, so there was nothing I could do. But I couldn't figure out
why I was the one. Why were they grabbing my head and making me go
down on this thing?
The majority of the sexual activity was with my brother just older than
me . He'd come over to my bed. I cried real bad after the first time we had
anal intercourse. The next time he wasn't as rough with me, but it still
hurt. It happened for quite a while, until he got his first girlfriend. I don't
want to make it sound like I was saintly or anything. Mter things got to
the point they did with him, it was like, "Well, if you're going to do this,
you go down on me. I'm not going to do this for nothing." So there was
some sexual release for me as well. He went down on me a couple times,
but I never had anal intercourse with him.

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Richard Hopkins 247

From first grade, I always had girlfriends. It was important to have

girlfriends. But I knew there was something different, and it must be me.
In high school, 1 would double-date with a good friend of mine, and after
we took the girls home I'd give him a blow job, or he'd spend the night.
Those times would start out, "Oh, suck me!" "Well, you suck me!"-that
type of thing-and before you know it, "All right, whip it out!" Well, this
guy had the balls to whip it out and I had the balls to do it. It's amazing
what you can get that way. I had lots of friends through high school-
guys 1 ran around with, double-dated with, went to parties with, played
basketball with-and 1 had sex with all of them. But I lied all the way
through it; I'm doing it, but I'm not gay. I'd wake up the next day and
call my girlfriend and go on-find out where we were going that night,
or she'd say, "The family dinner's this Sunday. What time you going to be
here?" I did that all the way until 1 got divorced.
1 watched my brothers grow up, graduate, and get married, so that's
what I did. I got married right out of high school. Two to three years into
my marriage, with two kids, I finally started saying, "1 really am gay, I re-
ally am. What am 1 going to do about it?" 1 finally woke up and stopped
some of the lying. 1 came home from being with a guy and I said to my
wife, "1 love you as a person and as the kids' mother, but this isn't work-
ing. I am just not happy here. I'm twenty-four years old, and I've got to
figure out what's going to make me happy." My wife wasn't happy either,
so we started mapping out what we could do about it.
I went back to my parents', but after about six months I realized you
just can't go back. I was too old to be coming in at midnight with them
still waiting up for me, or to be saying, "Mom, I'm not coming home
tonight." That was a wild time. You're out all of a sudden, you're free to
do what you want to do, and there's all this world out there you've never
experienced. I'd had plenty of gay experiences, but I'd never been to gay
bars, never experienced the nightlife, and 1 was trying to soak it up as
quickly as possible . I got really out of control, but it didn't take long to
pull myself back.
People get lost in the bar scene. 1 did at first . It was exotic, it was new,
it was exciting. It didn't take long for that to wear off for me. But there
are a lot of gay people out there who have no direction, no vision-the
only thing that's important is being in the bars over the weekend, having
something new to wear, and enough money to drink themselves silly. Keith
and 1 are both very responsible and driven, and we want to work and be
successful. I'm sure there are a lot of gay people out there who are the
same way. But we have run into so many who are completely irresponsi-
ble, who think things are owed to them without having to work for them .

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On the farm you are secluded; the people you interact with are pretty
much your family. We were real private people, not telling everybody in
the neighborhood all our problems. In fact, we worked real hard to keep
our problems under wraps. I never saw my mom and dad openly do any-
thing, and that's the way I've always viewed being gay-as a very private
thing. I don't want to wear it on my sleeve. It's not open for discussion,
and I don't ever intend it to be-with people I work with, the next-door
neighbors, the family even. If you know me, you're either going to like me
or you're not going to like me, but not because I'm wearing a banner up
and down the street so everybody knows, or saying in your face, "I'm gay,
like it or leave it."
I haven't been honest with my parents about being gay, but I've lived
eight years with Keith and he's always welcome in their home, so I think
they have a pretty good idea. I'm HIV-positive, and I've known that for
about a year and a half, so I'm really to the point where I need to talk to
Mom and Dad. We'll see, but I do think that's going to happen soon. It's
time. But how can they not know I'm gay? Maybe they're just being pleas-
ant all these years, not blurting it out, because we never talk about sex. As
far as my brothers are concerned, I don't feel the need to tell them. I know
they all know about it already, but I don't owe them an explanation. They
probably feel responsible in some way. But I don't see the time I'm going
to sit down with them and just lay my cards on the table.
Sex with a man, being gay, is what I'm comfortable doing. It's what I
like to do and it's what I feel like I'm good at . When Keith and I make
love, there is something that is right, completely right, and that never oc-
curred with a woman. Yes, the act could be done with a woman, but the
feeling, the passion, the pleasure is just right with a man. You've got to be
born with something like that . Maybe my brothers saw something in me
I didn't know about, something that was saying to them, "It's okay to do
this to him-he wants to do this." I don't blame them for this. I don't
blame anybody for this. But I can't help but wonder what they saw that
allowed them to do that, why they thought it was okay, and if that's why
I am the way I am-that I started enjoying it after a while, and continued
with it.
I have trouble coming to grips with this because they all know they
did it, and we've never talked about it, and they're all very standoffish
with me. I think it makes them all uncomfortable. We interact, but there's
no closeness. I really think I've made an effort throughout the years. I
helped one brother build his house, and we've taken another brother's
kids on vacation with us, and I've let my oldest brother spend the night
with us numerous times when he needed to. They're the ones who really

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Richard Hopkins 249

have a problem with it. I know I'm okay. I'm being honest, as far as my
sexuality goes. The way they view me has made me a little stronger and
helps me come to terms with it a little bit better.
My oldest brother is a mess, but the rest of us are all successful and re-
sponsible. Ray and I are not close now. It's not like we don't like each
other. We just don't make time for one another. I don't get along with my
brother just older than I, and I don't like my oldest brother at all. We've
tried, but we haven't succeeded. He may be gay, too. Keith and I ran into
him in a bar one night, so it was kind of tough to get out of that one. I
was uncomfortable from the very get-go, and-in this big city-he was
with a guy I'd dated before.
Who I am and why things have happened is something I'm trying to
figure out right now. I've started seeing myself, and there are some parts
I really don't like, and I've got to face them. Trying to make everybody
proud of me, I spent a lot of time not recognizing who I was and lying
about who I was. I tried for so long to do what I thought was the thing
to do, to be the way I was supposed to be-and I tried all those things for
all the wrong reasons. I had the two kids, which I don't regret at all-
they're wonderful kids and bring me a lot of happiness. But it wasn't the
reason to do it. I lied to myself. That's what I'm really struggling with
right now. Throughout my life, there have been lies and then lies to cover
lies, and lies and lies and lies.
Now I'm trying to figure out what role God has in my life. About a
year ago, I started going with my parents to the church I grew up in, an
Independent Christian church . I went real steady for about a year. I've yet
to find me a church around here, but I really am trying to come to grips,
because I do believe in God . I don't know what God thinks of me right
now-that's something I need to work out.

Farming was in me, but I was never a Future Farmer of America. I think
I saw a picture of my dad I didn't like-always having to work, never look-
ing happy. But I felt sorry for my dad after we all moved away and he quit
farming. He loved farming-I see that now-and after a man does that
for years and just quits, I know it had to work on him. They leased the
farm out, and he runs a farm machinery business so he still works like a
dog. They still don't give a hoot about what the house looks like . It's not
a run-down old shack, but they don't put money into the house or vehi-
cles or anything.
My dad and mom, my uncle and his wife, my grandmother and grand-
father-their commitment to one person has really been tremendous.
Commitment to the right person is what I want, but when you have two

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men together it's too easy to just chuck it all and get out. Hell, divorce is
too easy for married people these days, and with two men it's even easier.
You have a fight, you move on to the next. There just doesn't seem to be
a real effort to make it work. Keith and I are hitting our eighth anniver-
sary. There have been troubles and struggles. I feel like I don't deserve
him sometimes, because I've done some pretty nasty things. But the bot-
tom line is we do love and care deeply about one another, and no matter
how bad things get, that commitment remains the same. My son and
daughter, twelve and nine, are here one day a week, every other weekend,
and four weeks out of the year nonstop. We always do family vacations to-
gether. The kids love Keith-he is as much a father to them as I am. He is
extremely successful-his drive is incredible-and his commitment to his
job and to me and my family is very important to him. He will execute my
will and the trust that's all set up for the kids.
I still love horses, and the farm is still a sanctuary to me. It's so open
and free, being able to saddle a horse up and escape, get away, just get lost
and ride. Sometimes you don't realize what you have until you don't have
it anymore. I wish my kids could grow up in that environment, to learn
how to care for things. They ride my horses, but it's not the same as being
there day in, day out.
Just because I'm HIV-positive doesn't mean I'm not going to be here
for a long time to come. It's taken me a while to realize that, but I haven't
been sick, and all indicators are real good-going up, up, up. I'm healthy
as a horse, I feel good, and I'm loved by a lot of people. There's absolutely
no reason to think it's not going to continue for a long time. Down the
road, I want to have five to ten acres, room for the horses and the animals,
and then let Keith build a new house. I may be in the middle of beautiful
Meridian-Kessler in Indianapolis right now, which is real nice, but there
will be acreage in my future. I can guarantee it.

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 Lon Mickelsen

Lon was born in 1961 andgrew up on a 7BO-acre crop farm in Mower County,
southeastern Minnesota. He was the seventh often children, with three broth-
ers and six sisters. Lon lives in Minneapolis and works in investment products
marketing.

YOU HAD TO be the oldest boy in the house to become pals with Dad,
the guy that he would discuss farm things with. When Ben, my next older
brother, moved out of the house, I moved into his place, even at the din-
ner table. We'd all shift around the table . Now I was the oldest boy in the
house, so all of a sudden I was pals with Dad. I didn't have to do anything
to prove myselffor that spot-it was by default . It felt good that Dad was
treating me like he used to treat Ben, like more of an equal, like I would
understand what he was talking about .
We farmed just shy of eight hundred acres, growing soybeans, corn
and oats, and peas for Green Giant. My two older brothers were more
involved in the farming work than I was. We had no livestock, so there
weren't regular chores to do, but in the summer we had to do some of
the cultivating and weeding. We were pretty involved in walking beans-
walking up and down the rows of soybeans to pull weeds that were missed
by the herbicides. Picking rock was a dirty, horrible job that seemed like
an endurance test, but we were all expected to do it. The area had rich
soil, but it was also pretty rocky, so about every two years we would
pick up rocks off of all the fields. Year after year, the plows kept pulling
up these ten, twenty, and thirty-pound rocks left by some prehistoric
glacier.
My older sister liked mechanical things and wanted to be on a tractor
as much as anybody, but in our family the guys helped dad in the field and
the girls did the housework. Except for picking rock, which required a fam-
ily effort, my sisters did not get involved much in farm chores. One of my
sisters and I did a lot of gardening, partly because of our involvement in
4-H. With ten kids, the vegetable garden was a necessity, not a hobby. We
were expected to maintain a good -sized garden, about a sixth of an acre.
I was one of two males in my family who really liked to cook. Ours was a
meat-and-potatoes family, and I liked to try things we didn't normally have,

251

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252 Part 3. Between the Mid -1970s and Mid-1980s

like Oriental cooking, souffles, and crepes. For our family, those foods
were plenty exotic.
My parents were strict disciplinarians, which is a difficult thing to be
with ten kids. My mother was the one who really raised us. She only called
Dad in when she needed the heavy guns . Mom had a pretty gentle wooden
spoon, and we were not spanked much-although there were times I would
have preferred a swat rather than "a good, stiff talking-to," as my father
used to say. My mother, a devout Catholic, injected religion into the fam-
ily whenever she could. When things were difficult, we would all get to-
gether and pray the rosary. From the time I was old enough to be carried
along to church until I left for college, the only time I ever missed a Sun-
day mass was when I was sick. And not just kind of sick; you had to be re-
ally sick.
There was an old German-Scandinavian work ethic, but there was a
play ethic too. We rarely worked on Sundays, and we did a lot of cookouts
and other fun things together on the weekends. My grandfather was an
avid golfer and bought his grandkids memberships at the local country
club, so we would golf with him and my dad. We had the misfortune of
living in one of the few counties in Minnesota that don't have any natural
lakes, so it was a big deal to go to a lake . A couple of Sundays each sum-
mer, we would pack up the boat and go fifty-some miles to water-ski and
splash around for the day. And in early August, after the cultivating was
done but before harvest, we would rent a cabin at a lake in northern Min-
nesota and go up for a week to water-ski, fish , canoe and just generally
play in the water.
I started band in fifth grade, played the French horn and then the trum-
pet. In eighth grade I got into singing and it became a large part of my
identity through high school and college . I was in just about every music
organization there was in high school, and I was also in a rock-and-roll
band that played in bars and clubs on the weekends. It was a Partridge
Family sort of thing-a family of five kids that went to the same school
we did . They brought in other people as they wanted to add instruments
to the band . I wasn't aware of it at the time, but two of the brothers in
that family were gay. I became very good friends with both of those guys-
there was sort of a relaxed understanding between us. I got to know them
at about the time they were coming to grips with their sexuality, proba-
bly ten years before I did.

Our farm had two large pastures, almost twenty acres, some of the best
grazing land in the county. There were creeks running through both pas-
tures, and when I was little I would go there with friends just to explore-

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Lon Mickelsen 253

Eating Apples, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Lon Mickelsen

in the creeks and the woods, along the railroad tracks, under the railroad
bridges, up to the highway. You could get probably half or three-quarters
of a mile from the house. I'd hike out there and sit, just to get away.
We lived very close to town, and there was a bunch of town kids that
used to come down and play under one of the railroad bridges that crossed
the creek. Playing "Truth or Dare" with a bunch of boys and girls, I was
always more interested in seeing the boys naked. I went fishing a lot with
one of the boys from town-probably the person I spent the most time
with in my childhood. We spent three or four summers together, almost
every day when I wasn't doing some kind of farmwork. In my youth, he
was the only friend that I had any sexual encounters with. It started when
we were fishing and decided to go skinny-dipping in a pool in the creek.

