Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (22 page)

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
pleasure 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 incredible 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 effeminate, 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 together with a guy, I was twenty or twenty-one years old, working at a supper 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. After I got off work, we drove around and talked. God, my blood was racing hard. After 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 number 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 particularly sophisticated. I sometimes think that I could come out to my sister, 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 of friends 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
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 having problems. I think I serve as a great example as a gay man, in my teaching 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 accepted 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.

1.
Until the late 1960s and the 1970s, when explicitly gay-oriented pornography became widely available, physique magazines such as those John mentions provided 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 enthusiasts, 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 community on the island in the 1930s. By the 1950s, Fire Island had become an underground gay mecca. The reference to Fire Island that John encountered in a physique magazine alluded to this.

Born in 1944, Myron grew up with two brothers on a 160-acre dairy and hog farm near Black Earth, in Dane County, south-central Wisconsin. He married at age twenty-five and came out at thirty-eight. He lives on 5-acre hobby farm near Madison, Wisconsin. In this brief narrative, Myron describes seeing 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 supposed 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 machinery 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 garden. 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 supportive 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 brothers 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 consoling 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 refused to take phy. ed. in high school, and I would never go swimming or take my shirt off. Even if it 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 opinions on anything. We were told what to do and what to feel, and we were 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.

“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.

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.

Now he refuses to drive machinery at all. Although my nephew is supposed to take over the farm, Pm 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. Pm 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 Homemaker 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 myself for what I was and not pretended to be straight and gotten married.

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 Massillon and Wooster
;
in Wayne County. Norm grew 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. After college, my wife and I became heavily involved with church work. We taught in a Christian 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
I was seven or eight, it was my job to get up around 6:00 and milk our cows. Then we would have breakfast and go off to school. I milked in the evening as well. Our neighbors about a half mile to the west were Mennonite, and every night when the woman would go out to feed their chickens, 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. After church, there were at least twenty, twenty-five people there for dinner. 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 neighborhood activities.

We had maybe three acres of strawberries and raised our own vegetables, 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 farmers 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 of larger 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 because 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. Sometimes 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 always very demanding, rather brutal, and things had to get done his way. He and Mom fought all the time, and he would often take it out on us kids. By the time I was born, my parents had gone through the Depression and the war, and Dad was supporting a family, trying to keep up a
small farm and his own job. I think he felt a lot of pressure and was very frustrated.