The outcome of Fellows' interviews was his 1996 book Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men From the Rural Midwest, a compilation of 36 personal narratives of gay men, most of whom had abandoned rural living. Fellows, himself a gay man raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm, knew that many males like himself, who'd subsequently fled to larger metropolitan areas, felt like outsiders among their urban counterparts.įellows' goal was to give voice to the experiences of rural gay men who were typically overlooked or ignored by gay urban culture - or else, as he wrote, simultaneously stereotyped and romanticized as wholesome and virile 'country bumpkins with rosy cheeks, ready to be plucked if they venture into the big city.' In the spring of 1992, Milwaukee writer Will Fellows began interviewing 75 gay men, ages 25 to 84, who'd grown up in farm families throughout the Midwest.