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From there it was "you show me, I'll show you," and we felt each other's
erections. That sort of thing went on for weeks one summer, probably in
the fifth or sixth grade. But in high school, he and I were almost strangers;
we could hardly look at each other and rarely talked. I think a lot of that
was because we were embarrassed about those past summers, and didn't
know how to deal with that as we got older and started to realize what it
had been.
In my family, sexuality was governed largely by conservative Catholi-
cism-that is, it was not discussed. When I was probably six years old and
started asking enough questions about where the kittens came from, my
mom had the talk with me about the birds and the bees. It was all pre-
sented in non-human terms. My mom and dad seemed to be reluctantly
resigned to the idea that sex education should be taught in the schools,
mostly because they didn't want to deal with it at home. Sexuality was
held in an undercurrent. You didn't talk about it, and you certainly didn't
openly demonstrate it in any way. When boyfriends and girlfriends came
over to the house, they were expected to be prim and proper in front of
the family. You were expected not to sit in the car with a boyfriend or girl-
friend after you got home from a date. I suppose it was the convent sort
of attitude-"Sex is evil, children"-not openly announced, but under-
stood.
I dated all the way through high school, mostly to be one of the gang.
I think I was aware that I had an attraction to boys, but I was trying to
stay with the flow. My last steady girlfriend was in college. I went out with
her for about two-and-a-halfyears, and broke up with her during my se-
nior year. One night we were talking and finally I said, "Listen, I can't do
this anymore ." She said, "What do you mean, you can't do this?" And I
thought, I don't know what I mean. Why do I want to break up with some-
body I've been going with for two-and-a-halfyears, a person I actually
love? The answer was obvious, but my mouth couldn't form the words:
Because I'm not sexually attracted to her. I was dating her, but fantasiz-
ing about my male roommates.
A few months later, at home for spring break, I went for a walk down
the railroad tracks one night and was sitting on the same railroad bridge
that I'd played "Truth or Dare" under as a child. I was trying to figure
out why I'd broken up with my girlfriend. After an hour or so, I finally
came to the point of saying out loud, "I must be gay." I couldn't believe
it, but I must be. As soon as I'd clicked that little switch, a hundred things
rolled through my mind. I would have to somehow get used to it, though
it seemed like it wouldn't work either way-I couldn't be straight, and I
couldn't be gay. How could I ever tell my parents? They could never deal

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Lon Mickelsen 255

with it, because the Catholic church is against it. How could I ever meet
somebody? Could I ever have a real relationship? I felt a strange, quiet
panic; this was something I was going to have to carryall by myself. But
I'd had enough of fighting it for fifteen or twenty years, and I was giving
up. I decided to affirm it because I couldn't fight it anymore. If I could
have fought it, I would have.
I'm still coming to grips with being gay. I've pretty much always seen
myself as a homosexual trying to appease society by pretending I wasn't.
I've never liked the word "gay." It doesn't bother me as much now, but I
used to choke on that word. It seemed like a derogatory term, like black
people calling each other niggers. I first went to my therapist to deal with
a relationship, and in one of the first sessions he said, "We'll deal with this
relationship first, and then we'll deal with your homophobia." I thought,
who's he talking to? It was shocking to hear somebody say I was homo-
phobic. To me that was something only a non-gay person could have. Then
I realized you can accept who you are, but you can still be crippled by a
fear of it.
Dealing with my homophobia has been an exercise in getting over
avoiding being gay and making a conscious effort to tell people who I want
to know about it . Part of that has to be to inform my family. But my par-
ents are so reactionary, I don't know if or when I will ever tell them. It
just might not be worth the hassle to me . But my first experience oftelling
a sibling was very positive . I told my sister who's a year older than me, as
we went for a walk near my parents' house. It was very reassuring, but I
knew it would be with her, and she had kind of suspected it anyway.
One of the first people I told was myoId college roommate. He's one
of the people I'd been most attracted to, and had he been gay I think we
could have been very good partners. He's married to one of myoId girl-
friends, a sister of the two gay brothers in the band I was in. She and I
were dating when we got to college, but I became very interested in him,
and so did she. She got to know him from hanging around our dorm
room, and they started dating. That was terribly traumatic for me. I was
losing a girlfriend, who was a true friend and a social safety net to me, and
at the same time I was losing the person who I was really sexually inter-
ested in-and I was losing them to each other. But the wounds healed
fast . They've been wonderfully supportive, and they're still among my
best friends.
I'm talking about it with people who have known for a year, asking
them what their reaction was when I told them, talking to other people
who are gay, finding out about their life experiences. The very first per-
son I ever told was my last girlfriend in college, who for six years had been

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wondering why I really broke up with her. She's still a very good friend,
and I made a special trip to the farm in central Minnesota where she lives
with her. husband and family, to talk to her. She was able to tell me about
all the people who have been talking about me for the last few years. It's
an eye-opening experience when you find that a lot more people are aware
of it than you think or hope are .
It's been eight, nine, ten years, and I'm just now starting to put all the
pieces together. Up until the last year or so I've chosen to conform and to
give the appearance of conforming. My overriding passion has been to meet
people's expectations, and I've always been able to do it, largely. That stems
certainly from a childhood of doing what was expected of me by my par-
ents. When I told my sister that I was gay, she said, "You've always stood
out in my mind as the one person who wasn't in trouble with Mom and
Dad for what you were doing on your dates." My sisters were always in
trouble for sitting in the driveway necking in the car when they got back
from their dates. "That's why you got off so easy," she said, "but now
you're going to make up for it!"
I had three steady dating relationships in high school. I was physical
with those girls, but not particularly sexual. I was one to emphasize get-
ting to know someone emotionally and intellectually. In college, I was sex-
ually active with one woman, but that was a very small part of the rela-
tionship. I've had very deep feelings for some of the women I've dated,
and I could be physically aroused, but I was never fulfilled sexually. My
masturbation fantasies were always about other males. When I was younger,
my fantasies focused on the sexual experiences I'd had with my friend in
fifth and sixth grades. As I got older, they were about guys I knew who I
would like to have physical contact with, like college roommates. I don't
remember fantasizing about someone I didn't already know pretty well.
The sexual fantasy part of it came after the friendship was there. I've never
been one to fantasize about celebrities or men in magazines.
I didn't have sexual contact with another male until I was a senior
in college, so there was a long, dry spell. That first experience was with a
college roommate. We had been friends for two years, but our encounter
scared him so badly he barely wanted to talk to me after that . I haven't
talked to him for years now, but what I've heard about his life is a sad
story. He comes of an absurdly staunch Catholic upbringing, and has been
trying to please his parents for years. He has actually moved back-a thirty-
four-year-old guy who's living with his parents and constantly trying to
make them happy. I wish he would throw all that off and get on with his
life. I'm not Catholic now. I'm not even religious, and in many ways I feel
like a more spiritual person now than I did when I was religious. But I

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Lon Mickelsen 257

never felt like I couldn't be Catholic because I was gay. I gave up religion
before I came to grips with my sexuality.
A friend of mine who grew up on a farm near Omaha gave in to his
homosexuality at about the same age I did. We were starting to deal with
being gay at a time when many friends our age who grew up in urban
areas were putting things together and getting on with their lives. It took
longer to come to grips with being gay growing up on a farm, not so much
because of the homophobia but because of the absence of homosexuality
in that culture. It's not that homosexuality was frowned upon . It simply
didn't exist . There were never any strong overtones about it being wrong,
because it was never discussed. Of course, the adults were aware of it, but
it was seen as more of a big-city thing that they didn't understand and
didn't have to deal with, so they didn't. One of my uncles had a gay brother-
in-law who moved back to Minnesota from New York when I was in high
school. I never even knew he existed until then. My mom and dad would
talk about him. "Oh, he's the guy that thinks he's a homo. Maybe a doc-
tor could help him."
There was no role model anywhere in that community, so that I could
say, "Here's a person who is like me, who's gay, who's an adult, who's not
running away from it." I'm sure it's not that way in all farm communities,
but I had to wait until I went elsewhere to find acceptance of it-to see
it, even, and not be afraid of it-and to see people who were living as gay
and not repressing it . I have friends who grew up in larger cities who talk
about gay couples dating in high school. Seems like it must have been on
another planet. Where I came from, anybody who was suspicious of them-
selves being gay in high school just didn't go out, period-or they asked
a girl out just to stay with the flow. The two gay brothers who were in my
band had prom dates, and I'm sure their mother was pleased that they
were home nice and early.
Looking back at some of the people who still live in that community,
I wonder if this person or that person is gay. My "Truth or Dare" friend
from fifth and sixth grade dated my sister a few times. I'm pretty sure he's
straight, but I don't know. He's one of the few people in my class who's
not married. He stayed in town to take over his father's business. To this
day, we're still embarrassed about the naked games we played as kids. When
I go home at Christmas I see him at my parents' church and it's awkward.
"Hi, how ya doin'?" "Good. How 'bout you?" "Great." "Bye."
A long-term relationship is something I aspire to, but right now I find
it difficult to imagine myself with anybody on a long-term basis. And I like
living alone so much. I think of a long-term committed relationship be-
tween two individuals as an ideal. And though it's hard to see myself in

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that kind of relationship, I've never been involved in a one-night stand ei-
ther. I've only had sexual experiences with four or five guys, and I've al-
ways kind of held a low opinion of people who sleep around a lot. It seemed
that they were chasing something that they weren't even coming close to
finding-that their sleeping around was getting them farther away from
what they were really looking for.
I came off of my first real gay relationship about four months ago. It
wasn't a relationship I particularly wanted to be in, but it lasted almost
two years anyway, so I think my lifestyle and remnants of my nun-induced
morality lend themselves to a long-term relationship. But I haven't yet
found anybody that would even be a possibility with. That's largely be-
cause I haven't been in the flow. I've been running from being gay, or try-
ing to figure it out. I haven't been in situations where I could meet a lot
of gay men I would find interesting or who would be a good match for
me . There's a community of gay musicians and visual artists in Minneapo-
lis. They're very campy, cliquish, they have limited interests, and when they
have parties, straight people are not invited. I've never seen myselffitting
into that, but as a singer and musician it's the only part of the gay com-
munity I've ever really known . I need to find out what else is out there,
and that's very difficult to do until you've decided to be out with it. Over
the next few months, as part of my therapy for myself, I intend to get out
and about and see what's there. Minneapolis is a very connected city for
the gay community, and I think I can find a lot of areas of common in-
terest other than the arts.

When my mother did her living will, she named me and my oldest sister
as the executors . I asked her why, out of ten kids, she chose us, and she
said, "Because you're as logical as you are emotional." I'm not sure what
that means, but I think I have an idea, and she's probably right . I've al-
ways thought my mother has had something of a soft spot for me because,
more than the rest of her kids, I've been able to tell her exactly what I
think without being too worried about it. She has looked for things from
me as much as I have boked for things from her. It's been that way since
I was probably ten years old . She and I have talked about moral and reli-
gious issues, which makes her uptight when she knows I don't see eye-to-
eye with her on a lot of things. Many of my siblings don't either, but they're
less inclined to talk to her about some of those things that she finds very
threatening. I think she and I see the world similarly, but she's got a con-
servative, devout religious element that I don't have at all.
To my parents, a mixed marriage was a Catholic and a Lutheran. Di-
versity was okay as long as it wasn't threatening-somebody who was Dan-

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Lon Mickelsen 259

ish instead of Norwegian or Swedish or German . Louie Anderson, the co-

median, does a routine where he talks about driving down the street with
his dad, and his dad says, "Well, look at that guy-what the hell? He's got
a ponytail, for Christ's sake!" That's my dad, privately deriding people who
don't conform to the local lifestyle. I never felt like I was friends with my
father when I was younger, but I'm very good friends with him now. He's
not aware of my sexuality, but when a kid gets to be thirty years old, and
the only one of ten kids who's not married, I'm sure there are questions
in his mind. But so far it has not gotten in the way of us being good friends.
Some of the most intelligent people I know are farmers in the com-
munity where I grew up. But to my dad, the reason for going to college
was so you wouldn't wind up farming-as though farming were reserved
for only the uneducated or unintelligent. It was always preached to us that
we needed to aspire above farming, yet I think my dad really liked it, and
still does. I wish he could see more clearly how much he really enjoys it,
because you can see it in him. He retired last year, but he still helps his
brother during planting and harvest. And I can see his face become more
intense and involved when we talk about the crops, how big the harvest
will be, or the latest farm machinery to hit the market. I think he dis-
couraged us from farming because he felt that his economic fate was in
somebody else's hands-that he wouldn't necessarily get ahead by work-
ing harder.
Looking back, the farm and my hometown seem like distant, impossi-
ble places-places where my life doesn't fit, and where "keeping it to your-
self" is considered an admirable trait . But growing up on the farm didn't
seem that limiting to me until I was no longer there. And though there
were times when it was rough around the edges, my life on the farm gave
me many of the things that I value most today: my appreciation of the im-
portance of relying on others and allowing them to rely on me, of bal-
ancing work and play, of keeping a wide-eyed fascination in the world; my
love of animals and nature, my work ethic, my desire to grow things. Every
now and then, sitting in a twenty-story office building in downtown Min-
neapolis, I have the urge to hop in my car and drive until I see corn . Some
of my urban friends feel panicky out there, but to me the big open spaces
are very calming.

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 Steven Preston

Steven was born in 1962 and grew up with two brothers, one older and one
younger, on his father's 300-acre dairy farm in south-central Wisconsin . They
farmed another 200 acres owned by his grandparents. At the time of our in-
terview, Steven was living on a small hobby farm in southern Wisconsin and
working as a nurse.

I NEVER KNEW my mother. She left us when I was one and killed herself
when I was nine . My brothers and I don't know anything about why she
left, because my dad would never talk about it . She and my dad had sepa-
rated, and one day she just left us with the babysitter and didn't come home.
When my dad came to see us, Neil was running around in the snow bare-
foot and Kevin and I were so ill we had to be hospitalized. Kevin wasn't a
year old, I was a little over a year, and Neil was two. My dad was so busy
with fieldwork and the cattle that Grandma looked after us until we got
to an age to help with milking.
My dad oversaw it, but my older brother Neil and I did most of the
herd management. It was our job to select bulls for breeding, register the
cattle, manage feeding, raise the young stock. Starting at 5 A .M., we would
have maybe twenty calves to feed, repeated the cycle at night, then fed and
bedded the cows. We raised all of our own crops. Haying was never-end-
ing and basically took up our entire summer-at least ten thousand bales
a year to get us through. Many summers, ifit weren't for the neighbor kids
we would never have had any contact with kids our own age, because we
didn't leave the farm except to go to church. It was very isolating-
Grandma and Grandpa and my dad.
Grandma's a stern old Norwegian who believed strongly in "spare the
rod, spoil the child," so we did not miss an opportunity to be spanked.
We always attended everything at the United Church of Christ, and it was
very important that we were baptized and confirmed. If we whispered dur-
ing the church service, my grandmother had this signal-a little nod of
her head. She'd look at you just once, and if you didn't stop, you knew
your ass would be cream when you got out of church.
Family functions were very important because we lived with Grandma

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Steven Preston 261

and Grandpa, and everybody came there, but holidays were never relax-
ing or enjoyable . The week before was always hellish. We would clean the
house three days before everybody came, and Grandma would be cooking
and screaming at everybody, "Don't mess up the place!" Then they would
come, and they would eat within an hour, we'd do presents or whatever,
and they would be gone and it was clean-up time again. It was like feed-
ing a threshing crew.
We would can corn from late June or early July, until we were done. It
took weeks. Huge gunny sacks of sweet corn would be brought up from
the fields and we would husk the ears. Every piece of leaf and silk had to
be completely removed for Grandma, who would sit on a chair with a huge
basin on a stool between her legs and cut corn for hours. I used to think,
"That fuckin' corn doesn't taste that good," but it taught me that hard
work and stamina is what it takes. Things don't get done by themselves.
I loved to visit our neighbors, an old couple with no children that lived
around the hill from us. That's where I learned about chickens-what to
feed them, what they need, and how to butcher them. I'd consort with all
the women who had chickens, because I just had to know more about them.
Poultry was one of my major interests, but my dad forbade it . I was not to
ever get poultry. "You can't have those filthy things when you're on grade
A." My dad's place was immaculate for grade A milk production. Every-
thing was very clean, and the barn was whitewashed and limed within an
inch of its life .
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

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262 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

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 over-
dose, 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. Look-
ing 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, be-
cause 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 Grand-
ma'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 up-
tight and nervous about it when we were little because I didn't under-
stand 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

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Steven Preston 263

painful, and who could you tell? But as I matured, it felt good . We did
everything-oral, anal , fondling, masturbating. Even when he was mar-
ried, 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 accept-
able 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 dis-
gusted 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 any-
more, 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, drag-
out 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

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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 cir-
cle 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 god damned 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 sup-
posed 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

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Steven Preston 265

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 per-
son. 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 be-
tween 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 ei-
ther 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

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and ribbons with them . We're also raising white leghorn banties, which I
really like-they're cute little chickens. Blue andalusians are another fa-
vorite; very few people have them. We've raised them for three years, keep-
ing 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 oflast 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 sparJuy 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 hon-
est 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.
I'm very open with my family and have made it clear what my rela-
tionship with Hank is . Take me or leave me . I've been through enough
with them that I don't have time for that shit . My dad has said, "What are

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Steven Preston 267

you going to do when you get old? You're going to be alone . You won't
have any kids ." He's got three kids and we all resent him. Ain't it great to
have kids?
My brother Neil is also gay, and he is the only family I feel like I could
count on if! really needed some emotional support . Kevin's so different
from me and Neil-he's like my dad. He doesn't talk about anything but
what's on the surface-hunting, crops, what cow is testing highest this
year, the new bull that's out from this or that company. A typical conver-
sation with Kevin: "How are you and your wife doing?" "We separated."
"Oh, what caused that?" "Well, I was hunting all the time, and she didn't
like that I was gone ." End of conversation .

