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

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.
    Dean Gray, born in 1962, grew up on a small dairy farm in central Wisconsin. Even in his preschool years, his attraction to animal husbandry was strong.
    There were lots of mechanical things on the farm that I was no help with, but I could handle the record-keeping and I loved taking care of the animals, which included delivering lots of calves. When I was four years old, we had a calf I named Todd. No one else knew he had a name. One morning I was in the barn and found out Todd was to be sold. I refused to go in the house for breakfast. Overwrought and crying, I stood in front of each cow in the barn and sang a song to each one—thirty-some songs I made up, looking for comfort.
    To the extent that these boys were attracted to any aspect of farmwork, it was generally the care, feeding, and breeding of livestock and the cleaning and maintenance of these animals’ shelters that they found most appealing and satisfying. This sort of work is essentially the “housework” of the farm. After a housekeeping apprenticeship with his mother in his early years, David Foster was expected to join his father and older brothers in doing some of the farm chores. “What I did, I did very well. I’ve always been a very thorough person, very organized and clean. I did farmwork that way too, cleaning the barn and sweeping the feed into the cribs. . . . My mother would say, ‘David’s the only one that sweeps it that clean.’” The degree of rigidity with which the boundaries of gender-based work roles were enforced varied greatly among the families represented here. In most cases, enforcement tended to be especially strong for males. Forfemales, things were more ambiguous and fluid. It was far more common for wives and daughters to do work related to livestock and crops, when their help was needed, than for husbands and sons to do housework, no matter how badly their help was needed. But it was common for everyone in the family, regardless of gender, to be involved in certain seasonal tasks requiring a large number of hands, such as “walking beans”—walking between rows of soybeans and pulling out weeds and unwanted “volunteer” corn sprouting from the residue of the previous year’s crop.
    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