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

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