My dad looked down on dairy farmers who were grade B, and it was like
a big joke to him if a farmer had trouble. "Did you see so-and-so tipped a
wagon over? What a stupid damned thing to do." I was raised to be real
negative and critical of what other people did, and to judge them if they
weren't successful. There was always competition-your animals have to
be better than the neighbor's, and you have to have all purebreds. Throw
out the old. Newer means better and more important and richer. "I've got
new self-unloading wagons to fill the silo with . Zoellers are using their
old machinery, and they're beating it into the ground. They must not
have the money."
You're on your own in this world. My dad really made that clear. If!
was going to survive, it was up to me. Dad didn't care about us in the way
a father should. He was more worried about what Joe Blow over the hill
had, and what they were doing, and what sports their kids were in, and
why weren't we doing as well? Shit, we were good students and we helped
him. I feel like I have to work every day not to be like my dad. When I'm
upset, I tend to go immediately for the negative. Now I think, slow down
and start thinking rationally. I'm a sensible, logical person who can fig-
ure this out without losing my cool. I was taught to react now, react
quick, and then it's over with . And after he'd beat me bloody, he'd smile
and say, "What's for supper?" "Hey, what do you want for supper,
Dad?"-as I'm wiping my eyes and my wounds and thinking, "Get me
the hell out of here." I always wanted his approval but always hated him
because of it.
How is it that some people grow up with all this baggage and actually
are productive adults, and others just never can cope? They're in the bot-
tle or trashed on something all the time. Somehow you either cope or you
give up . I guess if you're a fighter or a survivor, you manage-because you
want better, you want to improve your life, you want to be happy. I really

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feel good about my life and where it's at right now. Some of the anger will
never go away, but I'm not looking for a quick fix.
I believe God created me, so therefore he must love me. If! am a sin-
ner, then he will forgive me. I believe in an afterlife, and that I will go to
heaven . What do you want from your life, what will make you happy? Can
you find your happiness within without destroying yourself getting there?
A lot of people are destroyed. My mother is an example of that. Will it
make you happy to walk through the woods and hear the birds sing? That's
as close to God as I will ever be.

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 Connie Sanders

Connie was born in 1962 and grew up with three older brothers and two
younger sisters on a farm in Franklin County, southern Illinois. They farmed
about 120 acres, on which they grew corn, wheat, soybeans, and hay, and raised
beefcattle, hogs, and chickens. Connie's father worked full-time as a coal miner.
Connie lives in Chicago, where he teaches in a college.

MY MOTHER CALLED last night and was telling me about all these
people she knew who were sick or dying. I told her I had just come from
visiting a very sick friend at the hospital. She asked what was wrong, and
I said, "He has pneumonia, and I think he has AIDS-actually, I know he
has AIDS, and he knows it too." And my mother said, "Oh, that's really
sad ." Her tone made me think that she meant it was sad that people do
that to themselves . She said, "How do you know him?" and I said, "He's
a friend. I'm better friends with his friend Gary." I didn't allow myself to
go ahead and say, "Actually, Gary and Kurt are lovers, and I've been friends
with Gary for years, and they've been such a support for each other, and
Gary's being so strong and so nurturing right now, and I don't know
what Kurt would do without Gary being there." I wanted to say all those
things, but I didn't .
Sometimes I think it makes sense to come out to my parents, and then
I go home to visit and I'm back in a world that's so completely different
from the world I know now. Where I grew up, everybody was pretty much
the same-white, working-class, rural, Protestant. People trusted each
other, neighbors kept an eye out for each other, and the church was like
an extended family, very communal and secure. But it wasn't a place where
diversity was valued . It was like homosexuality didn't exist, except in a ser-
mon or in a Bible verse condemning it. There was no one to talk to about
things like that, at least no one I knew of.
I rode horseback every chance I got from the time I was nine years old
until I was about fourteen. Sometimes I rode with friends, sometimes with
Dad, but most of the time by myself. I craved the time alone in the wide-
open countryside, the physical contact with my horse, the sense of inde-
pendence. And I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, reading and writing
in a journal, with a sense of being alone . I think that kind of experience

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contributed to my being a spiritual person. I've had to go inside myself so

much to get a sense of who I am and how I fit into the world, what's im-
portant and what's not.
Sometimes I feel that I was this person sort of planted on the farm. I
always felt sort of outside of them all. Now that I'm in an urban environ-
ment I feel so comfortable, it's almost like coming home. But I have a good
time when I visit my parents now, when it's just my parents and me . I
dreaded it for a long time because I'd have to edit out quite a bit of my life
to be with them. One of these days I'm going to stop limiting myself, and
I'm going to talk to them about it.

I wasn't as involved in the farmwork as my older brothers. I helped deliver

baby lambs and calves, and my everyday chores were gathering eggs, carry-
ing hay, and watering the cattle-sometimes by using an axe to break the
ice on the pond . I liked doing things that let me get out on the tractor by
myself and just go from one end of the field to the other. I would day-
dream or sing-songs from church camp, songs from musicals, or songs we
had sung in choir at school.
I hated picking corn. We had a corn-picker that was pulled behind the
tractor, with the wagon hooked on behind it. It was a jalopy of a thing,
and a hassle. I'd have to ride in the wagon, and when the corn piled up
too high I'd knock it down and even it out. Before we got the corn-picker
we picked corn by hand, which took forever. When I was five years old, I
missed being in the big Halloween parade in town because we were out
picking corn. It got late, and my dad had to get the job done . Mom said
I wouldn't be able to go because she thought I was coming down with a
cold-but I was out there on that corn wagon, for god's sake!
The next year, in first grade, I was on a float in the Halloween parade.
It was supposed to be about Illinois history; there was a farmer, a minis-
ter, and an Indian . Agriculture, faith and heritage . I was the minister. I
represented faith . I had a big Bible and my little black suit, and I waved at
people. I really liked that, because I was a very religious kid and I enjoyed
being the star. My parents were involved in the United Methodist church,
and my mother especially was very religious. I was sort of the favored child
with my mother, and I was the only one of the kids who ever took religion
as seriously as she did .
Dad would come up behind Mother at the kitchen stove and start rub-
bing her neck, and she'd start giggling. They were very lovely-dovey with
each other. Dad would sometimes tease Mom by putting her over his knee
and spanking her while she giggled and pretended to try to stop him. They
obviously wanted us to see a healthy, playful attitude about sexuality in

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marriage, but they were embarrassed to talk about it, especially Dad. One
time, when we were breeding rabbits, I asked him about how rabbits had
babies. All he would say was, "Well, they do it just like any other animal
does. The buck fucks the doe, and she has babies."
My dad was very hard-working, he knew what his priorities were, and
taking care of the family came first . He was a fairly typical farmer, blue-
collar kind of father and could have a coarse sense of humor. I, being a
self-righteous little kid, sometimes got offended by things he said. I liked
to watch shows like The Waltons, but Dad was more into cowboy shows. l
And there was nothing worse for him than having to watch TV musicals
like Oklahoma! or The Sound of Music, which I loved. Dad and I were so
completely different in so many ways, we just didn't connect . With my
brothers, at least he had to do things like giving them condoms to keep
them out of trouble with girls. I guess he thought I was such a goody-
two-shoes, he didn't need to bring that up with me.

Fall was my favorite time of year, but I always knew there would be a re-
vival meeting at the church. From my infancy until I was about fourteen,
I went to revival meetings every fall, where I'd hear a lot of preaching and
fist-pounding about hellfire and brimstone. In high school, I started going
to a holiness camp where they were into something called sanctification,
which they interpreted as instantaneous perfection and holiness. I yearned
for perfection, strived to attain the love of God, and had constant guilt.
When I noticed my attraction to another guy at school, I would pray,
"Thank you, God, for beautiful people . Help me not to be lustful." I had
gotten this prayer idea from an advice column in a Christian youth mag-
azine.
I was usually a gregarious kid, very good in school, and active in band,
speech team, church youth group, and other things . During my junior
year, however, I started dropping out of activities and didn't talk to my
friends as much. My grades went from Ns to C's and D's. I was depressed
and started feeling guilty about things like being in the marching band,
because of the baton twirlers' sexy outfits, or because we played "The Strip-
per" at some of the basketball games. When my parents talked about buy-
ing some new furniture, I told them they didn't need it, that they should
save their money and be good stewards.
My church often had altar calls during the invitational hymn at the
end of the service. The minister would ask those moved by the sermon to
come to the front of the church to kneel and pray, to get right with God.
It was not something most people did every week. Maybe they did it once
and considered themselves "saved." I started doing it a lot. The fall of my

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272 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-J980s

junior year, I'd spend whole days thinking about what I could possibly
have been doing that was sinful in the past half hour, and asking God to
forgive me. My parents saw how depressed and fanatical I was becoming,
and Mom got upset and started crying a few times. She took me to the
family doctor to get a prescription for an antidepressant, which didn't seem
to help much.
One Sunday morning when I had been praying and crying by my bed,
my dad told me, "Look, your mom's going to church and we're going to
have a talk." Dad and I went out to the backyard and sat under a tree. He
began by saying, "You're hurting your mother, and I want it to stop. You're
a good-looking young man, it's the fall of the year, you've got everything
going for you-you're smart and you're popular. You have to pull your-
selfup by the bootstraps and get over this." Then we actually started talk-
ing about things, and he asked me a lot of questions. "Do you have ho-
mosexual desires?" He didn't ask it in a judgmental way, but I lied and said
no. He asked me about erections and masturbation, and I told him I be-
lieved I had arrived at a spiritual plane above all that . I think that was one
of his first clues that I was really fucked up.
As I got worse, I spent hours on my knees by my bed, praying and cry-
ing. I could hardly eat, and started choking on my food. I'm a diabetic,
so my parents decided they had to do something. They called another farm
family, because one of their sons had had a breakdown, got the name of
his psychiatrist in St. Louis, and took me there to get treatment.
The hospital was a liberating experience for me . Here were all these
people who were urban, educated in a different way, who didn't measure
everything by the church and by what the neighbors thought. They chal-
lenged my beliefs in ways that sometimes seemed harsh and cynical to me
then, but they helped me begin to look at belief more critically. Though
it was painful and terribly frightening, it helped to free me. After a few
weeks I was released, and after a few more weeks I got off the medication.
I had never before realized that I could be just a normal kid. Finally I was
able to believe that God loved me as much as anyone, and I could stop
spending so much time worrying about it .
When I was sixteen, after I got out of the hospital, I started dating
girls. My parents always liked the girls I dated; they were all pretty safe
choices. I became very close with a girl who was active in the church youth
group. We both ended up going to the same Free Methodist college, where
students had to sign a statement promising not to have sex or to drink or
smoke on campus. My junior year in college, I dated a girl my parents liked
very much. Karen was a Baptist girl who used a lot of makeup and was
pretty in a sort of artificial way. She worked with handicapped kids and

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Connie Sanders 273

was a very sweet, giving person-almost neurotically giving. When Karen

met my family, she really won them over, so much so that everybody was
upset with me when I broke up with her. I later started dating a girl who
was not very physically attractive in the traditional sense. Diane was very
intelligent, a math major. We watched Masterpiece Theatre together and
talked about philosophy.
Mter my parents met Diane, they sat me down and told me how girls
like Karen only come along once in a lifetime. My mother did this whole
psychoanalytical thing about how I always rejected the things I wanted. She
recalled how she had tried to buy me some cowboy boots when I was five
years old, and I cried and cried in the store because I didn't want them, I
didn't like them, and then when she brought me home, I wouldn't take
them off-I wore them and wore them. Now I was rejecting Karen, this girl
they loved and thought I was in love with. Why was I doing this to myself?
Why couldn't I just give myself what I wanted? When I tried to explain what
Diane and I had together, my dad said, "Don't give me all this about intel-
lectual and spiritual relationships. Physical attraction is very important." I'll
be sure to remind him of that when I explain my sexuality to him.

As a young child I saw Cinderella, with Lesley Ann Warren. I was just en-
chanted-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, sev-
eral 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 col-
umn 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 fif-
teen, 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 acknowl-
edging 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 both-
ered me because I thought people shouldn't really be reading about ho-
mosexuality, 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 homo-
sexual love stories ever written." I could hardly tear myself away from it,
but I couldn't bring myself to buy it .

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274 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

"Sometimes r feel that r 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 Con-
nie 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 park-
ing lot and another one while I was driving. Throughout college, I re-
mained celibate, telling myself that although I had these feelings, I could
never act on them.
Mter 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 discus-
sion 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, includ-
ing 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.

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Connie Sanders 275

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. Mter him, I met an-
other 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 stu-
dent 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

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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! had sex with someone, we were auto-
matically 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!
would get him up to go to church the next week. We had a date that week-
end 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 fami-
lies 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 pro-
gram 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

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Connie Sanders 277

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 ifshe 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 com-
municative 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 Foiles 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 prob-
ably 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 por-
trayed 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 six-
teen 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

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278 Part 3. Between the Mid-J970s and Mid-J980s

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 .
Mter the show, I was in the back with one of the few straight guys in
the chorus, and 1 started to cry. He said, "What's wrong, Connie?" and 1
said, "I think 1 just came out to my mother, and 1 don't want to go out
and talk to her." He said, "Come on , let's go meet Mom." She was dab -
bing 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 danc-
ing off into the moonlight, celebrating their love for each other. She said,
"Oh, 1 just had the best time. That was so good! You know, 1 couldn't fig-
ure 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 pho-
tographs 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 di-
rectly confronted them with it, it became messy, because then their par-
ents had to really deal with it . They couldn't use denial anymore. My par-
ents 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 im-
portant 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 ifshe'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 "1 hate to
see your mother hurting like this." My prediction is that he'll be upset be-
cause 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. 1 think my dad is a lot less flexible, less verbal, and less able to
grow. l 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 intelli-
gence . My mother watches a lot of television, and 1 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?

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Connie Sanders 279

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 thera-
pist 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 fam-
ily, yet he sensed that he was different and that he was often misunder-
stood. At times I would lay in my bedroom feeling like I was missing every-
thing. 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 unin-
hibited 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.
Sometimes I still feel like a misfit, even with gay people. My values are
much more liberal than the values I was brought up with, but in an urban
gay environment my values make me look sort of moralistic. There's some-
thing about camp humor, for example, that I've never been comfortable
with . It seems like it's easier for urban people to have a harsh, cynical sense
of humor about everything. Maybe it's a guy thing-wanting to make
everything into a joke-and maybe it's an urban gay subculture thing too,
but sometimes I want to say, "Just drop all this shit and be real. Stop think-
ing you're always on stage and talk to people like human beings." Matt
says I need to loosen up, but it's hard for me to just let loose and think
anything's okay. I still see certain behaviors as healthier than others. Matt
is a lot more comfortable taking people at face value, without judgment.
So he helps me loosen up a little, and I help him think about things in
ways he wouldn't have before .

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280 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

NOTES

1. The Waltons (1972 - 81) was a long-running television drama series that por-
trayed the life ofa large family in rural Virginia during the 1930s and 1940s. The
stories were seen through the eyes ofJohn -Boy, the gentle and emotional eldest
son and hopeful writer. Though the series was not a big hit in large cities, it was
one of the most-viewed television programs in middle and rural America.
2. Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians (1982) by John E.
Fortunato. New York: Seabury Press.

Copyrighted Material
 Randy Fleer

Born in 1963, Randy grew up with two older brothers on a mixed livestock
and crop farm near Wayne, in Wayne County, northeastern Nebraska. He
lives in the Chicago area. In this brief narrative, Randy recalls coming
out-to himself, to his parents, and to a small circle ofgay men in his home-
town.

