Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural
- Trouble and Consolation:Writing the Gay Rural
There are … two great themes in rural writing: the theme of departure and the theme of return.
—David Pichaske
The first gay man i knew was the undertaker. Mr. Dorsey owned our town's one funeral home, a small redbrick building to the right of the library and across from a beauty shop called Dazzle. From the library's circulation desk, you could catch a glimpse of a zip-bagged body unloaded from a white van or sometimes see Mr. Dorsey outside in his black suit, with his thin dark moustache and perfect white teeth, sweeping up cigarette butts after a service. Mr. Dorsey had grown up in my town, studied mortuary science at a nearby college. When his father retired from the family business, he inherited it. Which is to say: once you died, you went to the town queer.
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The first gay love poem I read was Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You." I was a college freshman, and I came across it in a book of gay love poetry in the library's new arrivals section. I don't remember the title, but the cover showed two shirtless men leaning toward each other beside a vibrantly blue swimming pool. I hid the book under a stack of magazines and read it on the top floor in a tucked away corner behind some engineering journals. I remember the stab of excitement I felt from the ease of O'Hara's voice: "because of my love for you" and, as he says later, "the fact that you move so beautifully." How could one man be saying this to another, and with such manic excitement in a "warm New York four o'clock light"? There were references I didn't understand—"futurism," "the Frick," "Nude Descending a Staircase"—but reading O'Hara's language was like overhearing one side of a conversation that somehow, without even knowing, I'd always wanted to join.
Afraid to check out the book, I copied down the poem on a piece of torn notebook paper. I kept it folded in my pocket, and carried it everywhere—to class, to the library, even back home where weekends I'd help cut wood for my grandparents' furnace. Sometimes alone in the grove at the back of their farm, I'd take it out and read it to myself, a poem in my handwriting but not by me, and feel for a moment that I was O'Hara: chatty, sophisticated, fearlessly reaching [End Page 165] out to take another man's hand. I'd hear the roar of the chainsaw, see the red scatter of cardinals, smell sheep feed and crushed hickory leaves underfoot; but I could still picture his urbane world of New York art and art museums, of afternoon light I'd never seen cutting across concrete, steel skyscrapers, subway stops. It was the beginning of two impressions that would only deepen the more I read. The first was that if you were gay, you needed to live in the city. The second was that if you were gay and wanted to be a writer, you needed to write about the city.
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I grew up in a small Indiana town famous for a seventy-pound cantaloupe grown by a man named Verlie Tucker. We had a roller rink, a KFC, a pair of rival grocery stores with a jail in between. In the summer we ate deep-fried Mars Bars at the annual 4-H Festival, where we watched swine-judging and poultry showmanship competitions. Afterwards we'd crowd at picnic tables outside the new Dairy Queen, blaring Hank Williams Jr. or The Oak Ridge Boys. All around us, all the time, were fields of corn, soybeans, wheat; and the population was booming, nearly two thousand at the start of '82.
Ten miles outside town, my family lived on a lake where we snagged bluegill and perch. On my grandparents' nearby farm, we shoveled manure, chopped wood, helped my grandmother churn butter, and some days I'd get to feed Napoleon, my grandfather's champion market goat. When...
