The Gay Painting in My Grandmother's Room

Garrett, Indiana

The cold, snowy day after Christmas.  Cousin Buster and I have already played with our toys, and we're tired of sitting around the living room of Grandpa Prater's farmhouse, listening to the adults complain about hippies and laugh about things that happened a thousand years ago.  So we go exploring, hoping to find a secret stash of comic books.

The kitchen
The furnace room
A little room used as as a pantry.
A room with a pump in it.
Some bedrooms.
Grandma Prater's Room.  Locked.  Off-Limits.

Grandma Prater died in 1966, when I was five years, old, so I have only a few random memories of her:  a short, fat, brown woman carrying bags of groceries, frying chicken, telling me a story about a mouse, giving me the nickname Boomer.  She had a thick Kentucky accent.

In a small farmhouse, they could use an extra bed, but after she died, no one ever slept in her bedroom again.  The adults went in to clean, or to look around, but kids weren't allowed: we might "break something."

The door was always locked, but when we played in the house, we always tried it anyway, just in case.

Today the knob turns, and the door stands ajar!  Cousin Buster and I glance at each other in surprise, then push the door open and look inside.

It is a very bright, airy room, not at all stuffy, with two windows and blue wallpaper.  A four-poster bed with a blue comforter,  the covers turned down, a Bible opened to the Psalms, as if Grandma Prater has just stepped out and would return at any moment.

A wooden dresser with photos of Kentucky kinfolk.  A bureau.  Clothes on hangers visible in the open closet door.  A rocking chair with knitting stuff on it.


And a painting: in a lush green forest, a boy is leaning against a tree, playing a flute.  He is wild, savage, naked except for an animal skin. A round red sack hangs from his side.

I stare in awe.  I am looking through a gateway into a "good place," where boys can hold hands and kiss without anyone asking "what girl do you like?"  The boy is a fairy, a mystical sprite, beckoning me, offering a way to the secret world.

After that, on most Christmas and summertime visits, I asked to see Grandma Prater's room.  I became familiar with the bed, dresser, bureau, and rocking chair.  I picked up her Bible, read the annotations, examined her sewing, turned the photos around to see who the subjects were.

But my favorite part of the tour was the painting.

Who was the boy?  Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream?  A boy Hercules (was that a lion skin?).  I thought of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows, the painting that led to Narnia, the Road to Elfland in heroic fantasy.

And, as I learned more about my grandmother, the painting seemed more and more out of place.

She was born in 1900 in the desolate hills of Eastern Kentucky.  Although she graduated from high school, a rarity at the time, she lived in isolation and poverty.  During the Great Depression, they survived by making moonshine.  She lost four of her eleven children.  During World War II, she moved to Indiana, to another isolated farmhouse.

She believed in ghosts, haints, witches, and premonitions.  A few weeks before she died, she heard her mother calling her from beyond the grave.

She never read fantasy or mythology, or, as far as I could tell, any book but the Bible.  There was no other art in the house except for a picture of Christ on the Cross and a souvenir from Indiana Dunes.

I asked my mother where the painting came from, but she didn't know -- it had been there as long as she could remember, even back in Kentucky.

Were there art galleries in the Kentucky hills?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Grandpa Prater died in 1978, but Uncle Edd continued to live in the farmhouse until 1998, and, I assume, kept up the blue room and the painting.

 After I moved to West Hollywood, I visited my parents twice a year, first in Rock Island and then in Indianapolis, with little time leftover to visit my elderly aunts and uncles in northern Indiana.

Before I knew it, ten, twenty, thirty years had passed since I last went into Grandma Prater's room.

Indianapolis, December 2000

Yuri and I are spending Christmas with my parents.  We go into the room that they've turned into a home gym: two exercise bikes, some free weights...and hanging on the wall beside a towel rack, The Painting!

I stand speechless, staring, as memories rush back.

How did it get here?  Maybe when Uncle Edd moved out of the farmhouse, Mom claimed it.

Yuri touches my shoulder.  "Are you ok?"

"Sure...I mean...this is one of my favorite childhood memories, a picture from my grandmother's bedroom.  I thought it was a hint that gay people exist."

"Your grandmother had the Pastyr Devid?"

"You know it?"

Turns out that it was one of the illustrations in a book of Bible stories that Yuri's grandmother read to him.

"I ask for the story of David the Sheep Boy..." Yuri began.

"Shepherd?"

"Ok, David the Sheepherd.  I asked Baba to read me that story many times.  I thought he was beautiful.  Maybe this is where I know I am gay?"