AS A YOUNG child, I had vivid fantasies about rough-housing with my

uncles, riding on their backs and shoulders. In adolescence, I really didn't
have any thoughts about girls or boys my own age . I was interested in
men . My sophomore year of high school, about the time of Anita Bryant's
big campaign, I started hearing the word "gay."l One night there was a
TV show with a character telling his best friend he was gay, and I asked
my mom what that meant. In her, "Okay, we're talking about sex now"
half-whisper she said, "That's a man who loves other men instead of
women." The light bulb went on.
The summer before my junior year in high school, my parents and I
went to Omaha to see a family show. During intermission, I was in the rest
room relieving myself and noticed that the guy next to me was watching
me. I started watching him and we ended up going into a stall and touch-
ing each other. That was my first experience and I was very excited by it .
One night, about six months later, I called Larry-a gay man in Wayne
that everybody knew about . I said, "I think I'm gay, and 1 don't want to
be like that . I was wondering if! could talk to you about it." I went to his
apartment and we talked . He told me, "You are gay and there's nothing
you can do about it. You're not bad, and you're going to have a fine life
just as you are . You don't have to fit the mold." I listened to him, but deep
down 1 didn't believe him . When I said, "It's not right, I'm not normal,"
he said, "What is norma!?" But I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be like every-
one else, find that woman and get her pregnant and all that stuff.
I won a trip to Germany the summer before my senior year in high
school. Up to that point, all I knew was Nebraska. Suddenly, I saw New
York City, flew to Germany, spent a week at a youth hostel in Berlin and
three weeks with a family in Nuremberg. While I was in Berlin, I wan-
dered around the subway and picked up or was picked up by men on a few

281

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282 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

occasions. How does that song go? "How you gonna keep 'em down on
the farm once they've seen Paree?"
I came out to my parents on April 2, 1980, near the end of my senior
year of high school. I remember the date because I had been working up
to it for a long time, and I was ready to tell them on April first, but de-
cided April Fools' Day was probably not a good idea. I was taking a bath
in the evening, thinking of what I was going to say, and by the time I was
ready my father had already gone to bed . Mom said that I could tell her
and she could tell him, but I said it was something very important that I
had to tell both of them .
Dad hadn't fallen asleep yet, and I went through the usual half-hour
build-up. "I've got something to tell you . ... It's important for you to
know this . .. . I don't want you to think any different about me .. .. Bla-
bla-bla-bla-bla." Finally I said, "I'm gay," and my dad said, "What did he
say?" My mom said, "He said he's homosexual, dear." I told them I didn't
feel good about it and was trying to see if I could fix it myself. It would
be two more years before I felt being gay was okay.
The summer before I started college, Larry was having a get-together
with several other gay men he knew around town. Mom answered the
phone when he called to invite me, and when I was getting ready to go
into town that night, she stopped me and said she wanted to know who I
was going to see and what I was going to be doing. I wouldn't tell her and
said that she shouldn't worry.
That night at Larry's, I thought, "Wow! Four men in a room, and
they're all gay!" In Wayne, where everybody knows what you do, Larry's
place was a comfortable island where we could get together and talk. In a
way, it's too bad that we could only feel safe talking there, but it was kind
of exciting to get together with the girls and gossip. It was almost an un-
derground thing, hearing them talk about some cute boy in town, or
"Watch out for so-and-so-I think he's got an idea about you." I haven't
seen anything like it since leaving Wayne . In Lincoln there were so many
more gay people around, and bars for them to go to. And in Chicago there
are ghettos with blocks of businesses that cater to gays.

A guy that I became friends with in college grew up doing some hustling
in Omaha on the Milk Run, the area of town where men drove their cars
around. When I first met him, I was envious of all that . Now I'm glad I
came of age and came out the way I did. And despite the isolation, I'm
glad I grew up where I did . I had to learn so much on my own, and some
of that was not so good, but in a large city you can get so immersed in gay

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Randy Fleer 283

culture that you forget to grow up in other areas. I know a lot of gay peo-
ple who almost cannot function in the heterosexual world.
There are some gay people I would like to be associated with and some
I wouldn't. I think everyone should try to make the world a better place,
live and let live, take care of and pick up after themselves, not be a burden
on others. I see so many young gay men with no direction in life, who just
go from one bar to another. They need some maturity, to start being re-
sponsible for themselves. It's scary that there's a whole generation ofpeo-
pie like that. What's their situation going to be in ten or fifteen years?

NOTE

1. In 1977, Anita Bryant, evangelical singer and former Miss America, led a
highly emotional and widely publicized campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance
in Dade County, Florida.

Copyrighted Material
 I(en Yliniemi

Ken was born in 1964 and grew up with two older sisters and two younger sis-
ters on a small dairy farm in northwestern Minnesota, seven miles from Pons-
ford, in Becker County. He lives in the Minneapolis area and works in horti-
culture and plant biology.

THROUGHOUT growing up, one of my goals was to please my parents,

and by working hard on the farm I pleased them exceedingly. I was not a
rebellious child and I tried to maintain the best relationship possible with
them by doing all the right things . I thought it was just the greatest thing
when the neighbors, who had a son about my age, would tell my mom
they wished their son could be just like Kenny. I thought, "Wow! I must
really be doing everything right ."
From the beginning, I went out to the barn with my dad and was ex-
tremely involved in the work on the farm . As a little kid I started out feed-
ing milk to the young calves and as I got older I learned how to drive trac-
tors. But in the back of my mind, I didn't know ifI'd be good at farming .
I could handle the animal husbandry and field crops part of it, but I wasn't
very good at all the mechanical work. I was just amazed at how my dad
did it, but I never really learned it from him. If he was working on some-
thing and needed help, he would ask me to help him, but I never had an
interest in it and he never pushed me .
My dad became extremely allergic to cattle and hay dust . On top of
that, we had a bad drought in '76, and hay prices were very high . He de-
cided he wasn't going to feed the cattle through the winter, and sold them
all. Six months later, in the spring, my mother decided she wanted to start
farming and asked me to help her. I was all for it, because I actually missed
the cows . From that point on, my mother and I did most of the work. We
were responsible for milking the cows twice a day, feeding them, and clean-
ing the barn . My dad had found a job in Detroit Lakes, about thirty-five
miles away. He did a lot of the fieldwork, but that became a big part of my
responsibility too. Putting up the hay was a never-ending summer chore.
Before I started college, I considered farming. But that was in the early
'80s, and the farm economy was just horrible . Farms were going under

284

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Ken Yliniemi 285

"As I got older I learned how to drive tractors .. . but I wasn't very good at all
the mechnical work. I was just amazed at how my dad did it, but I never really
learned it from him." Kenny Yliniemi looks on while his father works on mow-
ing machinery in a hay field, about 1970. Courtesy of Ken Yliniemi.

left and right, and prices were very poor. In order to take over my parents'
farm, I would have had to borrow a great deal of money. When I went
away to college, my mother sold all the cows. I've often wondered if! did
the right thing. If! had stayed at home and not gone to college, I'm sure
I'd be farming today. But my parents always told me I needed to do what
I really wanted to do. They would have been very pleased if I had taken
over the farm, but I knew farming was not what I wanted to do for the
rest of my life.

There was a division oflabor in our household: the girls were in the house
and I was in the barn. I would usually get up around 5:00 or 5:30, do
milking for an hour, grab a bite to eat, take a shower, and catch the school
bus around 7: 15. When I got home I did milking, and after supper I had
homework. So it really got to be a long day. I was never encouraged to do

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286 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

any of the household activities, but I liked doing those things. I would
bake on occasion, and my mother was very much into canning and freez-
ing and often needed help with that . We would can chicken, peaches, pears,
and canning tomatoes was a big one in the fall. Vegetables would always
be frozen. I really liked helping to pick them, clean them, cut them up,
and blanch and freeze them. When I was married, I did a lot of canning
and freezing . I would call up my mother and ask her, "How do I do this?
What's the recipe you use for this?" I'm sure she kind of wondered about
me sometimes, but she was always very encouraging and willing to share
her recipes and ideas with me.
In high school, I really wanted to do acting, but I couldn't because of
the farm . Most of the play practices took place in the evening, and there
was no way I could do that because we lived twenty-one miles from Park
Rapids. So I got involved in technical theater and did that all through high
school. Light design was my specialty. I worked on it right after school, so
the late bus would get me home in time for milking. I would have just
loved to do the summer musical, but we were busy with making hay and
other summertime farmwork . I envied the freedom enjoyed by the kids
who lived in town.
Our community 4-H club was started my senior year of high school,
and I got involved in it right away, but I wasn't interested in doing any of
the farm activities. I wanted to get into drama and speech. They had what
was called "Share the Fun." Each club in the county put on a skit and
competed with each other, and one skit from the county went on to per-
form at the state fair. That first year, I designed the whole act and got cos-
tumes for everyone, and we made it all the way to state.

We had a Finnish sauna in the basement, and one time when I was in ju-
nior high my cousins came over to take a sauna. Two or three of them
went in together. My bedroom was in the basement, so I went down and
laid on the floor under my bed and tried to peer into the sauna through
the cracks in the wall and watch those guys who were several years older
than I was. Then they came out of the sauna and started walking around
without any clothes on . They thought they had the whole basement to
themselves. Oh god! There I was, a gay adolescent with those naked guys
in front of me, and I couldn't even look at them because I was so afraid
they were going to find me and beat me up. When they went back in the
sauna, I was so disappointed I had missed most of it.
On the school bus, all the older guys would ride in back, and I would
listen to their rough and gruff conversations about women. I was intensely
turned on by those guys. During junior high, my hormones were just rac-

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Ken Yliniemi 287

ing, but it wasn't something I thought about at all. It wasn't until I got
into high school that I realized I was different from most people. It be-
came very evident to me that I didn't have the same interests the other
guys did, and an awful lot of my friends were girls. I just didn't relate well
to guys my own age.
Whenever my parents went to town-and then when I got old enough
to drive-I would go to the drugstore and buy Playgirl. I'd buy a Playboy
with it, to make it look like I was buying one for me and one for my girl-
friend. Detroit Lakes was usually where I went, because I didn't go to
school there and didn't know anybody in the store. When I first got my
driver's license, I wouldn't even make it all the way home before I ripped
open the Playgirl on the side of the road. I didn't keep too many maga-
zines around at home because of the chances of someone finding them.
Mter I had used one for a couple months, I would burn it . I would hide
the magazines at the bottom of the garbage, so if something happened to
me and I suddenly died, they wouldn't find them. They'd just take out
the garbage and they wouldn't know any different.
Saturday night was sauna night, and as an adolescent I went by myself.
I'd always take a magazine into the sauna with me because it was a perfect
place to jack off. One time I forgot my magazine on a bench in the dress-
ing area. It wasn't until late that evening, after everyone had gone through
sauna, that I realized I'd left my jack-off magazine down there. And it
wasn't just a Playgirl, it was an obviously gay magazine. I was mortified
that someone had found it. When I went down and looked, I found that
it had slipped behind the bench. If anyone saw it, no one ever mentioned
a thing to me .

Paul was about my age and lived on another farm in the area. I would sit
next to him on the school bus, and then we started doing things together,
like going for snowmobile and horseback rides . One beautiful summer af-
ternoon, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was painting my parents' house
and Paul came over. He asked if everyone was gone, and I said they were.
Then he said, "Let's go inside." We went down to my bedroom in the
basement and jacked each other off. Paul knew exactly what to do-led me
through the whole thing-and I really liked it. I was just shocked, couldn't
believe it . I'd never had anyone touch me there before, and I was so turned
on. I was thinking, "I shouldn't be doing this, but, oh, it does feel really
good! Oh, well, I'm not doing anything. I'm letting him do it all. I'm not
encouraging this at all." But when he went home, I was so guilt-ridden I
was ready to tell my parents and my pastor everything that had happened.
But I was so terrified, I couldn't even bring myself to do that .

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I vowed I would never let it happen again, but Paul came over a cou-
ple of days later and the same thing happened. This continued all through
high school. He would come over, or he'd invite me to go do something.
He was always the one who instigated it . I thought if! didn't instigate it,
it was okay-I wasn't really like that. But if a week had gone by and I
hadn't heard from Paul, and I was really horny, I'd get on the phone. "Do
you want to go do something? Let's go horseback riding." If he wasn't
home, I'd want to know when he was coming back. We arranged that if!
was home alone, I would call him. And whenever he went by my place, he
would look at what cars were in the yard to see if maybe I was home alone.
Then he'd call, and if! was alone he would come over and we could do it
wherever we wanted in the house.
Paul knew where my crotch was all the time-he knew how to get me
hard right away, and then give me a good blow job or jack me off. It was
strictly sexual gratification on both of our parts. We never kissed. I hated
his guts a lot of the time, because I was really guilted out by the whole
thing. But if! hadn't seen him for a couple weeks I'd want to call him up
and have him come over. We did it just about any place we could. We'd go
out in the middle of the woods on horseback or on the motorcycle. We'd
go swimming at Big Basswood Lake, down the road about a mile, late at
night when no one could see us. We'd soap each other up and have a re-
ally good time. In the wintertime, we'd do things in the barn loft because
it was fairly warm, and if we knew no one was in the barn, we'd do it there
too. One time my parents and sisters were gone for three or four days to
visit relatives in North Dakota. I stayed on the farm to milk the cows and
take care of everything. Paul helped me with some of the chores, and for
three or four nights we slept together in my bed. We'd wake up in the mid-
dle of the night and get each other off. I felt guilty as usual, but I thought,
"I'll grow up and get married, and it'll be okay."
My parents never once sat down and told me the facts oflife. But if a
girl in the neighborhood would get pregnant, my parents made sure they
pointed it out with comments like, "I just can't believe it. I don't know
what she was doing. Why couldn't she wait till she was married?" We never
had any real sex education at school. I would read anything I could find
about sex. I would pore through home medical books, and whenever I'd
find a new term I'd look it up. I wasn't looking for things about homo-
sexuality, because I was trying to deny that . Even though one side of me
was having fun fooling around with Paul, the other side of me was really
wanting to find out how things worked heterosexually. On the farm you
see how nature does it, but you don't really know. As a little kid I asked
my dad how a cow gets pregnant, and he said, "Well, the bull gets up there

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Ken Yliniemi 289

and sticks his peter in there." When I said, "No he doesn)t) Dad," he got
mad and said, "Well, don't believe me then."

My parents had me baptized and confirmed in the Apostolic Lutheran

church, which is very conservative and primarily Finnish. I did everything
in church I could do. I didn't miss Sunday school and I made sure I had
my lessons done. I went to Bible school, and when I got old enough I
taught Bible school. All through my teenage years I was very much in-
volved in the young people's group at the Ponsford Community Church,
where they preached born-again Christianity very strongly. I had a won-
derful time at their summer camp-Camp JIM, which stands for Jesus Is
Mine. A lot of people sent their kids to Camp JIM to become born again.
I had so much conflict as a teenager, because Paul would come over, and
then I'd go to church. The pastor emphasized making sure you came to
communion with a clean heart, so I'd make sure I had confessed and
asked forgiveness in a personal prayer. But that always reminded me I was
a sinner.
Most kids, when they go away to college, go out and party and get
drunk. Instead, I got so intensely involved in religious-oriented campus
organizations I would sluff off schoolwork because I had Bible study that
night. I fell in love with a guy who introduced me to some of those groups,
but both of us were so involved in our religious activities there was no way
anything could ever happen. I remember once giving him the biggest hug
and not wanting to let go, and he wouldn't let go either. That was the
closest I'd ever been with a man emotionally, but I wouldn't acknowledge
anything about being gay connected with those feelings. Mter he gradu-
ated, I went up to visit him at his parents' farm, and he said, "I think I'm
going to get married." I said, "You are? To who?" "I don't know yet, but
I'm going to get married," and within about three months, he was mar-
ried. I was crushed.
Eventually I got away from the religious groups, started dating, fell in
love with this wonderful woman, and we got married when I was twenty-
three. I was married for four years. My wife was the turning point in my
coming out, because she had been raised very differently than I had, in a
very liberal family in the city. She didn't take any shit from anyone, and
she taught me a lot about being who you are, expressing yourself, talking
back to your parents. People have said that I was such a conservative thing,
and that she's the one who really brought me out and made me gay. She
didn't make me gay, but she helped me feel comfortable in being who I
am. The summer ofl991 was when I really came out to everyone. I came
out to myself about a year earlier and had gone to a support group at the

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Men's Center in the Twin Cities. It was safe to go there while I was mar-
ried because it was not a gay organization.
I was sleeping with men while I was married, and when I got divorced
I told my wife I would never expect anyone to be faithful to me . I would
just expect that somewhere down the line they would probably cheat on
me . That sounds really sad, but some part of me really does believe it. I've
been seeing a lot of men and getting involved in relationships with them,
and I feel like I'm walking on very unstable ground. I thought one guy I
was involved with was really honest and up-front, and I found out he was
cheating on me. It just ripped me apart. How do I adjust? Do I not ex-
pect honesty from now on? Do I not expect people to be faithful to me?
Did I set myself up for that because I expected it to begin with?
Honesty within a relationship is very important. You talk about how
you feel, what you want. Everyone changes, but that's okay as long as you're
honest . I want more than anything else in a relationship for both of us to
be happy. That means if one of us decides it's not for him, that's really the
end of it. You want it to work and you hope it will work, and everything
tells you it should, but is that reality? I think honesty and happiness are
more important than long-term commitment . I don't believe relationships
should be like typical heterosexual marriages where the couple stays to-
gether just because they're married. You should be together because you
really love each other and you really want to be together, not just out of
habit, because that's all you know and you're scared.

