Read Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest Online
Authors: Unknown
Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (6 page)
A large majority of my subjects identified more closely with, and generally had richer and more satisfying relationships with, their mothers and other females than with their fathers and other males. With few exceptions, 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 welcomed, 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 Fleckman 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 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.”
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 gender-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 real little, 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,
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 feminine 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 upbringing led him to assume.
Where I grew up, men were men and women were women and there really wasn’t anything in between. Geared toward being strong, silent and tough, I accumulated lots of layers 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 insane 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 contrary to their inherent natures. In most cases, this gender-rigidity seemed to lead them to make more drastic efforts to deny or avoid their homosexuality. Common manifestations of this kind of response included getting married, having suicidal tendencies, and becoming immersed in religious 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 essential difference of his sexual identity.
Todd Moe, born in 1962, grew up on a small farm in east-central Minnesota. 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, contagious 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
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 commanded, 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 gender-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 illustrated 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.
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 contact with people outside their own families. The degree of isolation varied greatly, determined not only by the farm’s location in relation to neighbors and the nearest village or town, but also by the modes of transportation 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 effort to overcome the geographical isolation of farm life for their children. Other parents, it seemed, were attracted to farming
because
it afforded a large
degree of social isolation, which may have been consistent with their own natures 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 homogeneous with regard to racial, ethnic, and religious heritage. Racism, religious intolerance, and a general suspicion of strangers were quite prevalent. 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, attributed this broadening influence to having established a strong connection with the natural world, and having developed an appreciation for “the balance 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 of life 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 something to do with other people. When you make your living dealing with the cycles of nature, you know that there are other reference points outside 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, perspective, 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
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 inclinations and standards. Jim Cross believed that because his childhood was so uncluttered, he was able to focus on the blossoming of his own individuality. 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 suggest, however, that if these boys were going to have any success in creating 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, families tended to be more accommodating of these boys’ differentness than were peers in the larger community, most often encountered at school. 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 outside of town and not in it!”
“Growing up on the farm, if you don’t want to deal with anybody outside 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 existence, 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.”
In her book,
Letters from 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
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 farmyards. 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 backgrounds to assume that farm folks regard sex with a fairly comfortable matter-of-factness. After 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 animals 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 observing a boar mounting a sow.
On the other hand, John Beute’s mother was probably like many parents in her belief that sufficient sex education was afforded by observing breeding among farm animals and pets. A large majority of these boys received 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 undercurrent. 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.