Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest Read Online Free PDF Page B

anymore. I don’t like the direction that farming has taken, the increased industrialization and reliance on corporate power and corporate structure. Bigger farms might mean more production, but the cost in human lives is far too great to be a good thing.
    We’ve lost a lot of the independence of small communities such as the one I come from. For the most part, they continue on a blind descent into some kind of modern hell. The patterns of rural life have disintegrated into a cheap imitation of suburban life. The kids are involved in the same shit that the urban and suburban kids are. They don’t have much of a sense of community anymore. They lose their grocery store, they become just a collection of old people living off what years they have left and wondering what their kids are up to a thousand miles away.
    There’s a center of life that has disappeared, and I’m not sure what anybody can do about it anymore. Bring in some Amish? I tend to be a romantic, I guess. The Amish have a good way of life in many ways, and a lot of people could learn a lot of things from societies like that. I admire them, although I recognize that Amish culture can be oppressive to nonconformists.
    Though Martin Scherz’s sentiments about the disintegration of rural communities echo my own, I am struck by the irony of this perspective. As Martin observes with regard to the Amish, an openly gay identity—of the sort that I have embraced in one fashion or another all of my adult life—is essentially incompatible with traditional farm culture, where gender roles tend to be tightly defined and enforced. Thus, it seems that the possibilities of coming out relatively easily and even of living quite openly as a gay man in a farming community have been enhanced as the integrity of rural communities has been diminished.
    In “suburbanized” farm communities you are not likely to know your neighbors very well, so you are less likely to be concerned with what they think about you. You probably consider your hand-picked social network of like-minded people to be your community, so the influence of the conformist impulse in your rural neighborhood is lessened. You are probably exposed to, and identify substantially with, the urban culture by way of the mass media, so that the potential insularity and homogeneity of rural life are diminished. You are more likely to see farming as a business than as a way of life, so the social conventions of farming culture lose some of their authority.
    The influence of rural community is illustrated by comparing andcontrasting the experiences of Steve Gay and Todd Ruhter. Steve was born in 1959 and grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. Todd, born in 1967, grew up on a Nebraska ranch. Both were raised in German families and in predominantly German communities, both came of age between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, and both went to college. But the ways in which they had accommodated being gay in their daily lives differed greatly. Steve Gay and his lover, Jim, lived just up the road from his parents’ place, on their own farm. Steve talked about his decision to be openly gay in a conservative farming community, despite estrangement from his parents and siblings.
    I guess it’s just the strong-willed part of me that some people have and some don’t. You’ve got to say, hey, my life is going to be what I want, it’s going to make me happy If other people don’t want to contribute to that, well, then they won’t. If they can’t handle it, that’s too bad. It takes a lot of will and self-determination to go against your family and friends—to make people see you differently than they used to.
    At the time of our interview, Todd Ruhter was getting ready to move from Omaha back to his home ranch, to take care of the cattle for several months while his father recuperated from surgery. Because he had made large financial investments in the ranch and expected to have the chance to take it over when his father retired,