I'm trying to come to terms with the guilt the church put on me for being
gay. I felt guilty about doing something that was wrong, and would go
over and over passages in the Bible that were supposedly referring to ho-
mosexuals. I never really understood it, but I had to believe it, and I had
so much conflict. My mother would watch The 700 Club, and a lot of their
programs really denounced gays. I would watch it and think, "Thank good-
ness I'm not really gay-it's just a passing thing." Every once in a while
there would be something on the news about a gay pride parade, and I'd
think about "those faggots that live in the cities-I'm not like them at all.
I'm not one of those." I tried very hard to be straight-got married and
did that whole route-and it didn't work. Finally, I was able to come to
terms with the fact that this is who I am and it is okay, it's fine. I was cre-
ated with just as much purpose in life as any heterosexual. I wish there was
some way I could convince my parents and my sisters of that . God made
me exactly who I am, and God wouldn't make me like this just to be cruel,
or to live the life religion teaches: If you're gay, well, it's okay, but just
don't practice at all.

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Ken Yliniemi 291

Paul, my high school friend, identifies himself as gay, but he will never
admit it to anyone else. I think everyone in the community knows, but no
one talks about it. Paul's life is the flip side of mine. I strove to please my
parents, to work hard and to excel, and he did just the opposite. When I
went away to college, Paul was still on the farm, and sometimes when I'd
come home on weekends we would get together. When I started seriously
dating women, I really didn't want to see him at all, so it ended. Occa-
sionally, Paul would call me when I was married, and I would tell my wife
it was just a guy from back home. He called this summer, when I was home
for my high school reunion. He had heard I was divorced, he was drunk,
and he wanted me to come over to his place really bad. I told him I had a
boyfriend, and even if I didn't I wouldn't want to come over to his place
because it was nothing more than just sex.

Copyrighted Material
 Clark Williams

Born in 1965, Clark grew up with four brothers and sisters on a small honey
and produce farm near Eau Claire, in Eau Claire County, northwestern Wis-
consin. Cia res introduction to his sexuality at rural, highway rest stops is the
focus of this brief narrative.

MY PARENTS WERE pretty open about sex. It was never something to

be ashamed of or to hide from. We all had "the talk," and if we needed
birth control, that was fine, we could have it. But homosexuality was
.never discussed. As much as my parents allowed us to explore who we
were, being gay was not an option.
When I was nineteen, I was walking in downtown Eau Claire one night
and a guy pulled over and said he wanted to give me a blow job. So I had
my first sexual relations with a man, in his car. I told myself! would never
do it again, but a couple weeks later I found myself walking down the same
street, looking for the same man. I didn't find him, but I found someone
else, and that started the whole thing. Suddenly I realized there were men
everywhere who were looking at me and who would have sex with me.
Mter I got my first blow job, I went gangbusters. The rest areas that
dot the rural highways were very active if you knew where to go. There
was a lot of great sex going on out there, some of it young-sixteen - and
seventeen-year-old boys. But most of the guys that I'd have sex with were
married. Sometimes they'd take their rings off, sometimes they wouldn't.
One time I had sex with the father of a kid I knew at school. Sometimes
people my own age would come by, but for a long time my only experi-
ence was with older men . I didn't have to do anything but lean back.
There was a very active rest area about two miles down the road from
the farm. It was dangerous, not knowing if the state patrol would drive up
or if my dad was going to pull over to take a piss. But I really got into that
game one summer. There was always a wide variety and I was good-look-
ing, so I never had any problems. I could do that and still date women. I
never really bothered myself wondering whether or not I was gay. It was
just something I was doing at the time, and I did it until I was about
twenty-three.

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Clark Williams 293

I wish I hadn't had to go through all that. I wish I could have fallen
in love with a boy at sixteen and had all the experiences that two sixteen··
year-olds should have with each other. My first role models were the older
men I was having anonymous sex with . I'm glad I was able to break away
from that, because I know a lot of people don't, and they go on and per-
petuate it. I've always wanted to know about those men-what they
thought, why they were like that, how they could do that and stay mar-
ried tor so many years. They're still doing it, with someone younger than
me who's taken my place. They taught me about sex, but not once did one
of them say that what we were doing was okay. It was always over quickly.
They were always wary: "No, don't give me your phone number. Let's
meet tomorrow night at 9:00." I wonder what I would have done if one
of them had said, "You really should find someone your own age, and I
think I can help you do it ."

Copyrighted Material
 Joe Shulka

Joe was born in 1966 and grew up on a SOO-acre dairy farm near Prairie du
Chien) in Crawford County) southwestern Wisconsin . He grew up with four
sisters) one older and three younger. Joe lives with his partner, Dallas Drake)
in Minneapolis.

MY BEST FRIEND Mike, who lives here in the Twin Cities, I've known
since kindergarten . There were six of us who hung together from almost
the very beginning, and five of us are gay. There were also peripheral
friends who liked to hang with us because we had a lot of fun together,
and all of them are gay. They were all town kids, so after school they would
do things together and I would want to be there, but before I got my driv-
er's license I had to go home on the school bus. And summers, they were
lounging around the house watching cable while I was throwing bales
and milking cows. But we were inseparable for most of high school, and
four of us went to the same college . I had friends in college who didn't
know any straight men from Prairie du Chien. They wondered if it was
something in the water. Out of a class of 138, we've identified thirteen
men and eight women . When my mother clutches her bosom as if to say
she's the only mother who gave birth to a gay son, I say, "Mom, would you
like the names of the other mothers? They all live here. Maybe you could
get together and have a kaffeeklatsch or something."
If there is a checklist to see if your kid is queer, I must have hit every
one of them-all sorts of big warning signs. I was always interested in a
lot of the traditional queen things-clothes, cooking, academics, music,
theater. No high heels, nothing like that, but my god, my parents must
have seen it coming. A farm boy listening to show tunes? From sixth grade,
I was in various choirs-large choir, madrigal groups, solo ensemble. My
four friends who happened to be queer were also in the choir group-five
men with forty-five women .
I was involved in high school play productions. I had no idea then, but
I'm sure the guy who directed our plays was gay. As a round teenage kid
who had no clue what was going on, I was totally infatuated with him. He
was six-foot-two, blond hair, green or blue eyes . One of my best images is

294

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Joe Shulka 295

of him showing up for play practice one night, sweaty, in a pair of lycra
running shorts and a tank shirt . He got a lot of flak because he taught
English and directed plays in a jock school. I would love to meet him again,
to have lunch with him and chat, because I'm sure he must have seen it in
all of us; he must have known we were little fledglings just waiting for it.
My parents very much frowned upon my activities because they took
me away from farmwork. They didn't attend my concerts or plays, and
that hurt. We've tried to work through those things, and I understand
where they were and what was going on. My parents had a hard time deal-
ing with me because I was so different from the young man they had hoped
I would be. God, it's amazing what you think when you get to be an adult.
I sound like I've gone through the Twelve Steps, and I'm now at peace
with my Higher Power. Memories of me just screaming at my mother come
to my mind, and now I say, "We had different sensitivities and sensibilities."

Right after my parents' wedding, it was one child after another-five kids
in six years. From a distance, we must have looked like the most perfect
little traditional farm family. Mom dressed us all the same-the vogue thing
to do in the seventies. She'd buy cloth by the bolt and all of us kids would
have matching striped shirts and plaid pants. My maternal grandparents
lived on the same farm, so we were almost like the Waltons, which we've al-
ways joked about-and even the Waltons had their deep, dark little secrets.
My sisters and I had rotating shifts to do weekend chores. We did the
milking, cared for the cattle, and cleaned out the barns. There was always
a lot to do on a day-to-day basis, and summers there was the planting of
oats and corn, and baling hay. My grandfather was our hired hand, so he
and Dad took care of most of it. I would help, but I think Dad saw my re-
sistance and just kind of gave up after a while.
Dad bought the farm from his father, and as soon as he had a son he
figured it was going to continue on for generations. There was a lot of dis-
appointment and strife when I went off to college. My mother would ask
me, "So, when are you going to stop this college stuff and come home
and work at the farm?" The farm was seen as the place where real work
was done; when you work, you get your hands dirty and you sweat . Mom
has only a high school education, and Dad doesn't even have that . He
dropped out of school during the Depression to work the farm and sup-
port the family. I'm the first generation ever to graduate from college, and
my parents wouldn't even attend my graduation.
My father just turned seventy, my mother is forty-six. Dad grew up
in the Great Depression, Mom came of age during Vietnam, so it was like
Woodstock and the Waltons. I have always been much closer to my mother;

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296 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

"I laugh hardest when I'm with my sisters. Within ten minutes we're just screaming,
tears rolling down, almost wetting ourselves." Joe Shulka, age 5, with sisters, center,
Krista, and Vicky. Courtesy of Joe Shulka.

we have the same perspective on a lot of things, the same sense of humor.
My father and I are as different as night and day, and have been kind of
distant, but we're getting closer now. There was so much work to be done
that we didn't see each other a whole lot. When I'd get home from school,
he was out working in the barn. We didn't have a whole lot of conversa-
tion. Summers there was some, but then Dad would start talking about
the Depression and the eyes would start rolling.

At six, I was totally infatuated with other boys my age. I have a cousin,
two years older, who grew up to be an absolutely stunning man. All the
really good looking genes of the family just funneled their way toward
him-all the tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, chiseled features. Bal-
ing hay with him was always a joy! When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I palled
around with my cousin Allen . He lived on a farm adjacent to ours. I hung

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Joe Shulka 297

with him a lot and almost idolized him, because he was thin and wiry and
a lot of the things I wanted to be. I was making a real conscious effort to
be more like a boy, more like I thought my father wanted me to be. I never
hunted or fished until I started palling with Allen. He was a very good
hunter, but I would walk around in the woods with him and purposely
step on sticks to frighten squirrels, and he would get very irritated. I had
then the attitude I have now: Why should you go out and kill some little
forest creature when you can run down to the Piggly Wiggly and get some-
thing larger and better-tasting that doesn't have fur on itr
I was an obese child, so physical education was the worst possible thing,
just awful. Basketball was my least favorite, because we always played shirts
and skins. Allen taught me how to play basketball, and I really made an ef-
fort-played every chance I got for almost a year-but I still sucked so
bad. I've been called faggot by other boys since I was probably seven. Even
my sisters would call me faggot or queer when they were pissed at me. I
don't even want to think about what kind of messed-up straight boy I
would be if I had been jeered and mocked and taunted as a kid for being
a faggot and a queer, and I wasn)t.
I entered puberty late, when I was maybe a junior in high school.
There's something about the hormones that pump through you when
you're seventeen years old that just galvanize locker-room images. There
was a classmate of mine in high school, Greg, whose father owned a trac-
tor dealership, so my dad did business with his dad. I don't know how
Greg's dad gave birth to seven sons who were just-oh my god!-every
single one of them was better than the last. All of them played football,
all of them played basketball, they were big, they were beefy, they were
brawny. It was like they all entered puberty at seven and started shaving
by the fifth grade. To this day I remember Greg's broad and hairy chest,
and his very tight blue jeans. My friend Mike, who's a quintessential size
queen, happened to see Greg naked once . I guess he was quite amply en-
dowed.
I didn't date at all in high school. Isolated on the farm with just the
family, miles away from town, it was easy not to have to deal with a lot of
that. I think my mother would have liked to see me date, because I know
she had inklings. When I was twenty, she and I were having one of those
bizarre conversations where you think you're talking about the same thing,
but you're really talking about different things, but you're answering ques-
tions based on what you think you're talking about . My mother turned to
me and said, "Well, have your" And I assumed she meant "Have you had
sex?", and I was still a virgin, so I said, "Well, no-no, I haven't ." Then
she realized what the question I was answering was, and she said, "That's

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not what I asked. But what do you mean you've never had sex? It's fun!
Live a little!" That's not what she told her daughters.
I came to terms with being gay long before I had sex. I think that's the
way I needed to do it. Again, I found a clique offriends in college who all
turned out to be gay. There was one October where thirty men came out
to me. It was ridiculous! I was in a male choir in college, and the men who
slept with women were definitely the minority. We did a tour of wom-
en's colleges in the Midwest, and those poor girls didn't get anything. We
would sing and go back to our own rooms, all paired off. I've known a
few women who thought they were dating me, but I've never dated women,
and I didn't date men until my third year in college. I thought dating was
supposed to be fun, like on The Brady Bunch. Greg and Marcia looked like
they were having a blast. Dating is a horrible, awful, vicious thing! I once
defined "a date" as the two to three hours of shared activity men display
in public preceding sex.

When I was twenty-one, my first lover and I went out for about a year. It
would prove to be the first of several relationships that were really bad
choices for me. When we started having problems, Rob started to show
signs he was not going to make it easy on me when we broke up. I had
pretty much decided to tell my parents I was gay, and was trying to sched-
ule time to go home to talk with them about it. Rob beat me to the punch
by just a few weeks. Out of the blue, he wrote a letter to my parents and
told them in no uncertain terms what their son was and who hewas. It was
addressed to my father, but thank god my mother opened it. My grand-
mother happened to be in the house when my mother read the letter and
burst into tears. They kept it from my dad for a year or two, thinking he
didn't need to know and that it would be too hard for him. It was real dif-
ficult for about six months, and there were two or three months where
we didn't speak at all. They just shut me out. We said some awful things to
each other. My sisters were working on my behalf to try to open things up.
It took a year or two before my mother was able to say the word "gay."
She would always refer to it as "his lifestyle," and when she said it she would
drop her voice. She's getting better about it, and so is Dad. He and I have
not had "the talk," even though he's met Dallas. It's just one of those things
I don't think my dad and I will talk about a whole lot. My parents haven't
had much exposure to people who are different, but they happen to have
given birth to five very enlightened, feminist kids. And having a gay son
and a lesbian daughter has kind of pushed them, kicking and screaming,
into realizing there's a lot of differences in the world.
Grandma took my being gay pretty tough, because she and my grand-

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Joe Shulka 299

father had only one child, my mother, and I'm the only grandson. So
there's a limb on the family tree that's pretty much snubbed. My dad looks
at it like that, too; the family name ends with him. They may still hold
near and dear to their hearts that if the right woman comes along I'll be
swayed, but I'm sorry, it's just not going to happen. I'm a Kinsey six.l

I am so envious of men who came out in high school. But if! had clearly
known I was gay at thirteen, I don't know what I would have done. There
was no one to turn to and the resources were just not there. God, I wish
there had been something to hide underneath my mattress! It would have
been so nice to have known at that time, because I wasn't putting a name
to how I was feeling. I wish I had known there were so many of us-that
I was not alone. My friends and I were all going through this big battle
that a lot of us didn't even know we were fighting, and that we would
have no clue about for years. We tried to peg feeling different on other
things. It's such a heterosexist world at that age, and sex was one subject
we never talked about when we were in high school. None of us experi-
mented with each other in high school, either. College was a different
matter.
I learned about sex from the World Book Encyclopedia in the sixth grade.
Since AlDS, I think the sexuality stuff is starting to infiltrate school sys-
tems in smaller cities. I know it is in my hometown. Whether or not it's
happening in a positive way, I don't know. I feel so much for kids in small
towns who haven't got an outlet. It would be so much easier to come out
if you felt like you had a safe place to come out to. My partner Dallas and
I have done some public speaking in small towns in Minnesota. We have
little cards for the Gay and Lesbian Helpline here in the Twin Cities, and
we go into libraries, find the books and files that have even the vaguest of
references to homosexuality, and slide these cards in them. Some kid is
going to search out that book, find the card, call the 1-800 number, and
talk with a friendly person who might actually say some positive, affirm-
ing gay thing to them.
Nobody told us that some of the authors we read in high school were
gay, that some of the music we heard was written by gay men. I feel like I
was cheated out of a whole culture. At college I was able to get a better
connection with it, and when I moved to Washington, D.C., I really saw
there was a culture, it wasn't just a bunch of men having sex. We had art,
we had history, we had music. It seemed like I found a home. There's so
much about gay culture I like. It's fun, it's creative. It's also catty and vi-
cious, but it's just so colorful. I wish you could inspire young kids who are
coming out to look at what's available to them. They don't have to do

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mainstream America. I know gay men who would love to be straight . My

god! White, middle-class, Protestant, college-educated. If it weren't for
being gay, I would be part of the horrible majority. I don't see Range
Rovers and car-seats in my future. I see gala balls and Halloween masquer-
ades and horrible drag shows and pride festivals, tit-piercing and tattoos
and big, burly lesbians in leather jackets. And then there's that whole other
side of it, where they take off the leather jackets and teach Sunday school.
I live in one of the gay neighborhoods of the Twin Cities, and a cou-
ple years ago I was beaten up two blocks from my house. A friend and I
were walking across the street and a car ran a stop sign and tried to hit us.
Then he got out and beat the shit out of me. There was nothing overt
about us. Neither of us were wearing any gay insignia; we weren't even
talking at the time . But people see us and jump to that conclusion, and
there's a segment of the population that will act viciously on those as-
sumptions. I learned a lot from the experience and became very vocal about
my bashing; I did a lot of public speaking and interviews. Now Dallas and
I make it a point to make public displays of affection. You try to explain it
to people who are not gay by telling them to imagine going out with their
date and not being able to kiss them or hold their hand or put their arm
around them.

