13 Country Boys, Cowboys, Farmboys, Truckers, and Rednecks

Both of my parents grew up on farms, and everybody who finds out that I'm from Illinois makes a crack about farming, so I've never found country boys particularly exciting. I was always into short, dark-skinned, muscular, not tall, chunky, and Anglo-pale.

Besides, I spent my childhood trying to avoid football, pick up trucks, country western music, hunting, fishing, and beer  Why would I want to hang out with someone interested in those things?

Still, country boys are often attractive, perhaps due to their hard iconic masculinity.

And the gay ones are so unexpected.  What causes someone to resist the siren call of West Hollywood and spend his life amid the vast fields?

Here are my top 12 country boys dates and hookups.












Texas

1. Ole Miss.  On my way south from Rock Island to my horrible year in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, I stopped in Oxford, Mississippi, and in one of my few experiences in street cruising, picked up a University of Mississippi undergrad named Elmer (really)

2. Carl the Cowboy Cop.  Texas had fewer country boys than one would expect, though lots of guys pretended to be.  Carl was 6'8, lanky, blond, and from a ranch near Abilene.  On our first date, he bought me a pair of cowboy boots and took me country-western line dancing.









West Hollywood

3. The Cowboy of Sunset Boulevard was actually a college music major from the San Fernando Valley, but he pretended to be a cowboy, and hit it off on my Montana-born roommate, Derek.

4. Frozen Custard and Gay Bashing.  During my semester in Nashville, I got a date with a country boy who wanted to go through my photo album, insisted that we didn't do it in the bed near the open window.  And smoked.

5. The Country Western Singer, also in Nashville. At least, a singer.  Adter I crammed Country-Western into my brain to impress him, he turned out to be into pop.

6. The Nebraska Cornhusker.  In 1995, Lane and I took a road trip from West Hollywood to Rock Island: The Great Redneck Roundup, 20 hookups in 20 days.  But few actual country boys.  A highlight was the Nebraska Cornhusker, a former football player who now worked as a college recruiter, and had three of the six characteristics of Country Boys.

7. The Honest-to-Goodness Cowboy of Missoula, Montana, another highlight of our   He made his living in rodeos.

New York

8. The Bear Who Wasn't into Sharing.  My boyfriend Joe's ex, a carpenter who lived in rural Rhinebeck, New York.  We thought he wasn't into sharing, and he thought Joe wasn't, until two of his friends convinced us otherwise.

9. The Football Player Who Got Unstuck In Time, Carey the Alabama Farm Boy who was going to the University of Alabama, and got lost on a field trip to New York, either in 1939 or 2000.

Florida

10. The Florida Cowboy.  Did you know that there were ranches in Florida?  The ranchers are called "cowhunters" or "crackers." But the tall, buffed guy that Yuri and I shared actually worked on an alpaca ranch.

11. Tucumcari Two-Step.  When I was visiting Larry in New Mexico, I met a guy from Tucumcari, on old Route 66. He had never heard of the tv series.

Ohio

Not a lot of country boys in Ohio.








Upstate

12.  The French Canadian Farmboy.  When I took Troy to Montreal to go to his first glory hole, he hooked up with Max.  Troy was impressed that he was an actual, honest-to-goodness farmer.

Plains

13, The Dakota Boy.   When I went to a Pow-Wow, I expected to meet a member of the Dakota Indian Nation, but instead I got a farmboy of German ancestry.  Cute, though.

12 Hookups and Dates that Sound Like the Plot of a Porn Movie

Every day we see, hear, and talk to friends, neighbors, coworkers, students, strangers -- and dozens of service people, the pharmacist, the plumber, the carpenter, the bus driver, the pizza delivery guy, the bookstore clerk.

99 out of 100 are female, ugly, straight, or taken, but even if you encounter that 1 in 100 that's male, cute, gay, and available, the interaction is so momentary that there's no time to determine if they're attracted to you, or just being friendly as a part of their job.

Even if you can establish a mutual interest, how do you arrange a date or a hookup with other customers waiting behind you and the boss keeping an eagle eye from a post nearby?  99 times out of 100, it's impossible, and you each go on to more accessible guys at the Rage or a M4M Party.

This is the stuff of porn movies, where the service guy is always muscular, gifted beneath the belt, and ready for action, in an empty store or on a service call with an empty schedule all afternoon.

I've only managed a few of these "porn movie" hookups or dates, where you approach the guy and make the connection while he is at work.

Here are the most interesting.

1. The Waiter.  In West Hollywood, you got cruised by waiters all the time.  They weren't serious.  When the waiter flirted with me at the French Quarter, I just laughed it off.  But the next day I saw him at the gym.

2. The Doctor.  In the 1980s, doctors were usually homophobic, so you always had to be careful that your doctor was gay or gay-friendly (you still do).  So when I got sick and needed a doctor right away, I stayed strictly closeted.  But he said "I can do a house call tomorrow, to see if you're feeling better..."

3. The Politician.  I'm not interested in politics, and I especially wasn't while living in San Francisco, with homophobic rhetoric spewing from every press conference.  But when I met a young city councilman., who also happened to be gay, I became interested.

4. The Fireman.  When I was living in graduate student housing in New York, my roommate left a pan of water on the stove all day.  I returned to find the kitchen on fire.  It was easily put out, but the fire department came anyway, and one of the fireman gave me his number.

5. The Chef.  During my summer in Paris, I went to Suam Thai almost every night.  One slow night the chef  -- who was not Thai -- invited me back into the kitchen to talk about something or another, and one thing led to another.....

6. The Pizza Delivery Guy.  Just after I got my Ph.D., I was visiting Rock Island, and cruised the pizza delivery guy.  I was leaving town the next day, but my friend Dick sealed the deal.  They've been together ever since.












7. The Hitchhiker.  When my friend David came to visit me in Florida, we drove out to Key West, and picked up a hitchhiker, a college student who was happy to share a bed with us.

8. The Actor.  You go to a play, your eyes meet, you go to their dressing room afterwards, and sparks fly.  Easier said than done: they can't see you in the darkened theater, they're busy concentrating on their performance, and it's hard to get backstage afterwards unless you already know them.  It's only happened to me once.

9. The Chinese Food Delivery Guy.  In Dayton.  Ok, I didn't hook up with him, but I got a date with his best friend

10. The Flight Attendant.  The flight was half full, I was sitting in the back row near the galley, and the attendant was bored.  We struck up a conversation, and when we were delayed too long for me to catch my connection, he offered to show me the sights of Boston.

11. The Water Delivery Guy.  Pete, who delivered bottled water to my apartment in Upstate New York.  One day I asked him to show me how to install the water bottles, one thing led to another, and we dated for about 3 weeks.

12. The Museum Guard.  While we were passing through Indianapolis on our way home from New York in 2015, we stopped to visit a museum where Ryan was a guard.  He came by our hotel later.