Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (33 page)

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 recognize 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 grief from 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.

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 national march had been in 1979.

Heinz was born around 1952, the sixth of six boys, and grew up on a Wisconsin farm. He lives in the Minneapolis area. This brief narrative is adapted from a letter sent anonymously in which Heinz stated, “An interview is impossible. After all these years I am still a victim of being a gay farm 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 applications, 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 couple 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 showing 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.

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.

Tom was born in 1953 and grew up in southern Wisconsin on an 80-acre farm near Argyle, in Lafayette County. His grandparents, who migrated from Norway, 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 anything 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 sidelines 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.

If I 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 comfortable with my sexuality. And in some ways I feel 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 enjoying 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 feel kind of like it’s them and me. But then, I don’t know how much I identify with any group.

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 people 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 eventually. 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, electricity, 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 carried 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. If we’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 unattainable 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 compared 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 haughtiness 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 another 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 Sunday clothes, so to speak.

We had beef cattle and pigs, and we raised corn and hay for the livestock. 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 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 became 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.

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

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
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 livestock 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. After 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 wastebasket. 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 railroad 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. Anything 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 Sunday school and Luther League. I was raised believing in God and the scriptures 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.