I grew up eight miles from town, and I always thought it was a great dis-
tance, mostly because my father drove only about thirty miles an hour.
"Set the cruise control for thirty? Come on, Dad, cars can go faster than
tractors!" The isolation was compounded by the whole sexuality issue and
by my strengths being in academics. That sense of isolation pushes you to-
gether. It's infuriating to have seven people in a house with four bedrooms
and one bathroom, but you overhear each other's conversations, you talk
to each other, you bump into each other constantly, you really get to know
each other.
Despite living in different cities and states, we're a pretty close-knit
family and they're very important to me . I call my mother two or three
times a month and we'll chat . When I was having such a problem with my
folks about my sexuality, I was furiously angry, but there was no way I
could cut them out. They're too important. I need their support so much,
to hear good things from them, to hear about what's going on back home.
I laugh the hardest when I'm with my sisters. Within ten minutes we're
just screaming, tears rolling down, almost wetting ourselves. My dad just
looks at us like "What is with those kids?" Lisa is a lesbian, very open, very
vocal. She's thirteen months younger than I, but it's like we were switched
at birth. She was such the tomboy, and I was such the wuss. I would be

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Joe Shulka 301

given toy trucks and rifles, and Lisa would play with them. I would play
with dolls and she would have war games and blow up my GI Joes. To
have it be a surprise for either one of my parents-come on! Were you
guys paying attention for fifteen or twenty years?
Lisa is the sister I'm most like, for a variety of reasons, our inverted
sexualities being one of them. We feel like the odd people out, the other
part of the family tree, and that kind of pulls us together. I love her dearly,
and she's the one I wish I was closest to, but we have different ways of get-
ting things done, different views of the world and politics. In particular,
she is becoming a real man-hating dyke, a separatist. Every year her hair
gets shorter.
Lisa has been in a relationship now for almost five years. Her girlfriend,
Pam, is such an integral part of the family. She has been at every Christ-
mas, every Thanksgiving, everything, first as my sister's roommate, then
as her partner and lover. So when my parents choked on my sexuality, I
said, "Wait a minute! What do you mean I can't bring anybody home?
You have a lesbian daughter who's been bringing her girlfriend home for
years, and you know it." But I don't think my parents could conceive of a
sexual relationship between two women, whereas-very graphically and
luridly-my mother could picture her baby boy being sodomized. My
mother is convinced that all gay men do is have sex, and Lisa perpetuates
it when she says, "All you do is fuck." Lisa says when she goes to Gay Pride
she sees the lesbian couples with their babies, and a lot of single men being
bawdy and ostentatious. She doesn't realize that kind of overt sexuality
and camp is very much a part of our culture.
It's not just lesbians who are out there having long-term committed
relationships. I think a lot of gay men are looking for one person to share
their life with. A lot of us want and hope for that . Whether or not we have
the skills to get it is a whole different thing. I learned a lot about rela-
tionships by not falling into one, by making it a point to be single for al-
most two years. Dallas and I have been together a little over a year, and he
is the only partner I've ever wanted to bring home. I say partner because
the rest of them have all been boyfriends, and I see Dallas in a whole dif-
ferent light.
I never would have thought I would be able to bring Dallas home, but
about two months ago we were going to be driving to Chicago and he
asked me if I wanted to stop at my parents' place. I suggested it to my
mother, just off-the-cuff. "But I'm not coming home with any pretenses,"
I said. "Dallas is coming as my boyfriend. And no, we're not going to have
sex on the kitchen table." Mom was really taken aback, but I had given her
time to ask Dad and Grandma if they would be comfortable with it. They

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had a lot of preconceived notions, having never met any of my boyfriends.

I'd had a couple of really awful relationships, Rob being the first one. Then
I had a lover when I lived in D.C. who turned out to be a psychotic killer.
Mom knew about that one, too, so she was probably wondering what kind
of Jeffrey Dahmer look-alike I was going to be bringing home, or what
kind of flaming, ostentatious queen wearing a tutu.
I told Dallas, "You're not only going to be meeting my parents, you're
going to be meeting my entire family. They've all found an excuse to come
home this weekend ." When Dallas and I pulled up and he was just a real
average -looking, nice, cordial kind of guy, I think it blew them all to hell.
The stress level was high, but they were all really nice, very civil, and a lot
of fun . Dad talked to Dallas more than he talked to me. My grandma was
a little jittery, up-front and personal, and her smile was stretched very thin,
but she was very cordial. Everybody was being civil about as long as they
could. When we pulled out I said to Dallas, "I think if we had stayed an-
other hour, my grandmother would have had a stroke."

When I was maybe ten, Dad fell down beside a cow and was repeatedly
kicked. His leg was broken in many places and his ribs were cracked. It
happened in April, just as planting season was starting, and he was in a
wheelchair and crutches for a long time; the cast came off in November.
Dad came from a large family, so we had lots of help that entire season .
There were crews to do the planting, the cultivating, the haying, and to
help with the milking. I had cousins I hadn't even known about. I don't
know of any other occupation where something like that would happen.
It's not just an occupation, it's a whole culture.
In the last six months, my father has decided to sell the farm. I'll be
glad to see Dad not working so much, but it's going to be hard to sell the
farm, because it really is a part of everyone of us kids, and very much a
part of my father. With Dad planning to sell the farm, there's a lot of peo-
ple who are looking on it as a real loss, because he's been at it for fifty years
in the same place, and the farm has really changed under him . I feel some
guilt, but I think Dad and Mom have come to terms with the fact that I've
chosen a life of my own. I know there's been a real longing for me to be
there so that it would continue, but Dad has said he doesn't want his kids
to do it, because you have to work too hard for too little money and recog-
nition. He wants his kids to have a better life, and he sees it off the farm .
I never thought much of the farm growing up; it was just where I al-
ways was. Then there was a time when I thought the farm was a really bad
place to grow up, because I felt I missed out on a lot of things. Now I re-
alize how important it was, and I know that huge tract of land so inti-

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Joe Shulka 303

mately. I can traipse around in the woods and know my way in and out.
We used to joke that we lived on Walton's Mountain, because our farm is
perched on top of a very steep hill. It's a very bluffy area, but it wasn't
until I went away that I realized how beautiful the area really is. When I
look down those precipices, those virtual cliffs we pushed ourselves off of
on toboggans, sleds, and inner tubes, I'm amazed that we weren't killed!

Postscript: In 1994, I set up the "Shulka Scholarship for Social Equity" at

my high school in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Applicants were to write
essays on topics such as government, gay history, AIDS, racism, and lead-
ership. The school was eager to offer a scholarship from an alumnus, but
when the school board found out I was gay they attempted to bar my
scholarship . Although it ended up being allowed, the climate that was cre-
ated resulted in no applications. In its place, I purchased two dozen books
on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themes for the high school li-
brary. I hope that these books will help educate students so that they will
be eager to apply for my scholarship in coming years. I am working with
several other gay alumni to set up additional gay-positive scholarships at
Prairie High and in surrounding small towns.

NOTE

1. In describing himself as "a Kinsey six," Joe is referring to a scale developed

by sex researcher Alfred C . Kinsey, who viewed homosexuality and heterosexu-
ality as parts of a continuum. An individual's position on the seven-point Kinsey
scale was based on both psychological reactions and overt experience. The scale
ranged from zero (those whose histories were exclusively heterosexual) to six (those
whose histories were exclusively homosexual).

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 Todd Ruhter

Todd was born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1967, and grew up with a younger
brother on a farm/ranch near Prosser, in Adams County, south-central Ne-
braska. His father and two uncles farmed about 2,000 acres of row crops-
corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo. In addition, his father ran and calved out
about 500 head of cattle. At the time of our interview, Todd lived in Omaha.

BEING GAY HAS never really bothered me-there it was and that was it.
I'd always been different in every other way from everybody I grew up
with. What the hell was one more thing? And nobody else around me had
ever been perfect. I still couch it in terms of, "Okay, I'm not perfect, but
nobody else is." Friends will say they wish they were straight, but it's kind
of silly to wish for something you're not. And being gay is my only claim
to minority understanding. Otherwise, I'm a complete majority person:
white, male, Republican. If! wasn't gay, would I know that there's a whole
other world out there besides Prosser, Nebraska? I really would have missed
something if I didn't know anything besides my family, my farm, my
church, my small town. So, in that sense, maybe being gay is the best thing
for me.
Where I came from, social life consisted of dating the girl you were
supposed to marry, going to a movie, and sitting in a hometown bar talk-
ing about the same things every day. When I was twenty-two and first
came out, the gay scene in Lincoln seemed ultra-exotic and fascinating.
There were new people to meet, new ways to talk and think and dress, new
music. I had no clue how to operate socially, but it was fun to learn, to fig-
ure out how to fit in. Here in Omaha I know I've been laughed at and
looked at as stupid because I come from the country, so a lot of times I
don't tell people. You just kind of dust over your tracks. You try not to talk
like you're from the farm, you don't act like you care about the weather.
It's almost like being gay twice; you hide two things instead of one.
Some people assume that if you're gay you're going to move to the
biggest city and wear the flamiest clothes and learn how to walk the swish.
I would rather be able to go back to live in my hometown-maybe not
find the perfect mate, but be happy with what I'm doing. I've never met

304

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Todd Ruhter 305

anybody else who loved where they came from as much as or more than
they loved being gay. Where I came from is as important as what I am. In
fact, it's hard for me to separate the place from the person. I listen to coun-
try music and I go out of town to do rodeo on as many weekends as I can.
I have the big belt buckle I won in college and I have the big black hats in
the closet, which I like to wear. If! go home for a weekend, I start talk-
ing like a redneck. When I get boisterous, I'm very physical. My family was
not above rassling, and it wasn't unheard-ofto hit somebody if you argued.

My brother Tony and I started driving the pickup on the farm at age six,
as soon as we could reach the pedals. We also learned how to drive a trac-
tor right away; we started out doing the things that didn't require a whole
lot of brains. Disking a field a quarter-section in size didn't require driv-
ing straight. You could just drive and tear up dirt. When you got into
junior high, you were old enough to cultivate corn. Hopefully, along the
way, you'd learn to do all this right and you'd pick up all the mechanical
skills. I never did. I was always saying, "Dad, I don't know what's wrong,
but it's not working." I felt I had to prove I could do things, but I wasn't
getting it and Tony was. Until Tony came along, my dad would tolerate
teaching me things. But it was obvious that Tony was what my father
wanted-the next generation of farmer. There was something that was
drawing them together-or at least not pushing them apart-that wasn't
there with Dad and me . It drove me crazy! From then on, my father and
I grew further and further apart.
Riding along with my dad, meeting people, I picked up the ability to
do people and to bullshit . He knows everybody for a hundred miles around
and can buy and sell livestock at the best price . I can still meet someone
and, just like he does, pick up and go with it right away-have a best friend
within five minutes and forget their name within ten. But as much as my
dad can read other people and figure them out, I don't think he's ever
been able to figure me out, and I've never been able to figure him out.
It's probably been like that from the minute I hit the ground. It always
seems like he's so far across the room from me, and there's a big, invisible
wall between us.
In the early eighties, things started to get really tight financially. If we
didn't get rid of the farm, we were going to lose it. So we consolidated-
kept the cattle and got rid of the farm. We bucked up and went on, but it
was really tough, because my family was pretty well-known. It was a small
town and they were all related or knew each other somehow. All of a sud-
den, our finances went public. My family was devastated by that. We were
a very uptight, anal-retentive German farm family that wanted things done

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306 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

so it looked nice, no matter what. My family auctioneers on the side . Here

we had been selling people out, and now we were getting sold out .

My father would stop at the local bar and stay until it closed, and Mom
would sit up and wait for him. She would be so angry with him, and she'd
be angry with herself for being so upset . You knew when she put a Hank
Williams record on that she was waiting for him to come home. Lying in
bed, seven years old, listening to Hank Williams, I knew there was trou-
ble, that it was going to be cold, cold, cold the next day, and it was going
to be my job to put her in a good mood. I spent a lot of time with her and
got to hear a lot of her gripes. That probably explains some of the distance
between me and my father.
I got glasses at an early age . A quiet, skinny, sandy-blond kid, I was
never terribly social, and I talked to myself a lot. I started to read a year
and a half before I was in kindergarten, so you could usually find me in
the quietest place in the house with a book. People lived so far away that
I didn't know the kids I went to school with. I excelled in school, but I
kind of kept myself separate, and would just go home at night and do my
little things. The farm was a half mile from the Platte River, in a beauti-
ful valley with rich pasture and great big cottonwood trees. I had collec-
tions of rocks and leaves, and I could tell you what every kind of plant was.
My uncles and grandparents could discipline us just like my mother
and father could . Everybody and everything was community property.
And everybody in town knew me as one of Stan Ruhter's boys . I would
stay at my grandparents' in Prosser for days on end, almost every week-
end . They had a big house with empty rooms where my dad and my three
uncles had lived, so I had my own room there. Like my father, my grand-
father was gone a lot, buying sheep in South Dakota and Wyoming. I was
my grandmother's replacement for my grandfather and her sons like I was
my mother's replacement for my father. I was the first grandchild, and
males were always the center of attention, so I had the run of the place for
a long time.
Grandma taught me things most guys never learned because they were
too busy doing whatever with their fathers. She would buy books for me
and take me to the library. She taught me how to take care of plants, how
to know what's what, how to garden. Her mail-order catalog from Gur-
ney's of Yankton, South Dakota, the biggest seed farm in the Midwest,
came every January when it was really cold and nasty, and I was just en-
thralled with it. My grandmother would come down and check out my
garden and give me advice. My parents' thing was that they were going
to be the perfect role-model family. So, when I was doing weird things like

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Todd Ruhter 307

planting a humongous garden at age ten, they had to find some way to ex-
plain why I was at home doing the gardening and not out farming like my
brother, who was only seven . So it had to be the best garden there ever was.
If you were a guy, you were born to farm. You were born to be a total,
typical, straight male- to play sports, to hunt, to do everything a guy was
supposed to do. I knew from the beginning that I didn't fit into that .
Everybody else knew it too, so they pushed me for a long time, until I was
in junior high and they realized it wasn't going to work. The whole time,
my father and I battled each other. It was a long, drawn-out warfare. Ifhe
said up, I'd say down. If he said black, I'd say white . Neither of us would
ever admit that the other one could be right. I was frustrated that I couldn't
be right on his terms. I wanted to be, but I just couldn't think like him.

