ESSAY | LIFE | RURAL LIVING | LGBT+ | AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Five Years Old and Gay in Rural, Western Kansas

The remarkable story of Kevin and the doghouse

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Some people maintain that one cannot remember events or thoughts from ages as early as four or five. I know that one can and does if the occurrence is distinctly affecting.

I knew I was gay at age five. That is, I had feelings, desires, compulsions, and attractions that I still had at 11 and would then recognize as homosexuality. I vividly remember the feelings. I well remember the story I’m about to relate.

Somehow, I intuited that these attractions made me different from other little boys. I sensed that it was very wrong of me. I wanted to but knew I’d best not tell a sole, certainly not my grandmother of German Lutheran heritage nor my father, a former, for-real Texas cowboy and a Marine veteran of the WW II Pacific campaign. My sneaking suspicion that these feelings were very wrong became reality when my grandmother found out nonetheless.

Of course, at five, I had no concept of being gay. Indeed, in 1953, the word was not yet in use in the sense of being homosexual. Neither did I know the word homosexual. I had no name for my deeply seated feelings, but that did not lessen my belief that I was very different and alone in them.

It was a secret. It was my secret, mine alone to know, mine to keep. There would be consequences were anyone else to find out. I feared that I would get such a hiding as no unrepentant, English-public-school-sixth-former ever had. This was bad. I was never going to get into Heaven.

I know that it sounds to you as improbable. I can only maintain that I have these specific memories. You will either judge me credible or a false witness. Before you come to the latter determination, let me tell you the remarkable story of Kevin and the dog house.

Leoti, the consummate nowheresville

I was western-Kansas born and Kansas/Colorado raised until 1954 when I was six and my father moved us to suburban Washington, DC.

We lived in Leoti (Lee-oh’-ta), Kansas, the county seat of Wichita County, alongside my maternal grandparents. Leoti stands 37 miles due east of the Colorado border, at the intersection of east-west bound Kansas 96 and north-south bound Kansas 25. Both highways run border to border.

That intersection was the only major one in town. It was controlled by four-way stop signs. No other traffic control devices existed in the town except a few blocks further north, at the town’s northern border on K-25, where it crossed over the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks.

Any further north, one was literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Not that anyone had much call to go that far. The railroad had stopped passenger service to Leoti. All that went through were freights, all of them nonstop but one.

In 1953, the year of Kevin, Leoti’s population was 1,310. (Just by way of contrast, my suburban-DC, 1966 high school graduating class was 1,100 graduates out of a total class of about 1,350.) It was the sole surviving outpost of western-Kansas-cosmopolitanism on the east side of the Colorado border. For 30 miles in any compass direction, all that there was outside of little Leoti were open ranges and broad wheat fields mottled here and there by the occasional Sun-Flower patch.

It was the kind of small, western town where everyone knew everyone’s business, where anyone was at any given moment of any given day, and what they were doing.

This was largely due to Miss Information Please, the town’s telephone operator. I thought that was her name for the longest time because, whenever I rang the switchboard to make a call, she came on the line issuing the query “information, please?” With everyone’s prior knowledge, she shamelessly listened in on every call that went through her switchboard. The local population’s tacit, conspiratorial consent was the reason there were no secrets in Leoti — but mine.

The remarkable incident of Kevin and the dog house

That was until that summer when a new family moved into the big house cater-cornered from my grandma’s house, including Kevin. I was five. He was six. We formed an instant bond. We spent hours together roaming Leoti. To my mind, he was the Lone Ranger and I Tonto, forever faithful, forever loyal, and forever together. Without realizing it, I was in love.

At the far end of the alleyway behind grandma’s house, there lived an affectionate Great Dane that had a big, I mean really big, Great-Dane-sized dog house. One day, I got the inspiration that we should play doctor. We would need a private place out of open eyesight. The dog house was perfect. The dog was only ever in it overnight.

Outside it, I considered what to do. Why strip, of course. How else could we authentically play doctor and examine each other? That was the rationale I gave Kevin, but I had another motive in mind. I wanted to see Kevin’’s naked chest. I wanted to see all of him, to have all of him up against all of me with no clothing barrier hampering the adventure. Amazingly, he agreed.

So, strip we did. Carefully folding each piece of clothing, we laid them out in two small, neat piles on either side of the entrance. We scampered inside and spent what seemed to me like hours, with him the doctor poking and prodding me in all the appropriate and inappropriate places. At one point, we began to wrestle. He maneuvered me onto my back, got on top sitting astride my groin, and started tickling me — all over. Despite my giggling inveighing that he should stop, I was in Heaven.

Until, that is, my grandmother, walking down the alley looking for me, spied the little pile of my clothes outside the dog house and the second pile beside it. She knew what was going on inside and did not approve.

With one swift movement the likes of which I had no idea she could execute, she reached inside and grabbed me by the ear. Out I came reflexively flushing red with my shame. In no time, she got my clothes on me and marched me, still by the ear, back down the alley and inside her house. I was well and truly in the dog house now. Kevin, she left to his own devices, assured that he would slink home in dread expectation of what was to come.

Strangely, I have no particular recollection of what happened to me next. I’m sure, though, that it involved a spanking and a severe lecture from that decorous woman of impeccable morality.

I do remember her hushed phone call to Kevin’s mother. My grandmother had no doubt that Kevin being the older and the new arrival in town, and I being her grandchild, Kevin had been the instigator. In prim but no less grim, forbidding terms, she let Kevin’s mother, and, by extension, Miss Information Please, know that any mother who so loosely schooled her child in right-minded behavior would find Leoti an unwelcoming and unforgiving town, which, unsurprisingly, it became.

That same summer in which he had arrived, Kevin, together with his parents, was gone.