Free Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest by Unknown

hysterics. “We don’t understand this. It’s abnormal. It’s not right. We can’t tell anybody about this.” She said it was a good thing I lived in Omaha, because if I lived up there they’dhave to move. When she said she didn’t know how she was going to tell my dad, I said she didn’t have to tell him. “That’s why I sent the letter—he can read it just like you did and fall off his chair if that’s the case.” When my dad had a really hard time with it, I told him that “my being gay is no different than your goddamned tractor having two flat tires. That’s just the way it is, and you’ll just have to deal with it.”
    My mom was a lot calmer when she called two days later, but she said she just didn’t understand. I said, “Think back and put things together.
    You must have at least suspected.” But she said she’d had no idea. My dad said that he had suspected, and then he said, “With modern medicine, why can’t you just take a pill to take care of it?” When my mom asked,
    “What did we do wrong?,” I told her that it was nothing she did that made me this way. “It’s kind of like a field of clover,” I said. “Most of it is three-leaf clover, but there’s one that has four leaves. That’s a gay clover—it’s different, but it serves its purpose. It’s there with the rest of them, just trying to survive and do its job.” She didn’t buy that analogy.
    Since a few weeks after that letter, the subject hasn’t been brought up.
    I’d like to sit down with my parents and talk about it, but I know my dad would just leave the room. I think, in time, my mom and I will discuss it once in a while, as we feel a little more comfortable. It’s a long process. I don’t know how to answer some of her questions, and it’s hard for me to talk to her about sex. Of course, she’s worried about AIDS. I’m trying to get into her mind that I don’t sit around in bars and have sex all the time. I get up, put my pants on, go to work, and pay my bills just like anybody else.
    In one of his radio monologues on “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor stated that “every family needs at least one good sinner who does it right out there where you can see it.” By being open about being gay, some of these men have played that role in their families. As a result, they have experienced varying degrees of familial disdain and rejection. In some cases these negative reactions have been rooted primarily in biblical injunctions. In other cases, concern about the family’s image in the community appeared to be the main consideration. The potential for disapproval, gossip, and ridicule tends to be an especially potent enforcer of conformity—or the appearance of conformity—in farm communities, where families are often deeply rooted and thus less able to sever social ties or move away in the face of disapproval.
    Terry Bloch’s description of the area where he grew up provides a vivid snapshot of the force of conformity in a rural community, and how it affected his life as a gay man.
    Southwestern Minnesota is white, conservative, Republican country where, in those days, you didn’t admit there was such a thing as childabuse, you didn’tadmit that your husband was a wife-beating alcoholic, you didn’t let yourself get a divorce. You’d go to church on Sunday, smiling and waving, and keep your skeletons in the closet. The husband was the strong, dominant one in a marriage, and he didn’t talk about things. I brought those values into my relationship with Jahred, only to discover it wasn’t right. We have to be equal, we have to be more open with our feelings and thoughts. Sometimes I do a real shitty job of that.
    Despite the list of apparently negative influences that one could compile from these life stories, many of these men saw much that was positive in their childhoods. Lon Mickelsen’s assessment is characteristic.
    Looking back, the farm and my hometown seem like distant,