It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, actually I'm not sure what kind of night it was, or more accurately, what kind of early morning it was, three-twenty A.M. or there abouts, on March 16, 1958. Finally, after four other attempts, my parents got it right and I was born, the fifth and final child in our family of seven.

The birth took place at a hospital in Shelby, about 30 miles west of our farm, which is 30 miles south of the Canadian border. My father was born at the farm, by midwife, as were many of his generation. That was only one of many situations that would separate the two of us. He saw some of the world, thanks to Uncle Sam, and the United States Military. Mom came from a ranching background, became a registered nurse, and saw more of the world than many of her contemporaries. She returned to marry my father in 1948 before settling down at the farm founded by my grandfather.

Raising a family on a farm or ranch in remote, rural northern Montana is probably a fantasy for many people. That's the thing with fantasies, though, reality is generally much less romantic. I say that as an observation, not a complaint. I don't regret having grown up here. There are advantages and disadvantages in everyone's life. One of the advantages to a life lived in Montana is a profound sense of freedom and an equally profound sense of insignificance. I recall going for a walk one sunny afternoon when I was five or six years old, browsing through a series of abandoned homesteads. I walked about a mile north of home, then another half-mile east, kind of kitty corner for another mile or so to a reservoir to the southwest and finally back toward the farm. I was gone for about three or four hours and was intercepted on the last leg of my sojourn by my uncle, in his pickup. Farms are notoriously unsafe playgrounds. Abandoned farms can be even more hazardous, and let's not even talk about reservoirs. Apparently my absence was conspicuous and the neighborhood had been called out to look for me. I was unconcerned. I knew exactly where I was. I would come to understand that while I knew where I was, I didn't know where the abandoned cisterns were, or the tenuous nature of some of the ramshackle buildings I was exploring, or just how many six year-olds could be stacked into that reservoir. Oh, but the sense of freedom!

The sense of insignificance probably came from looking at the night sky. With no other lights around, no trees or mountains to obstruct the view and no clouds or moon, it's difficult to come up with words to express the volume or nature of the night sky in this part of the world. On a clear night it's not only possible to see the arm of the Milky Way, it's impossible not to see it. Sometimes it's difficult to pick out the familiar constellations, like the Big Dipper or Orion, because there are just too many competing stars. Stars like grains of sand. Once your eyes become accustomed to the light level, you can actually see your own shadow being cast by starlight, and the silence makes the sound of your own breathing and the beating of your heart an intrusion. The knowledge that all of this has been roughly as you are witnessing it for millions upon millions of years, but without you, becomes the anchor of your insignificance. It's strangely freeing. Anytime I am overwhelmed by life's challenges or certain of my importance, a starlit night re-emerges and everything else slips away.

This is probably the point in my story at which life on the farm, for some, becomes unromantic. Someone once told me that life here would be idyllic, so long as there was a mall about ten minutes away. City kids. They just don't understand that here there isn't anything ten minutes away, at least not anything very different from the ground you're standing on. It's still a fourteen-mile trip to get the morning paper, and if I want fries with that I have to add on another sixty. There are other things besides the physical isolation that can wear on a relationship. Farming requires a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week commitment. You go to bed at work, wake up at work and spend your day at work. During the growing season, you don't take the weekends off and can spend eighteen hours of your day riding tractor. Winters are spent preparing the equipment for the next season or hauling grain to the elevator should the market take a jump up. Dryland farmers are at the mercy of the weather. It doesn't matter how well you do your job, how hard you work or how smart you are, when the rain refuses to fall, or a hail storm hammers a bumper crop to nothing in a matter of minutes you have lost the game. Two years worth of work reduced to nothing in a matter of minutes. Think about that.... So much for romance.

Occasionally, people come for a visit, but the expression 'you have to have been born here to appreciate it' often applies. Visitors tend to not stay very long. If they did, however, they might gain an appreciation for the subtle beauty the northern plains possess....the songs of Meadow larks...the faint fragrance of prairie primroses...the air after a summer shower or a quiet snowfall. But for most, there's nothing to do. It's too quiet to sleep. They've become accustomed to all the distractions of their lives and can't wait to get back--back to the moving and shaking, back to sound of car horns--back before they come face to face with someone they're perfectly happy to avoid.

Themselves.

People are tough to figure out. I guess I've tried to live my life openly and honestly, or perhaps more accurately, have grown into that. That has not been an easy journey, but lying or being intentionally deceptive seems as though it would be too resource intensive, as regards to my own personal resources. Societaly speaking, the only way to maintain a lie would require a good deal of self-censorship. Otherwise, my friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, upon discovering the lie, would either have to embrace the truth no matter how personally repellent the truth might be or face the dissonance involved in knowing the truth and embracing and maintaining the lie. What brings this on is a casual conversation I had with the head librarian in Chester, Montana.