I'm turning out to be just like my father was-in my temper, my ability

to filter facts so I don't give out too much information about myself, my
inability to communicate how I feel. I've become this big stoic man around
the house who just works a lot and doesn't come home, who pays the bills
and ignores everything else. My family's not an emotional family, not physi-
cally expressive at all. We can't get past a handshake. Like the Germans who
never smile in their pictures, we just kind of sit around with grim faces . A
horrible way to live, but I still lapse into it if! don't think about it.
Since my father stopped drinking in 1985, '86, he and I are starting
to get along a little better. He just turned fifty and he's starting to real-
ize he can't be on top of everything forever. Now we talk, and he listens
to what I say and agrees with me occasionally. He calls to ask for advice,
and we talk about cattle prices, the weather, who's got a new pickup . I ask
him for advice, which is a change for me, and he tells me- or says he
doesn't know, which is new for him. He's mellowed, and I don't feel like
I'm in competition or trying to prove anything to him anymore, so I can
learn things a lot easier. For years I couldn't figure out how to do things,
because he told me I had to.
I don't teel the need to talk to my mother as much as I used to . I try
to keep it down to once a month. She probably thinks things are getting
more distant, but I think things are just moderating after all these years.
I used to talk to her a lot more simply because I felt I had to, to make her
teel good about herself when she felt lonely and double-burdened. My
mother is the ultimate farm wife. She can pull a calf, muck through mud,
load fifty head of cattle on a truck, stand in five-degree weather for hours.
Since conception, she taught me how to ride a horse. She would take me
to horse shows and leave me in the playpen on the shady side of the horse
trailer while she rode . She can cowboy with the best of them, she's tougher

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308 Part 3. Between the Mid-1970s and Mid-1980s

than nails, and she still manages to dress up and go out . If I had to have
a wife, that would be the kind I'd want .
I'm not out with my family. There's really no point, and financially it
would be stupid. All the money I make, beyond what it takes for me to
live, I send home to put into cattle and investments there. The money goes
into one account and pays for everything, so I have a share in the deal, but
no legal recourse. I'm in the will, but I'm not legally in the partnership.
So I sure don't want to do anything that would jeopardize what I've spent
seven years working for. I don't know if my parents would do anything,
but I would be scared to find out. And I'm not really big on telling them
too much about what's going on in my life in the first place . My mother
knows something is up, and I think she always has, but she has never asked.
They're very appearance-oriented, and as long as they don't actually know
it, it's not real.
If you want to educate somebody, tell them you're gay. But there's a
time to tell people, when they're able to learn. My parents aren't ready to
know this yet . They're just figuring out where they are at age fifty and
forty-eight. I wouldn't want to infringe on that to save my life. Whenever
they're ready to hear, which may never happen, they can hear. I don't have
any problem with telling them . I haven't done anything else they've ex-
pected me to do . But even if! thought they might be ready, I'm not sure
I trust my judgment enough, considering what they have of mine finan-
cially, and how they could really hurt me. They are the keystone of my phys-
ical safety and my ability to interact in the community where I grew up .
There will come a time, when my father is done working, that I'll have
the option to go home . I'll have half of what he has, if I don't screw it up.
I wonder what he would do if he knew. The whole thing with my family
has always been, if it's wrong, don't tell anybody, and make sure it's not
wrong in the first place. To make sure I never told anybody at home would
be the ultimate damage control for them, because for anybody there to
find out would theoretically destroy the business for them and destroy
the way they're treated in town . I understand and respect that, and I don't
want to push them too hard, but I also want them to make sure that if
they can't deal with it, they don't force me to tell them. So we kind of
have a little standoff.
Tony and I beat the bejeebers out of each other for the first fifteen
years, but we've gotten to be pretty close. He'll come down and see me,
or I'll go see him, or we'll go to Denver or Lincoln together. Sometimes
we rodeo together. It's frustrating, because rodeo is a straight world, but
it's fun. I've gotten involved with gay rodeo; there's one in Kansas, and
they're starting one here in Omaha. When I first heard about it, I thought,

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Todd Ruhter 309

Yes, all right! I'd love to meet somebody in a gay rodeo. Then I realized
that a lot of people were doing it as just a humorous sideline. I'm learn-
ing to get into that, but it makes my teeth itch a little bit . If rodeo's not
done traditionally, the way I'm used to it, I shy away from it. Where I
grew up, rodeo was serious stuff-fun, but not campy fun. Everybody who
was worth anything rodeoed. If you were a cowboy, you were cool. We al-
ways said, "Cowboy is as cowboy does." It isn't necessarily a big hat and
big boots . It's what you do and how you think. I have a little fetish for
straight cowboys .

It was preordained that I wasn't going to farm . My family knew as well as

I did that it wasn't working for me, and I don't think they relished the
idea of having to work with me, so they just kind of hustled me out . Since
then, I've learned how to judge livestock and how to ride and rope bet-
ter. I started riding big feedlots to check the cattle, rope the sick ones, haul
them out, doctor them. It was hard work but great money. I've worked on
ranches in the sandhi lis in western Nebraska two summers-fixed machin-
ery, changed tires, moved livestock, fixed fence, tore pickups apart and re-
built them. Things I supposedly didn't know how to do, I was able to do
spontaneously and very well. I've realized the reason I didn't like to do it,
or wasn't good at it, was because I didn't want to.
I'm moving back home in about a month. My father is going in for
surgery, and he'll be incapacitated for three months. He's got cattle to
take care of, so I'm going to be the rancher I never was. We live on Big
Island, about eleven miles long, three miles wide; the Platte River goes
around it. It's very swampy, so most of the work on the ranch has to be
done on horses . My mother and I are going to calve out five hundred head
of cattle by ourselves this winter. I've learned how to do all the basics of
it, but I've never proved it on my home turf. I haven't done that kind of
physical work for years, so it'll be tough. It's going to be cold, and I'm
sure there are going to be times when I'll wish I hadn't done it, but I
think overall it's going to be fun. I've wanted to go back anyway, to prove
to myself! could do it, so I'm going to do it until May, come hell or high
water. If it works out, I'll stay longer.
When I've gone back home I've sometimes thought it must be obvi-
ous to a lot of people that I'm gay. It really wasn't, though, because they
couldn't conceive of it; it just wasn't an option. But now that gay people
are moving back to Hastings and Grand Island and coming out, and peo-
ple are starting to learn and understand more, it may be harder for me to
keep my cover. But no matter what, I'm one of theirs. Even though peo-
ple there are very cliquish and they know what you do and talk about you,

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you really can do what you want as long as you're their own. They'd tol-
erate just about anything as long as you paid your social dues and didn't
push it. If! were HIV-positive and got sick, I'd go home . No matter how
much they would hate the idea, they'd take care of me back there, because
I'm one of theirs.
Most of the gay people I've met who come from farms have ditched
everything they came from. They believe they had to leave the farm if they
wanted to be gay. They have never seen it as, "I'm gay, I'm from a farm,
I'm proud of it and it's still a part of my life, and I will go back there ."
They think farm life is horribly boring, it's so repressive, country music is
so stupid, they all dress so dumb, they all have such bad hobbies, they're
all so fat and dumpy. But it wasn't that bad . It wasn't any worse than life
here in Omaha, or in any city. I wonder why we're brave enough to face
some of the things we put ourselves through here every day, but we can't
face the idea of living at home.
So many times I've felt like I'm out here on my own, a whole differ-
ent breed from the people I see in the gay communities of Omaha and
Lincoln. I'm always searching for the person who's going to match me,
for someone who comes from my background, is not embarrassed or in -
timidated by it, and is willing to make sacrifices to go back to it. I would
love to have somebody significant in my life who can tolerate it, because
we won't be able to be as close there as here . Nobody's dumb enough to
be openly gay there, and it would be pushing it to live together, not be-
cause people would scorn you but because they could physically hurt you .
Living together might be okay in Hastings or Grand Island, as long as you
didn't hang out too much with the neighbors.
I'm anxious to see what kind of people I meet when I go back, because
now I know what I'm looking for, and I know how to spot someone else
who's gay. There used to be a gay bar in Grand Island, so it'll be interest-
ing to see where people are meeting, what bathrooms are cruisey. It'll be
interesting to see if there are people back there who made the choice to
give up the career life or the social life to live where they wanted.

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 Afterword

IN THE COURSE of working on the Gay Farm Boys Project, I happened

upon a book titled Farm Boy, by Archie Lieberman. l A photographer for
Look magazine, Lieberman became acquainted with a farm family in north-
western Illinois in the mid-1950s and gained their cooperation in creat-
ing a wonderful photographic record of farm family life from that time
through the 1960s. The book's primary focus is the family's only son: his
childhood and adolescence, coming of age, marriage, fatherhood, and in-
heritance of the family farm.
Lieberman's work celebrates the life of a boy who grew up to fit the
mold of farm culture, to follow a conventional life path, to complete the
generational cycle of family farm continuity. He managed "to be the square
peg in the square hole," as James Heckman put it in our interview. I have
seen the Gay Farm Boys Project as something of a tribute to the lives of
boys who come to discover that, however much they may have a sense of
belonging on the farm, something fundamental in their natures makes mis -
fits of them in farm culture. A few of the men whose life stories are pre-
sented here have remained in rural communities or have gone back to them,
but most of these men have responded to their feelings of being misfits by
removing themselves from the farm to the city or suburbs.
In light of this rural-to-urban migration, these men's stories describe
how their midwestern farming heritage has influenced their choices and
identities as gay men, how they see themselves in relation to gay men from
urban or suburban backgrounds, and how they fit into their local gay com-
munities . For many of them, the dislocation ofliving in an urban culture
after growing up rural was in some ways similar to that of being gay but
living in a heterosexist culture; in both regards, they felt like outsiders.
"Here in the city I'm kind of out of my element," said Wayne Belden,
who had lived in Chicago for about twenty years. "I just have to get on as
best I can, gaining some things and losing some."
What had these gay men lost and gained in leaving the farm commu -
nities of their childhoods and leading more urban lives? Certainly they
had lost the ability to pursue farming on a day-to-day basis as either a liveli-
hood or a way oflife. To varying degrees, they had lost intimate connec-
tions that had developed during their childhoods-to their homelands,
their home farms, their families and home communities. For some men,

311

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312 Afterword

Boy in Calf Pen, by Jeff Kopseng, based on a photo courtesy of Todd Moe

losing these relationships with places and persons had sparked significant
crises of identity.
But their losses seemed to have been tempered by important gains.
Putting some distance between themselves and the farm had made it pos-
sible for many of these men to come out more readily to themselves and
to their parents and other family members. And as they had distanced them-
selves from the rural communities of their childhoods, many of them had
gained a broader perspective on their lives. Greater exposure and access to
resources and role models had helped them explore and discover what it
can mean to be a man beyond the confines of the traditional gender roles
with which they grew up. Most of these men had achieved a reasonably
comfortable acceptance of their own ways of identifying and living as gay

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Afterword 313

men. Exposure to the urban diversity of gay men's lives had led some of
them to become more comfortable with ways of being gay that differed
from their own.
In the city, these men were more able to connect with others like them-
selves, to cultivate friendships as well as intimate and committed relation-
ships. They were more able to develop community connections across the
boundaries of sexual orientation, interweaving their lives as openly gay men
with those of gay and non-gay friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and co-
workers . Many of these men had benefitted from the greater range of op-
portunity afforded by city life in education, employment, entertainment,
spirituality, and volunteer involvement. Becoming politically involved in
issues related to sexual orientation had led some of these men to move be-
yond the "that's just the way things are" fatalism that is often character-
istic of farm culture .

What had farming communities lost and urban communities gained as

many of these gay farm boys had become city men? This question acquired
a particular significance for me on a recent day in early spring. Taking a
break from writing, I had gone for a walk with my mate Bronze in a nearby
park that is home to scores of Canada geese in the heart of Milwaukee.
On the occasion of a visit to my home farm, Bronze had suggested that
we take a bushel of corn back to Milwaukee to feed the geese that raise
their broods in the park. As we threw handfuls of this corn to the hungry
flock, it occurred to me that Bronze had found an urban outlet for the
animal husbandry impulses rooted in his own farm upbringing. In addi-
tion to feeding the waterfowl, Bronze makes occasional efforts to clean up
the forlorn park by collecting litter and salvaging trash cans and picnic ta-
bles that have been pushed into the pond by neighborhood vandals.
Had they felt there was a place for them in farming, some of these men
would have no doubt brought to their farmwork a meticulous aptitude
and commitment to animal husbandry and the "housekeeping" involved
in caring for livestock. Though it is unlikely that most of them would have
engaged in fieldwork with as much enthusiasm, they would have no doubt
been similarly painstaking in their care of machinery, fields, and crops.
Having grown up in families in which it was common for the household
economy to depend on the labor of children as well as adults, it is likely
that their approaches to farming would have been informed by a hard-
working, persistent passion to be productive and nurturing. In their urban
communities, many of these men had found outlets for these impulses in
their employment as well as in family, community, church, and volunteer
commitments.

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314 Afterword

In losing many of their gay sons to the cities, farming communities

had lost solid citizens. In gaining these transplanted citizens, the cities
had acquired some exemplary homemakers and gardeners. Many of these
men tended to be homebodies, oriented more to domestic life than to so-
ciallife. In their perspectives on matters of politics, gender, and sex, they
leaned toward the conventional and conservative. Their views on the re -
lation of gay people to the mainstream community were consistent with
the rural preference for blending in rather than setting oneself apart. Often
feeling like outsiders in their urban gay communities, they tended to see
their own views as representing a sensible and pragmatic counterpoint to
the more extreme positions of their city- bred peers.

In ways that reflected their diverse personalities, nearly all of these men
seemed to believe that changing anti-gay attitudes depended on gay peo-
ple being good citizens-responsible, self-reliant, productive, "regular"
people. "It makes me very sad that a lot of people think we're all a bunch
of perverts running around," Everett Cooper commented in our inter-
view. "And not only do they think that, but they choose to think that-
they choose not to know the other side of it. I would like somehow to be-
come politically forceful in changing that perception." Many of these men
seemed to believe that the only way to effect this kind of progress was for
gay people to go as far as they could to make their sexual orientation known
to all with whom their lives intersected. However, several men saw this
kind of openness as counterproductive, and inconsistent with being "reg-
ular" people.
If the prospect of staying in their rural communities had not appeared
to be so incompatible with leading honest , unconstricted lives, more of
these men might have made their homes in farm communities-some of
them as farmers, perhaps. If they had been able to live in these places as
openly gay men, they might have helped to diminish the silence, igno-
rance, and prejudice that surrounds homosexuality by demonstrating to
their rural communities the possibilities of living fulfilling, meaningful,
"wholesome" lives outside of the mainstream mold. From their homes in
the often more diverse and supportive environment of the city, many of
these men hoped that their efforts for social change would eventually reach
the minds and hearts of those back on the farm as well.
Since the late 1980s, AlDS has prompted an unprecedented reversal in
the rural-to-urban migration of gay men, as many HIV-infected men have
moved back to their parents' rural and small-town homes. "If! were HIV-
positive and got sick, I'd go home," Todd Ruhter remarked in our inter-
view. "No matter how much they would hate the idea, they'd take care of

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Afterword 315

me back there, because I'm one of theirs." Unlike any other force, AIDS
has pushed rural midwestern communities to acknowledge that gay men's
lives are connected intimately to their own.
Many ofthe HIV-infected men who have returned to their home com -
munities have found that attitudes toward homosexuality remain grounded
in ignorance and prejudice. In many cases, AIDS and homosexuality have
simply been lumped together in the same swaddling of silence. Perhaps
the devastation ofHIV will provide an opening to greater understanding
and acceptance of the diversity of affectional and sexual identity. However,
if the disease elicits little more than a resigned and pitying "taking care of
our own" response, intolerant attitudes and beliefs will be left essentially
unchanged and the tragedy of AIDS will be amplified. Will families and
communities move toward truly embracing their gay sons and brothers
and neighbors, more as "one of us" than as "one of ours?" Or will their
response be little more than the embrace of smug samaritans extending
love and support to those wayward souls who have come home to die?