A continent apart, both our grandmothers inadvertently showed us a sign of gay potential.


I looked up the painting on the internet:  it's Shepherd Boy Playing the Flute, by Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzski (1843-1902), who specialized in Biblical and classical scenes.

Leaving two questions:

1. Was Siemiradzski gay?  I don't find a lot of beefcake in his works.  There's a couple of cute guys on the curtain he painted for the Juliusz Slowacki Theater.

2. How did my grandmother get a print of a work by a minor Polish painter in the hills of Eastern Kentucky?

My Uncle and His Boyfriend in the Kentucky Hills

Eastern Kentucky, Summer 1973

It's the summer after seventh grade.  We're visiting my Uncle El, the only one of Mom's family to stay behind when the rest of them moved to Indiana.  Dinner is over, and we're telling stories of long-ago times, before I was born, when Mom was a little girl.   Sometimes the adults laugh at jokes I don't understand.

Uncle El's wife tells about the time she rode her bicycle all the way into Salversville to see a boy, but when she got there he was spooning with someone else.  (she obviously did not mean "sleeping front-to-back."  It was probably something like "making out.")

An elderly lady I don't know tells a story about witches.

Now it's Uncle El's turn.

"I'm going to tell about my brother, Manus, and his friend Graydon, two boys with the same soul."

I've been dozing off, but now I perk up -- sounds like this will be interesting!



Eastern Kentucky, Fall 1939

Manus and Graydon, the boy from down the holler, were born at the same moment, and some said they shared the same soul.

Oh, on the outside, they was as different as night and day:

Graydon was tall and dark, with thick arms and a tight chest, fond of wrasslin' and huntin' and fishin'.

Manus was short and slim and pale-skinned, a moody boy, always readin', but a good singer, with a clear tenor voice.

They was different down below, too.  You don't have much privacy in the hills, when you sleep three to a bed, and I saw them many times jumping nekkid into the creek, or lying on the soft grass.

Lordy, did that Graydon have a whopper!

"Eliot!  There are children present!"  the elderly lady snaps.

"Why, Marcy, surely they know that boys have something down there!"

Yet for all of their differences, Manus and Graydon were never separated, from sunup to sundown, when their parents forced them into different cabins for dinner.  Even then, they sometimes sneaked out to have secret adventures in the darkness.

Life was hard in the hills during the Depression.  Eight people in a four room cabin.

Kerosene lamps for light, a wood-burning stove for heat, and the woods outside for an outhouse.

They raised chickens and grew corn, beans, taters, and maters.  For everything else, they depended on Dad's job at a factory in Hueysville, eight miles away.

Still, they had fun. There were church socials and square dances.  In the evenings the neighbors came around to tell ghost stories and sing songs.  There'd be no dry eye in the house when Manus  sang "Barbara Allen."

Oh mother, mother, make my bed,
Make it long and make it narrow.
Sweet William died for me today,
I'll die for him tomorrow.

"I always hated that song," Mom says.  

In the summer of 1939, Graydon bought and fixed up an old clunker car.  Now they could drive all the way to Salyersville, 20 miles down the pike, to get malteds and go to the movies.

They liked Little Tough Guy, with the Dead End Kids, and Out West with the Hardys, with Mickey Rooney.

In late October of 1939, Graydon and Manus took ill, maybe from going swimming nekkid in the cold Brushy Fork Creek.  

They gave them herb medicine and mustard plasters and poltices, and Manus got better, but Graydon got sicker and sicker, and he died on November 5th, the day of the first snowfall.

His dad and older brother built a pine box to put him in, and they buried him in the graveyard up atop  the hill.

Well, needless to say, Manus was inconsolable.

He cried and cried, and after he stopped crying he wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, he just sat on the bed in the room he shared with me and Edd, staring out the window, up at the hill where Graydon was buried.

Then one night he yelled to the family, "Hey, there's a light up on the hill!"

It was a swaying yellow light, like from a kerosene lamp.  But who would be up there in the middle of the night?  It was pitch dark, with just a narrow trail through the brush and trees.  

"I'm going up!"  Manus yelled, pulling on his coat.


But Mom and Dad forbade him.  It was too dangerous. He could wait until morning to investigate.

"No, I gotta go now!  I gotta!"  He tried to push past them out the door.  Dad grabbed him by the arms.  He fought.

There was no help for it: they had to lock Manus up in the room, where me and Edd could look over him.

Well, Manus paced and rumbled, and yelled, and cried, and finally sat down in a chair, still staring up at the light on the hill.  Finally Edd and me fell asleep.

The next morning, when we woke up, Manus was gone!

