Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (13 page)

“Well, let’s get on. There’s more work to do.” If I 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 saying “Tent Show: Admit One.”

I thanked him. He told me that if I 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 descriptions 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 Flying 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.

The aerialist doubled as a lion-tamer, while his partner put the gorilla through hoops and loops. A scrawny elephant, tuskless, performed listlessly 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 except 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 Orpington, 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 squeamish!” 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 between two large lighted candles), took up the fowl, and began sucking its beak. She pulled a scarlet scarf from 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 afternoon gathering and husking corn. I chopped wood. After 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!

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 sensation 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 evidence 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 having 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.

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
myself nude to strangers. The ball we had played at the Sundsteen Elementary School was for kids. Even then, I could rarely catch a ball, and my balance 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: “Attend on Monday! I will personally see you do!”

While the other students suited up, I stalled, removing my shirt as carefully 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 conditions 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 freshman 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 someone else’s jock strap; keep the venison out of your teeth; stop using brilliantine. He grew up to marry the county judge’s daughter and became a World War II ace and a commercial pilot.

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 of four 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 myself is 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 reunions. I came to realize that I didn’t like that aggressiveness and arrogance, 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 demanding to have his way, and he used any method necessary to get it.

After my older brother was born, my father desperately wanted a daughter. Then I came along, and had the misfortune to be a boy. I’ve never regretted 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 relatives 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.

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 neighboring 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 pretend 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
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. After 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 information you could find was awful. I read in a book or magazine that masturbation was bad for you, so I tried to stop.

I went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and saw a psychiatrist. Apparently, 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 of a problem as you think you’ve got.” I was delighted, 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 ultimate 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 remembered. 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 accepted the idea that I was straight and only had to conquer my fear of girls.