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- 06/18/2023
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 93. Norm Reed "Oh, really?"
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“Oh, really?”
Growing up farm-boy
As an author, I’ve always been drawn to firsthand accounts of what life was like in the recent past. A large part of the appeal lies in learning details that are better than fiction writers could ever imagine.
Currently I’m reading a documentary of real-life farm boys talking about what it was like growing up Gay in the 20th century. The following excerpt is from a person born in 1945 and raised in a strict Mennonite family in Ohio. Even so, his family’s reaction to his gender-bending floutings may not be what you think . . .
“When I started school, I was kind of a mama’s boy. But one thing I made sure I knew how to do was tie my shoes. My sisters drilled me till I got it right. When we had gym in first grade we played in our stocking feet, and I knew how to tie my shoes, but a lot of the cute little boys didn’t know how. If it was a good-looking boy, I would make sure that I was the one who helped put his shoes on. I’d put his foot in my crotch and tie his shoes for him.
We were never allowed to mention anything related to sex or pregnancy at home. One morning, when I was about ten years old, I was lying in bed rubbing myself, and it felt good. I ejaculated and I was so scared about it. I thought I was real sick; that I had done something wrong to my body. The next day I said, “Mom, I don’t know what happened, but white stuff came out of me.” She just said, “Oh, really?”
A lot of times I would take walks so I could masturbate. It wasn’t like I could go into the bathroom and close the door, because we had no door on the bathroom; just a curtain. I couldn’t do it in bed because my brother and my grandmother were lying right there. It was just such a hassle; I couldn’t be alone to do anything. We were always so afraid of getting caught at anything we did. Mom or Dad or somebody might be watching. And then, because it was such a hush-hush thing, I felt guilty doing it.
Sometimes, when Mom and Dad would go away for a couple of hours, I would go up to Mom’s closet and dress up in her high heels and dresses. I wasn’t five or six, trying to play mama. I was twelve or thirteen, and I thought dresses were so comfortable. I did that for a number of years, and at the time they didn’t know anything about it, until I began wearing her outfits to work in the fields sometimes. It was no big deal. “Oh, Norm’s got Mom’s dress on again.” Once we were out in the field spreading cow shit, and there I was in Mom’s high heels, her white gloves and a dress, with my pitchfork. They just kind of accepted it, except one day when I was down by the barn in one of her better dresses. A damned goat got started chewing on the dress, and I thought, oh no, Mom’s going to really be pissed off, so I backed away, and the goat ripped it right off of me. But other than that, no one ever said anything about it.”
—Norn Reed,
1994 interview concerning
events of 1956-1960
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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