LGBTQIA/Sexuality/Relationships
Cowboy Up: Gay Men in Rural America
When we study gay life, place matters.
Several old men wearing seed corn ballcaps sat around in the feed store in St. Charles, Iowa, drinking Folger’s coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Although Doug and I never heard this conversation, I imagine it went something like this:
Have ya’ seen what those two sissy boys that bought the old Palmer place are doin’?
Isn’t that the darndest thing you ever saw! (Good Baptists didn’t say “damn.’)
They’re gonna raise some weird lookin’ cattle with a white stripe around the middle.
Those cattle belong in a zoo. They look like Oreos. (Everyone chuckles.)
They even bought a Russian tractor, ‘stead of a John Deere.
Well, I’ll be. Never saw such a thing.
And they’ve never farmed before!
They’re plannin’ on sellin’ GRASS-fed beef. (Heads shake all around.)
That meat ‘il be as tough as a fourteen-point buck!
Well, they won’t last long out there.
St. Charles, Iowa, is a town of a little over four hundred people about thirty miles south of Des Moines. And yet, it was a world away…