She's about my age, a little younger, and I mentioned to her the table lamps I saw in the Butte Goodwill store that I still wish I'd bought and sent to a friend in Washington State. Her response was along the lines of "Oh, that would have just been cruel". Now, that would have been about the furthest thing from my intention, and I was wondering why she would have that impression. Well, the only way it made any sense to me was if I filtered it through THE GREAT HETEROSEXUAL ASSUMPTION.

I think most gay people, upon first sight of those table lamps, would be almost hypnotically drawn to them. They were gaudy, they were so-o-o 60's, they were hideous enough to actually look nice on a table. They would have elicited comments like "they're awful, I love em", or "who would have bought these things originally, can I have em?". If my friend had given them away or tossed em in the garbage or buried em out behind his house, I wouldn't have been offended because I would have given them to him to do with as he pleased.

Then I got to thinking about some of the straight guys I've known. They would have been hurt. What would make me give them a present like that? What was I trying to imply about their sexuality? How could I think they would have actually liked that kind of thing? They'd have been more than hurt, they would have been severely traumatized. I could only similarly impress and appall them if I'd greeted them at the door and given 'em a full lip-lock complete with tongue.

Now I don't exactly run around Montana waving a rainbow flag and singing a falsetto version of "YMCA", but I don't exactly pretend to be straight, either. That whole pretending to be something I'm not just doesn't work for me. I'm just me, and I'd rather spend my days discovering who I am, than waste my time acting like somebody I'm not. I have a great deal of respect for those gay people who couldn't "pass for straight" if their lives depended on it. All too often, their lives do depend on it. They've been subject to a level of scorn I've never experienced, sometimes from other gay people. I'm not about to "pass" if I see some guy catching grief because he can't hide the fact he's gay. Having said that, I don't have the compelling desire to put myself on display for the locals by "acting" gay to reinforce their notion of what gay "is".

I've grown to understand that being gay takes on an incredible variety of expressions. You have to realize that very little about what "gay" was actually made it past the censors when I was a kid. Only those images that could be used to stereotype and ridicule--the effeminate man, the bull-dyke. I didn't have a clue that there were gay truck drivers, or cowboys, or soldiers, and I can't help but be a little amused at the irony that countless straight guys learned how to be "real" men from characters portrayed by gay actors.

I have distinct memories of being attracted to men when I was about seven. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only one to feel this way until I was about seventeen. Thank you, Tom Snyder. It was because of the Tomorrow Show that I realized people like David Kopay existed, somewhere. It didn't dawn on me that there were more than six or seven of us until I was about twenty-three and went to San Francisco with a friend. You can talk about epiphanies until the cows come home. I've experienced some real doozies. However, it occasionally dawns on me that I'm so used to being who I am that I don't realize that there are other people who still see the world through the filter established for them by popular media and acceptable perception. They like their beer cold and their gay men flaming, to paraphrase Homer Simpson. The idea that there are gay guys who don't fit the stereotype threatens a whole lot of carefully constructed lies. Generally, that isn't a problem, if those gays who don't fit the straight image of what a gay is keep their mouths shut.

There are a lot of folks in this area who've probably lived most of their lives and never met a black person, and so far as they're aware they haven't met a gay one either. Maybe that's why the reaction toward gays is sometimes so extreme. When one belief is found to be a lie, it calls into question everything else, and let's face it, there are a lot of beliefs in places like this that are nothing more than lies. Often, it's a lot easier to beat the truth down than to understand and internalize what you believe and accept is actually a lie.

I guess all of this is a roundabout way of wondering what "out" is and how one actually goes about "coming out". I've been to gay functions around the state, I'm on the Pride mailing list, I've gone before the state legislature and testified regarding legislation that's important to me and other gay folks. I've stood up for gay marriage; lobbied to include homosexuals in the list of those afforded protection by hate crimes legislation; and fought to maintain the protection of informed consent. I've told some of the local folks about that legislation and why it's important to me. But, I haven't harnessed myself to the roof of a bus dressed in a long, flowing silver lamme gown and had someone drive me to town. Am I out?

I've never been inclined to toot my horn too loudly. Not because I'm ashamed of my abilities or strengths, but because I wasn't raised that way. People around here just don't do that, and they don't think much of folks who do. That grubby old man in the local cafe with the beat-to-shit cowboy hat, torn jeans and worn out work boots may be a multi-millionaire, and not in a land rich, cash poor way. He's worked hard all his life and doesn't have any desire to flaunt the fact that all that hard work has paid off. He could push his old pickup off a cliff and buy a new Rolls, but he doesn't because it'd just be too flashy, his dog probably wouldn't like it, and a Rolls doesn't work for shit to check fence lines.

