LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Good evening, faithful LGBTQ Literature readers. Before we get to this month’s diary, a quick announcement: The LGBTQ Literature series will be taking a holiday hiatus next month. That’s a fancy way of saying, “I’m not doing shit over my winter break!” Sorry, y’all, but I really need to take my winter break for myself, and the weekend this series publishes (Christmas weekend) is going to be spent with family. If somebody has an idea for December 26 and wants to run with it, I am happy to let somebody else publish that day. Let me know either in the comments below or in a private message. But otherwise, we’re taking the month off and we’ll see you again in the new year. Have a happy holiday season! In the meantime, I would like to start building the 2022 LGBTQ Literature schedule. See below for open dates, and let me know if you’d like to take one of them!
With that out of the way, on to the diary:
I’ve been meaning to write about this book for long time now, and I’m not sure why I never got around to it. It’s a book that means a lot to me personally, and considering it’s been around for a while (1996), it might be familiar to some of our readers, too. The book I’m highlighting this month is Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, edited by Will Fellows. Note that it is “edited,” because other than in the introduction, Fellows’ voice is not found throughout most of the book. Rather, it is a collection of oral histories from gay midwestern men raised on farms, ranging in age from 24 to 84. There are a few introductory sections by the editor, but otherwise, the book is simply a vehicle for highlighting the subjects’ various life stories. In fact, he comes right out and says it in the introduction:
I have viewed this work of inquiry as “research” only in the broadest sense of the word. I have not sought to quantify anything, nor to prove or disprove anything. My aim has been simply to collaborate with gay men in telling about their lives, and to assist the reader in understanding what these men have to say.
The reason this book means something to me is twofold: First, as somebody from a very rural environment (not the Midwest, and not a farm, but rural nonetheless), I feel a connection to some of the stories presented in the book. Growing up gay can be isolating enough, but being a gay kid in a rural area is a special kind of isolation, a loneliness that can’t really be described to people who haven’t lived it. There is a distinct urban bias in much of LGBTQ historiography (for good reason—that’s where organized gay communities are, and that’s where most of the historical records are located), and this book sticks out as one of the relatively few that speaks specifically to the rural gay experience I remember. Second, I have fond memories of reading this book in the midst of my readings for comprehensive exams in grad school. That was such a stressful time in my life, and I was under so much pressure to retain all of the various historical arguments contained within LGBTQ historiography, but this book was the calm in the middle of the storm. The book doesn’t really make an argument, in fact. Its purpose is simple: to showcase the lives of rural midwestern gay men (in their own words). I love oral history, and I love reading the unfiltered perspectives of oral history subjects. If you read the book, it’s very easy to get lost for a whole day in the compelling stories told by these men. This is the kind of book that reminds me why I do what I do as a historian.
In the preface, Fellows describes his own role in Farm Boys and why he chose to assemble the book in the way that he did:
In preparing these narratives from interviews, I have seen myself as something of a midwife, listening to men who had something to say and delivering their experiences and perspectives to the reader in their own distinct voices. If I had believed that soliciting contributions from professional writers would have yielded as diverse a cross-section of gay “farm boys,” I might have chosen to edit their writings and organize them in a collection. In the interest of presenting a greater range of largely unheard voices, I have collaborated with my own group of subjects to shape autobiographical narratives from their interview transcripts. Because very few of these men were writers, it is unlikely that most of these stories would have been told unless someone had come along with a litany of questions and a tape recorder.
He also goes into some detail about his own midwestern farm background. After coming out between the ages of 18 and 21, he moved to the city. Searching in vain for his own story in the larger LGBTQ literature was his inspiration for the book:
My life since leaving the farm for college has been largely urban, mid-western, and variously fulfilling. There is much I have come to like about city life, but I have tended to feel like an outsider in the gay communities of the cities in which I have lived. And I have had similar feelings in relation to the larger gay “community” in the United States, as represented in popular gay-themed books, periodicals, and movies. In an effort to gain a better understanding of what I bring to the experience of being gay as a result, perhaps, of my farm upbringing, I have looked for books telling about my kind of childhood. The body of literature that examines the lives of gay men has expanded greatly in recent years and has enriched my life in many ways, but it neglects the experiences and perspectives of gay men who grew up in farm families. Urban or suburban experiences are central to the lives of most gay men, but they constitute only part of the story.
Fellows notes that people who grew up on farms in rural areas often disregard their childhood experiences as “irrelevant or embarrassing,” something with which I definitely identify. I often view my own coming out story as something that happened in spite of where I’m from. It seems that one of the purposes of Farm Boys, then, is to move that rural experience from the periphery to the center. Nevertheless, as Fellows points out, the farm often makes it difficult to live openly, and many of his subjects recognize the importance of their move to the city.
The life stories presented here are not primarily those of gay men who stayed in the rural farming communities where they grew up. A large majority of these men have left farming and rural communities, choosing to live in or near relatively large midwestern cities. Richard Kilmer was succinct in assessing his own choice to leave.
“If I had stayed on the farm, I would have never dealt with being gay. I would have probably gotten married and had sex with men on the side. I think a lot of gays don’t leave the farm, so there’s probably a lot of people out there who are doing that. So many people there are alcoholics, and I think that’s what a lot of gays gravitate towards, to kind of deaden their feelings.”