The door was still locked from the outside.  The window hadn't been touched.  There was no way Manus could have gotten out!

Some say one of his sisters let him out, and he went dashing up the hill and fell in a ditch, and got eaten by a bear.

El glances pointedly at my mother.  But she was only two years old at the time.

Some say a neighbor sneaked him out, and drove him to Salyersville, where he bought a bus ticket Out West, like the Hardys.

Some say Graydon came for him.

Whatever happened, no one ever saw Manus again.

But that night, up on the hill, we saw two glowing lights.

See also: My Kentucky Kinfolk; The Naked Man at the Crossroads; Erotic Story about Me and My Grandpa #1

The Naked Ghost at the Crossroads

Eastern Kentucky, June 1905

[This is the story that my aunt told me when I was about nine years old, in the trailer in the big woods, while a cold wind howled outside.]

Mary Shepherd was only 16 when her parents announced that they had arranged for her to be married to 33-year old Ell Hicks.

She didn't mind: he was a good catch.  He had a nice farm near Pyramid, Kentucky, about 14 miles south of Prestonburg.  And he was handsome, athletic, and "well-knit."  Girls had been trying unsuccessfully to land him for years.

Ell turned out to be a good provider.  He bought Mary the latest fashions, and took her to moving picture shows, and in 1904 they became one of the first families in the hills to own a new horseless carriage.

He was always kind to her and the children.  He never raised his hand in anger.

There was only one problem, something that Mary couldn't tell anyone about except her mother.  And many years later, her favorite daughter, Gracie.

Ell wasn't...um...we'll, he wasn't keen on his...um...on doing his duty as a husband.

Mary had to coax and cajole him, and even then it happened only once in a blue moon.

She blamed Ell's friends.  That's why he waited so long to marry -- he preferred the company of men.  Especially that wastrel Silas.  Why, they were joined at the hip, like Frick and Frack!

Sometimes those two stayed out carousing until midnight, leaving Mary rumbling around the house all by herself.

Finally Mary put her foot down.  "You can't visit Silas unless I go with you!"

That quieted things down, for awhile.

One day in the summer of 1905, Ell told Mary that Silas's elderly grandmother was sick, very sick, and everyone was gathered at the house to "sit up" with her, like you did in the hills.  She gave her consent for him to "sit up," too, as long as he was back by suppertime.

Well, suppertime came, and then sundown, and no Ell.  At first Mary was worried.  Then she got angry.  Maybe he wasn't sitting up with Silas's grandmother at all.  Maybe the old woman wasn't even sick!  No doubt it was just an excuse to go carousing with that wastrel!

Near midnight, Mary had enough. She woke Dewey, her toddler, wrapped six-month old Gracie in blankets, and set out to catch Ell in the act.

Ell took the carriage, so she had to walk.

It was very dark, but she could see well enough in the moonlight.

She went down the dirt road for about a mile, and then she came to a crossroads.  The left fork led to Pyramid, and the right on to Prestonburg.

There was something glowing on the side of the Prestonburg Road!

At first she thought it was someone holding a lantern.  But no -- the light was pale and cold, like moonlight.

It was like a human figure with legs spread and arms akimbo.  But much bigger -- at least ten feet tall! She couldn't make out a face.

It moaned like a ghost.

Mary was petrified with fear, but she couldn't run away, with Dewey clinging to her legs and Gracie howling.

She thought of going back, but Silas's house was closer, and there were people there.  So she persevered, walking slowly, with the boy still clinging to her legs and the baby still howling.

Finally she made it to the house, where she discovered that Ell was telling the truth.  It was full of people sitting up with Silas's grandmother, who died at the precise moment that Mary saw the figure in the woods.

But there was a problem: the figure was definitely male.  It was naked.  She distinctly remembered seeing...um...manly parts. . .dangling between its legs.

If it wasn't Silas's grandmother, who was it?  What was it?

Gracie didn't remember the incident, of course.  Mary told her about it when she was a teenager, just before she married my grandfather.

Years later, Gracie told the story to each of her daughters, just before they married.

Aunt Mavis broke with tradition, and told me.

No doubt the details changed over time, but I'm certain that the core of the story is intact: the wastrel, the sick grandmother, and the ghost in the woods that couldn't have been her.

What kind of cautionary tale is this for mothers to pass on to their daughters?

Maybe to be careful -- some of your husband's infidelities might not involve women.

But wait -- did Mary even know that gay men, or men on the downlow, existed?  Did Gracie? Or Aunt Mavis?

See also: The Ghost Lovers of Eastern Kentucky