Now compared to that guy, I'm probably a real dandy. I wear cologne you don't find in the grocery store. I like nice cars, not necessarily new ones, but nice ones. I don't keep up with the latest fashions, but I'm wearing a pair of Nick's handmade lace-up boots at the moment. I guess I just can't get it out of my mind that friends have lived and died without having seen or experienced half of what I have because it just wasn't "practical" for them to do so. What's the expression, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans? I don't do the things I do to draw attention to myself, but I'm not going to follow the crowd because it happens to be taking the acceptable path. The way I see it, we are each given a precious gift, our life. We can spend that life doing what someone else wants us to do, or we can recognize the fact that that person has his or her own life to live and doesn't need, or deserve two. In the end, it seems like that is the best way to return the favor for the gift we've been given.

To preface the next part, I need to mention that about twenty years ago a gas exploration outfit drilled a well about a mile from the house. They hit pay dirt, not a big enough well to cover the expense of sending it into the main line, but big enough to use. It's on my uncle's land, but we own about two-thirds of the section and have the right to use some of the gas for our normal farm operation. We buried a line to the farm and have had enough natural gas to heat the shop, a couple of the other outbuildings and provide heat and hot water for the house for several years now. Since then, a few more successful wells have been drilled in the area and this fall an outfit finally came in, and hooked them all up to the main line.

The day after Christmas a guy headed out to work on one of the wells and was killed in a rollover accident on Highway 2 about a mile west of Devon. I don't think I ever met him. Shelby isn't a very big town, so I imagine I saw him around at some time. I did talk with him on the phone a couple of times--he seemed like a nice guy. I still haven't taken off the message he left on my answering machine to tell me he was heading this way.

The following day it started raining a little and snowing a little, not enough to amount to anything other than making the roads an object lesson in how black ice is done. A couple of the Galata, Montana old-guard and the mother of one of their hired men were heading toward Shelby Friday evening and went off Highway 2 a couple miles east of Devon. The man who was driving broke his back, and his wife was killed. She was around 85, used to be the Postmaster in Galata, and still wrote a weekly blurb for the Shelby Promoter about the comings and goings on in Galata (a real short article as you might imagine). All in all, it was a rather unsettling end to the year.

The strangest reaction to this seems to come from some of the local folks around my age. They just don't seem to want to talk about it. I guess I understand. Most of them haven't had to face up to their own mortality much. Over the past several years, I guess I've witnessed much more of death than I ever imagined I would at this age, largely without anyone to talk to about it. I suppose I've become a bit numbed to the effects. Instead of being upset, I'm strangely at peace with it. We're born, and then we die. Everything that happens in between is part of the amazing kaleidoscope of life. For some, it's a long, rich tapestry of experiences, like a prairie sunset after a summer storm, each moment revealing new hues and textures before ebbing to a gentle glow and ultimately yielding to the still and peaceful night. For others it's a brilliant flash, a shock like a bolt of lightning at midnight, splitting the heavens open and revealing everything for the briefest moment, leaving darkness and a clap of thunder in the emptiness of it's wake.

I can certainly relate to comments about the transient nature of life. There's a strange beauty in it all. I think being gay has provided me with a unique richness of experience not shared by my heterosexual brethren. The challenge many straight guys face when confronted by change stems from the fact that they are so used to trying to control so many parts of their lives. When they're faced with something they can't control, like a loved one with a terminal disease, or the unstructured freedom that comes with retirement or the loss of a job, it can be devastating.

I recall trying to do the whole control thing when I was about, well, twelve. Have you listened to Joni Mitchell's "Edith and the Kingpin"? There's a lyric in it--"What does that hand desire, that he grips it so tight?" I've discovered that trying to control my life so completely would probably kill me quickly. I gave up a whole lot of it and just decided to live and, for the most part, watch what happens.

Perhaps that sounds too passive for those who pride themselves on being pro-active about their lives. It comes from years of living at the mercy of the weather, or seeing friends sicken and die, and realizing that nothing I can do will change the outcome. The future of farming is uncertain, and with it, my future in Montana. My brother once shared his opinion that it was important to decide, first, where you want to live, and then set about living there. I get tired of fighting to live here, of listening to conservative politicians spew ignorant, hateful rhetoric from their bully pulpit. I think about moving, and then I go for a walk. A Golden eagle eyes me from his perch atop a telephone pole and as I get close, I hear the rustle of wings and watch as the enormous bird effortlessly increases the distance between us. Spring is beginning to show signs of breaking. Far overhead chevrons of geese are heading north. I listen for the faint, muffled whisper of their passing. I can smell sage in the air again.

I can't imagine leaving.