Among the many things that have influenced my approach to this project
has been my acquaintance with the life and writings of Willa Cather. A
lesbian who grew up in rural and small-town Nebraska in the 1880s, Cather
was a quintessential misfit who felt that she couldn't live in her home state
as an adult . But from the comfortable distance of the urban Northeast,
she was able to write many novels and short stories based on her Nebraska
childhood. Cather made frequent visits to her home-state throughout her
life. In her late forties, she reflected on her life in New York City, on her Ne-
braska visits of earlier years, and on what compelled her to write her first
Nebraska novel, 0 Pioneers!2
There I was on the Atlantic coast among dear and helpful friends and
surrounded by the great masters and teachers with all their tradition of
learning and culture, and yet I was always being pulled back into Ne -
braska. Whenever I crossed the Missouri River coming into Nebraska the
very smell of the soil tore me to pieces . I could not decide which was the
real and which the fake "me." I almost decided to settle down on a quar-
ter section of land and let my writing go .... I knew every farm, every
tree, every field in the region around my home, and they all called out to
me .... I had searched for books telling about the beauty of the country
I loved, its romance, and heroism and strength and courage of its people
that had been plowed into the very furrows of its soil, and I did not find
them. And so I wrote 0 Pioneers '3
Before Cather got around to writing this novel, which celebrates the
European settlement of Nebraska, she had written short stories related to

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316 Afterword

pioneer life in Nebraska. According to one Cather biographer, her response

to her homelands in these works was one of "almost unmitigated hate and
fear. ... In her early stories she rendered what was hard and bleak and cruel
in the state's way of life-the collapse, for instance, of minds and bodies
in the struggle with the land, the pressure of convention in the village,
the imperviousness to art .... " Her reaction was said to be in "opposition
to forces that seemed to her monstrously strong and a threat to her dif-
ferentness, to the core of what she felt herself to be. To look at Nebraska
otherwise, to contemplate it with some objectivity and appreciation,
Willa Cather needed to go away for a long time and to achieve success."4
As freedom and distance changed Cather's perspective, those same con-
ditions have been important for most of the men whose stories are pre-
sented here. This is not to say that all of these men were inclined, as Cather
apparently was, to look back on their childhoods objectively and with ap-
preciation. Their recollections and assessments range from the sentimen-
tal to the severe. But like Cather, many of these men brought to their life
stories the unique perspective of individuals who had gone from being mis-
fits in their rural communities to being misfits in the more urban com-
munities they had come to call home .
"In certain ways," Richard Kilmer observed in our interview, "grow-
ing up on a farm and moving to the city was like being from a different
country and moving to the United States." Perhaps this conjunction of
rural and urban experience, somewhat like the experience of being an
international immigrant, had made it possible for many of these men to
achieve richer perspectives on life than would have been afforded by either
rural or urban life alone. So it seems to me . Whether I have found myself
reacting to their stories by nodding my head or by shaking it, whether
their words have roused me to laughter or to despair, my own life has been
enriched by collaborating with these farm boys in telling about their lives.

NOTES

1. Archie Lieberman. 1974. Farm Boy. New York: Abrams.

2. Willa Sibert Cather. 1913. 0 Pioneers! Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
3. L. Brent Bohlke, ed. 1986. Willa Cather in Person . Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, p. 37.
4 . Edward K. Brown and Leon Edel. 1953. Willa Cather: A Critical Biogra-
phy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. viii.

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 Postscript

"What storytellers, and what stories!" a man in Nebraska wrote to me

after reading Farm Boys. Although he had grown up in a small town on the
North Carolina coast, he wrote, "the emotional experiences these guys
describe sound very familiar. Their crushes and loneliness and hobbies I
can easily relate to. It's fascinating to me that while some of them enjoyed
working outdoors and others were more drawn to housework, except for
one or two they all hated basketball! Me too!!"
As I awaited publication of Farm Boys, I was a little concerned that some
readers might object to my generalizations about "the gay farm boy."
What if there had been great bias in the composition of my group of inter-
view subjects, leading me to create a portrait that was lopsided or in-
complete? Although I did not intend this work to be definitive, I did not
want it to misrepresent.
It has been a pleasure to find that every response I have had from "gay
farm boys" affirms the general portrait . "That's my life you're talking
about!" is something I have heard from many readers. "It's strange," a
man in a small town in western Pennsylvania said, "but even now, so
many years away from my farm days, it is still reassuring to know that that
bewildered, scared, goofY, gawky kid was not so strange after all. "
A man in Seattle who grew up on an Iowa farm in the 1930s and 1940s
wrote:
I identified with nearly every case history you presented, in one aspect or
another. The book recalled my own feelings of confusion, and the utter
lack of anything gay to which one could relate . Most of my friends grew
up in some kind of urban situation where they eventually made contact
with other gays. They find it difficult to understand that I had no idea of
what being gay meant until I went into the Army in my mid-twenties. I
know that young gays just coming out today have problems they have to
face, but they have no idea of the kind of isolation that I felt.
After immersing himself in Farm Boys over a long weekend, a man who
grew up on a farm in Indiana wrote:
On almost every page I found myself thinking, "That was me!" How I
wish I could have found a book like this years ago . I am a Roman Catholic
priest, the pastor of a very large parish. For twenty years, I was the
Catholic chaplain at [a midwestern university]. I had many occasions to
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318 Postscript

counsel young men in the course of my work. As you can guess, I was not
open about my own orientation, but I'm sure there was little doubt in the
minds of most. I pray that I was able to be of help to some. In fact, it
was partly through talking to the students that I came to be accepting of
myself. I am still not open with most people, but I think I have arrived
at a healthy understanding of myself and am very comfortable with my
orientation . It has not been an easy journey .
A Nebraska farm boy now in Seattle wrote:
My memories are not as bad as those of the man who was bound and
flogged by his father, nor are they as good as those of some of the farm
boys who had many playmates and a life full of FFA and 4-H activities .
I did notice that almost universally the farm boys saw their religious
experiences as being harmful to them. With that I can certainly identify. I
would be hard pressed to think of one positive memory from my Catholic
and Catholic school background. After graduating from college in Omaha,
I lived in Germany for six years and didn't even return to the States for a
visit during all that time. I came out there. In a very real sense, I went to
Europe to get away from Nebraska, from the narrow social control of the
people whom I knew.
"Really, these stories are all of our stories," said a gay man who grew up
Jewish in Chicago. A man in Minneapolis said that many of the
experiences of gay farm boys resonated with his ethnic urban upbringing.
It has become evident to me that, except for the often greater social
isolation of farm life, city boys growing up gay in tightly knit ethnic
communities have much in common with these farm boys. As a man in
Chicago wrote:
I'm sure it wasn ' t any easier for my boyhood friends and me to come to
terms with our homosexuality on the conservative northwest side of
Chicago. Our city was settled by the Yankee and German stock you
mentioned, but we had the added trauma of our ethnicity (Italian, Irish,
Polish) and the wonderfully progressive Catholic church to contend with
as well.
I do agree that openness leads to the smashing of stereotypes. I
continue to reside on the northwest side of the city. Like the farm boys
who feel disconnected from urban life, I feel a certain discomfort in Boys'
Town [a gay neighborhood in Chicago]. A nice place to visit, but I
wouldn't want to live there, much to the chagrin of some of my dearest
friends . As a teacher at an all-male secondary school, I find it heartening
that my students feel comfortable "coming out" to me. I could never
imagine, in our generation, displaying that kind of self-confidence and
courage.
Besides enhancing self-understanding for many men, Farm Boys has

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Postscript 319

opened a window on men's lives that has been illuminating for others. A
woman in Milwaukee commented that Farm Boys helped her to better
understand how her husband's farm background had likely delayed his
sexual development; their sexual relationship was his first, at age twenty-
eight. Another woman wrote to me after attending my Farm Boys slide
show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
My late husband and I were married in 1970 because it seemed to be the
thing that society expected of us . Neither of us were really aware of our
sexual orientation at that time. As time went on , I began to acknowledge
my attraction to women . My husband had a difficult time with this, and
also with acknowledging who he was sexually. He was an extremely un-
happy man, full of rage, and terribly addicted to religion. The stories you
shared have helped me to understand my husband more and have brought
healing to me.
A man who spoke with me after the slide show in Bloomington, In-
diana, told me that he was gay, married and in the process of coming out.
I was to do the presentation in Indianapolis the next evening, and he said
that he was going to ask his wife to attend with him. They were both there
that night, in the front row, two of about forty in attendance. He had
brought a notebook for taking notes. She thanked me afterward and said
that the presentation was very important for her.

"I have just finished laughing and crying myself through your book,"
declared a man who grew up on a farm in Mississippi and now lives in a
small town in that state . The emotional effects of the stories in Farm Boys
are as diverse as readers' lives . "If there is one emotional reaction I'm
experiencing, it's a renewed anger at Christianity," wrote a man in Califor-
nia, "when I read again and again the feelings of isolation, pain, fear, even
terror, and the accompanying denial these brought about."
A man in New York City said that, growing up , he had been eager to
leave Iowa, which he did thirty years ago . Now he felt torn between the
two places .
I have just read Farm Boys and found it a great joy, even though at times
tears were flowing when reading of the lives of these wonderful men
with whom I could relate totally . Although I didn ' t grow up on a farm,
I did live in several small towns throughout Iowa, some no larger than a
hundred people . The schools were made up of about ninety percent farm
kids . I always marvelled at how hard they worked on a daily basis, work I
also did on occasion when trying to make extra money. How I love those
simple yet wise people who grow and cultivate our food on land that is as
true and constant as they are.

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320 Postscript

Farm Boys has stirred some men in especially distressing ways. This was
apparent following several slide shows when men with rather stricken
expressions came over to shake my hand and say, "Thank you," unable
to say much more. And there was this earnest letter from a man in Iowa
who asked me to help him connect with other men in his area, and to
forward his letters to two of the men in Farm Boys.
I have read your book twice in the last three weeks. It has occupied my
thoughts continually and caused me sleepless hours at night. To realize
there are guys out there that I so identity with . I have lived a straight life,
always being so good . I have been married thirty years, have children and
grandchildren, and am a good provider. But I remain alone and apart. I
have never had a friend . Absolutely no one knows me. Because I live
one life on the outside and another on the inside, the mental turmoil,
depression, and loneliness are constant . That 's what so terrible . To keep
living like this. Maybe your book will give me the impetus to do some-
thing about it. Or maybe I am too old to hope. I can't change my
situation and abandon my life as it is.
Because these stories are able to illumine, to affirm, and to stir, many
people have found ways to put the book to use. A minister's wife in In-
diana suggested that it would be important to get Farm Boys into both
small-town public libraries and seminary libraries. A man in upstate New
York, whose sister gave him the book as a Christmas gift, wrote, "I have
never in my life so far received such a special, thoughtful gift from one of
my family members. I will treasure it as long as I am on this earth. IfI had
had a book like this sixteen years ago , I could have saved a truckload of
angst and hours of time in a therapist'S office ."
A woman in Wisconsin gave Farm Boys to her thirty-eight-year-old
brother-in-law. "He struggled a lot before he figured out that he was
gay," she said. "He has shared this with some of our family, but not all.
He has gotten some great support and some really awful reactions ." She
also gave a copy of the book to the twenty-year-old brother of a woman
friend. "He just came out to her last night and is struggling with how to
confirm his mother's suspicions. He is very creative, lots of fun, and a
wonderful uncle ."
A college English professor in Missouri wrote to me about a male stu-
dent in one of his classes who had written a poem about his twenty-two-
year-old friend, Jeremiah, struggling with his sexuality in rural Missouri.
"He must be retaught his loveliness," the poem concluded. The professor
gave the student his copy of Farm Boys) to give to Jeremiah. "I'm talking
about utility here," the professor said, "and what more useful thing can
a book do than save a man from suicidd" Through this book, he said,

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Postscript 321

"Jeremiah might rediscover his loveliness. He might discover self-worth,

affirmation, useful labor, and hope. He might be encouraged to go on."
It was this kind of impulse to Farm Boys evangelism that provoked Stan,
who grew up on a western ranch, to spread the word about the book.
From the midwestern college town he has long called home, Stan dis-
tributed Farm Boys bookmarks, and newspaper articles about the book, to
scores of people on his university campus, around the city, and beyond .
"1 am telling the professors in our department that if a male student comes
out to them and is having a hard time dealing with his sexuality, point him
to the book, especially if the student is from a farm," Stan said. "I am only
doing this because I really believe in the book, and that it will help rural
youth ."
Many men who have encountered Farm Boys have been stirred by a desire
to tell their own stories. Several have sent autobiographical manuscripts for
me to read. Others have asked me to keep them in mind as interview sub-
jects if! should do another book. In a note expressing his interest in being
interviewed, a man in Wisconsin confided, "1 got my sex education at the
early age of eleven or twelve from the sixteen-year-old hired hand, in the
convenience of a bunk house on the farm. I'm gay and still in the closet
in this small river town . But I do enjoy male sex, if the opportunities pre-
sent themselves. I told my minister friend that I could write a book about
my experiences. He said, 'Yes, but you'd have to leave town .' "
The desire to make rural connections-with the land or with gay men
from farm backgrounds-has been evident in some letters. One man wrote
to me after attending the Farm Boys slide show in Chicago:
Hearing the stories you tell validates my experience of isolation and shame
as a gay farm boy from New York. I can now look at my own past com-
passionately and know I'm no longer alone .
I'm now as certain as I can be that I'm moving back east next spring
to live in the country. I came to college in Chicago and haven't left yet. I
haven't liked being here for a few years; the city is noisy, crowded, ugly,
and stressful. But I haven't been ready to leave until now . What makes me
ready is my plan to seek out and rely on the support of my twelve-step
recovery programs, whatever welcoming and affirming church I find, and
the community of other gays and lesbians . By "community" I mean
honest and intimate friendships; I've always been ill at ease with the con-
spicuous forms of "gay life" -bars, clubs, gyms, cruising, promiscuity.
I plan to live near a small city that has a reputation for being gay-
friendly, and where people are out. I'll be visiting Ithaca, New York,
Burlington, Vermont, and Amherst, Massachusetts, to see what they're
like. The bottom line is that when I move to the country my support will
continue to be God, in the forms I have mentioned.

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"Reading stories of other farm boys has reminded me of the importance

of my own childhood on the farm," said a man in Washingron, D.C.,
who grew up in Nebraska. "I only wish I had men in my circle who were
also from farms . Maybe I'd finally fall in love!"
A shared musical passion prompted a man in Chicago to ask if I would
help him make a pen-pal connection with one of the men in Farm Boys.
"It would be a great pleasure to correspond with Dave Foster, who seems
to be fond of Opera but has no friends with the same inclination. I have
attended more than four hundred opera performances and have heard all
the great singers of the past sixty-five years . My favorite opera is Verdi's
La Forza del Destino, which I have seen eight times, including a perfor-
mance at La Scala in Milan fifteen years ago."
A photographer in San Francisco sent me samples of his work cele-
brating men 's bodies and enclosed a brief note: "Enjoyed your book
tremendously . How do I get to know a farm man1 If you are ever in San
Francisco, I would love to photograph you."
After reading Farm Boys, the owner of a gay resort in Iowa got the idea
to host a "Farmers & Cowboys Round-Up" during the Iowa State Fair.
"In the evening we will gather around a campfire on the banks of the river
to reminisce and tell our stories, " the brochure said. "We are providing
a place and a time for farm boys to make a real connection with each other
and to celebrate our gay heritage."

After my Farm Boys slide show in Cincinnati, one of the men there offered
to give his old Future Farmers of America jacket-dark blue corduroy with
gold decoration . During my talk I had mentioned that I had never had a
FFA jacket, and that its colorful embroidery had a certain charm. I had also
commented that the FFA emblem had inspired the "Fabulous Farm
Boys" design on book-promoting apparel.
This generous farm boy's old FFA jacket arrived in my mailbox a few
days after I returned home, and I have made it a part of book-related
events since then. His letter said that he had been a state 4-H president
and a FFA regional vice-president. "One of my first loves was my state 4-H
vice-president. Truly a story of fabulous farm boys," he said . "As young
men whose whole lives were centered around agricultural activity, being
gay was not easy. I hope that this jacket serves some meaningful purpose
in your efforts to broaden the world's perspective of who and where we
are . "

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