Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (24 page)

It was important that the cows got fed by six in the morning. It was important that they were milked by a certain time at night. It was important 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, and 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 theater 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
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 everybody 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 laughing 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. Either they’re not neat enough or they’re not clean enough, or they’re too— I don’t know. I like things a certain way, and if it’s not that way it’s just no way at all.

Born in 1947, Ronald grew 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 teachers 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 realization 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 homosexuality and that I would never practice my true sexual preference. I also decided never to marry, as I considered that to be living too much of a lie. Masturbation became my savior.

After 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 Rochester. 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 teaching. I was certain that as a teacher I could not expect to discover a true, loving gay relationship. That belief left me feeling empty and rather worthless, so I threw myself into my teaching and devoted myself to my
students. 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 myself in 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 professionally 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 confrontational 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. After an hour of discussing minor adolescent problems 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 someone 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.

Once Chris gained his driver’s
license, it became easier to maintain contact with him. When a gay youth support group was established by the gay/lesbian community in Rochester, he began attending weekly meetings. 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 organization, and had his first serious relationship with another man.

As Chris has matured and developed his own life, our contact has become 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 of taking 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.

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

THE BLOSSOMING of America’s
sexual revolution and counterculture movements represented the beginning of the end of what Henry Bauer referred to in his interview as “the dark ages of sex.”
Life
attempted to shed some light in a 1964 article, “Homosexuality in America,” which declared, “A secret world grows open and bolder. Society is forced to look at it—and try to understand it.”
¹
This article, in a popular photo-news magazine that was a fixture in many rural homes, presented homosexuality 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 sudden vivid interest in homosexuality come from?”
Time
asked in 1968. “It comes from what’s happening all around,” replied John Schlesinger, director 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 psychologist Evelyn Hooker had concluded that “homosexuality presents a major problem for our society largely because of the amount of injustice and suffering 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 undesirable handicap does not necessarily make everyone afflicted with it undesirable.”
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 homosexuality was a sickness, and acknowledged the inconclusiveness surrounding the “what causes it?” question. “
Homosexuals have never been so visible, vocal or closely scrutinized by research,”
Time
stated. “The militants are finding grudging tolerance and some support in the ‘straight’ community.” The article stated that “homophobia is based on understandable instincts among straight people, but . . . also . . . innumerable misconceptions 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-homophobic 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
PS. Tour Cat is Dead
⁹
and
Good Times, Bad Times,
¹⁰
Gordon Merrick’s
The Lord Won’t Mind,
¹¹
or John Reid’s
The Best Little Boy in the World.
¹²