Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

by Taylor Brorby

the prairie reveals.

Morgan silver dollar,

bucket hat.

But that day, we tossed and tumbled, and when I pinned Wesley, we both saw it, couldn’t unsee it—that our bodies had changed, and mine had betrayed me.

A small coal in my gut told me to look away, told me that the prairie could also burn boys who liked boys—that’s what we teach rural children.

But there was some understanding threaded through my DNA that told me I would always be a misfit if I never left where I came from—there was some desire for a different world, one where I could dance and sing. And in that faraway world, there must be others like me. I hoped there were.

“How long until I have to get it back to you, Mr. Erhardt?” I asked. “It’s yours,” he said, smiling once more. Then he turned his head ever so slightly and leaned toward me. “And, Taylor, I think if you really wanted to, you could write like that.”

The only item I listed under “Reasons to Die” was: Because I am gay.

Because I like to be liked,

And because of Levi.

I am gay—the shortest, most life-changing sentence a person can say.

to survive home, I had to leave.

Nothing, after all, survives on the prairie by being tender. So, I fled.

Home, for me, is land. As I’ve so often said after leaving North Dakota, “I love the land, not the people.”

The work that matters doesn’t always show.

I LEFT.

“Remember—you agreed to work there. It paid well. You should’ve been more careful.”

“I’ve never met anyone from North Dakota.” I’d smile, tell them there weren’t many of us from there, and that I was glad to be the first North Dakotan they’d met.

I was going home.

My parents weren’t being abusive, but I didn’t give them much chance for conversation. Avoidance was my solution to the issue; distance was a way for me to feel safe.

Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew my parents still loved me, even if they couldn’t accept having a gay son.

Home was, and is, for me, a sensation—thinner air, dust on the skin, dryness, eroded hills and buttes, a sheer amount of weather whirling across the canvas of sky. It’s overwhelming.

Then I remember: my presence is not welcomed by all.

kuchens.

IN THAT MOMENT I thought about both my grandpas, men of the Greatest Generation—Grandpa Hatzenbihler the farmer and Grandpa Brorby the coal miner. When I told them the truth, I was nervous, but it wasn’t hard: I didn’t have to cut the truth out. I just had to share it. And in those moments—in those small, quiet moments in Denny’s and over the phone—my grandpas told me their truth: they loved me.

MEDORA, NORTH DAKOTA, is the gayest town in the West.

North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame—

fleischkuekle—the local German-from-Russia meat patty, wrapped in dough, and deep fried, served with a pickle spear and French fries on the side.

North Dakota, Grindr confirmed, was no place for gay men.

Extraordinary Places—

“world’s largest Holstein cow,” atop the one hill west of New Salem,

where death isn’t a noun, but a slow-trickling verb.

the cold keeps the riffraff out.

“I’m so glad you got out,” he said. I swallowed and felt a bit embarrassed about how easily it came out of me, my admission that I felt safer away from home.

“Pastor Dan wasn’t out of the closet yet.”

fleischkuekle,

There was a silence, if only for a half second—that silence that any gay person knows, the silence between acceptance and exile, where tension brews, tears flow, where breath quickens; the silence that births us from the chrysalis of what people thought we were into who we really are; the silence of a quiet door opening or closing.

TO LIVE IN EXILE is to be separated, unwelcomed, burdened. Burdened by the weight of history, by the weight of memories, by the weight of what was said or what wasn’t said.

Before growing upward, prairie grasses shoot down their roots—they test the soil conditions to see whether this place,

this spot, is the right home for them. With each visit to North Dakota, to home, I test the conditions, send down my roots, and find that there is no place for me.

What I do.

You have no home here.

diabetic seizure

Time heals all wounds.

But how can a person live with a dead relationship when the family members are still alive?

It is biblical, how my memory of home swirls into a tempest, knocks me out with the weight of everything I now know. I cannot let go of home.

I no longer feel ashamed for the person I am.

My parents, who’ve had a difficult journey, but who tried.