The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 96. Notes on Farm Brother Couples

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Notes on Farm Brother Couples

“Roger and Bill were bachelors who lived together on a farm in our community. There weren’t many bachelors who lived together around there, and in high school, I had a feeling that something was different about them. ‘They’re war buddies,’ was the excuse. They really were war buddies, from the Korean War; one of them had rescued the other. Bill was a native of the farm where they lived and had inherited it from his parents. They had beef cattle and did some farming. They also had a ranch out in Colorado, where they spent part of the year.

When I was about twenty-five, I took off from graduate school and moved back home for the summer, the last summer I spent on the farm. One night, I was in town drinking, and Roger was there. By that time, I had a pretty good idea that he was Gay. We started drinking together, and then he said something about going to his place. Bill was away, and Roger and I ended up having sex. […] He was a real good-time person. I would ask him, “So who’s Gay around here?” and he would say, “You don’t want to know.” I think it meant that there were a lot of husbands around who had been friends of his.”

—Martin Scherz,

1994 interview concerning

events of 1976-1977