I’m not going to go into it in this diary, but Fellows includes an entire section on how he went about finding and selecting interview subjects which is interesting in and of itself. He includes the original ad that he placed looking for gay men with a farming background, and also some of the responses he received (including some bizarre ones that seemed really fixated on the bestiality often associated with farm life in the popular imagination). In the end, he focused on 26 interview subjects, each of whom received their own full-length chapter. A little more on the organization of the book:
I have chosen to arrange these life stories according to the subject’s year of birth. This arrangement appeals to me because it acknowledges the primacy of time and fate. Moreover, it takes advantage of the historical perspective on American culture which many readers will bring to their understanding of these stories. It also allows the reader to perceive more readily the ways in which the experience of growing up gay in the rural Midwest has and has not changed through the century.
I have divided the narratives of these men, born from 1909 to 1967, into three groups based on the calendar years during which they came of age (by my judgement, the period between their fifteenth and twentieth birthdays). The oldest of these three groups includes those who came of age anywhere between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. The middle period comprises those who came of age from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The youngest group includes those who had their fifteenth and twentieth birthdays anywhere between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. This chronological framework delineates three quite distinct eras in American mass culture with regard to the kind and amount of information about homosexuality and gay identity accessible to midwestern farm boys. Each of these three groups of life stories is preceded by a description of the era.
The introduction of the book is an extended description of midwestern farming and the role of the farming community, which I’ll spare you in this diary. I did find one section of the introduction, titled “Gender Roles,” quite interesting. While I didn’t grow up on a farm, I can certainly identify with the desire not to be in the “male” sphere:
In most cases, growing up on a farm presented these boys with two quite distinct, gender-based spheres of work activity—farmwork and housework. Farmwork was largely the male’s domain. It extended from the livestock in the barns and pastures to the crops in the fields, and to the maintenance and repair of farm machinery and vehicles. Housework was largely the female’s domain, typically extending from the house to the garden. On some farms, caring for the chickens and milk cows was also seen as women’s work, most often when these were relatively small operations. Until the 1950s, the sale of cream, eggs, and poultry by farm women was often an important supplement to farm income. As boys, several of the men I interviewed had been involved in raising and caring for chickens, with a particular interest in exotic breeds.
Any overlap or flexibility of male and female duties tended to occur most often in the gardens and barns, and least often in the houses, fields, and machine shops. But what was considered appropriate work for males and females varied by region, community, and family. In Todd Ruhter’s experience, “There was the wife’s role and the husband’s role, and the only time they mixed was when the wife was helping the husband.”
With few exceptions, the boys whose stories are presented here fit a common profile with regard to their involvement in farmwork. They generally sought to avoid fieldwork and the repair and maintenance of farm machinery and vehicles. This was typically attributed to an inherent “mechanical disability” and to the dusty, dirty, boring nature of driving machinery back and forth in the fields. Martin Scherz fit this profile, and felt deficient as a result.
“I felt like a damn fumbling idiot around farm machinery My brother was good at that kind of stuff, and that made me worse by comparison. When I would screw up, my dad would say, “Oh, go up to the kitchen with your mother.” I think it was his way of saying that I had to decide whether I was going to be a sissy or whether I could really help on the farm.”
I also identify with this quote from interview subject James Fleckman:
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.”
Unsurprisingly, the rigidity of expected gender roles on the farm is a constant theme in these men’s narratives.
[M]any 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.
[...]
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.
Another interesting part of the introduction is a section that discusses the role of isolation on the farm. Isolation can be a negative thing, of course, but Fellows suggests that the picture is more complicated when it comes to the lives of his interview subjects.
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.
[...]
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!”
But then there is the downside to isolation on the farm:
Many of these men believed that growing up on a farm hindered the development of their understanding of human sexuality in general. And no matter when they began to sense something different about their own sexuality, many of them believed that their farm upbringing hindered their ability to recognize, understand, and come to terms with their homosexual orientation. “In that farm environment, it’s like I was in hibernation as to who I really was sexually,” Robert Peters observed. Lon Mickelsen elaborated on that idea.
“It took longer to come to grips with being gay growing up on a farm, not so much because of the homophobia but because of the absence of homosexuality in that culture. It’s not that homosexuality was frowned upon. It simply didn’t exist. There were never any strong overtones about it being wrong, because it was never discussed.”
This invisibility of homosexuality is not unique to farm communities, but it was probably enhanced by isolation, religious conservatism, and sexual prudishness. Further, the mixture of antipathy and fascination with which many farm people regard urban life seems to foster the belief that homosexuality is an unnatural phenomenon of the city that has no relevance to rural life. The silence surrounding homosexuality was compounded for a large majority of these boys by the fact that they were not aware of knowing any homosexual person throughout their growing-up years.
It is difficult to sum a book like this up in a single diary. As you can tell just from the few excerpts I’ve included above, there is no single life experience of gay men in the rural Midwest. The stories are all over the place—ranging from funny to sad to idyllic to downright horrifying. Some of the stories focus a lot more on the farm itself, while some place their emphasis on life after the farm (which says something about how some of these men view their childhood). As I said above, this is the kind of book in which you can really get lost (in the best possible way), and I’m glad that Fellows approached this subject in the way that he did, preserving these voices and these stories that would have otherwise been lost to history. Farm Boys is a treasure, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can’t recommend it enough.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2022):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 30: OPEN
February 27: OPEN
March 27: OPEN
April 24: OPEN
May 29: OPEN
June 26: OPEN
July 31: OPEN
August 28: OPEN
September 25: OPEN
October 30: OPEN
November 27: OPEN
December 25: OPEN
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE