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MARK AND DALE
Mark and Dale's story seemed remarkable because, in some ways, they are so unremarkable. Except for the fact they are two men, their way of life is, by any standard, unexceptional and conventional. But they are two men living on a family farm in the heart of what they describe as Ku Klux Klan country, with Dale's fifteen-year-old son and eighty-year-old mother. Within the scope of my research, their circumstances chal-lenged my expectations. I also had a lot of fun visiting with them, their family, and friends during a summer weekend. Mark and Dale would be the first to tell you that the way of life they now have and the relationships they have built have taken years of work and commitment. There have been plenty of tears, frustrations illnesses, and arguments along the way. In many respects, they're like any other family. That wasn't what I expected to find on their farm in rural Tennessee. Mark and Dale live on a large piece of property they share with several members of Dale's family, about thirty miles outside a small Tennessee city. The drive out from the city took me through small] towns, past farms and many, many churches. Turning off a main paved road onto the dirt road that leads to the entrance of Mark and Dale corner of the family property, I passed the small stone house where Dale's parents used to live, a field of fruit trees, a fenced-in area filed with boisterous white turkeys, and the stable where Precious, their beautiful sand-colored horse, lives. The entrance to the property blocked by a gate, one of Dale's imaginative Rube Goldberg-like mechanical wonders made of weights, an old bicycle wheel, rope, and an electronic keypad. Punching the right numbers sets the whole con-traption in motion, clearing the way to the house. Despite a recent drought, the road to their house was lined with flowers. Dale has slowly been landscaping the property. Already there's a small sitting area nestled into a hillside surrounded by shrubs, flow-ers, and trees. A little fountain scuds water splashing over a pile of rocks near the stone patio. Their house is down a few stone steps from the patio and across a dirt driveway, its front facing a pasture. Dale has finished the roof and his son's room, but except for this and the mobile home around which the house is being built, the rest of the structure is just a shell. Until it's finished, living arrangements are tight. The main room of the mobile home is a combined kitchen and living room. It's filled with furniture, dozens of flowering African violets, and a pair of parakeets. There's a special chair set aside for Dale's frail eighty-year-old mother. Jimmy's room is a hint of how wonderful the house will he. It's ceil-ing is about twelve feet high, topped by a skylight. There's a loft bed reached by a ladder and a "Hobbit" door that leads out to a small bal-cony overlooking the field-complete with tranquil-looking cows-in front of the house. The walls and ceiling are painted white, the wood trim and carpeting are blue. Jimmy's weight-lifting equipment fills the middle of the room. At the time I met Dale and Mark in 19~6, Dale was thirty-nine. He's the youngest of nine children and grew up on the land where he and Mark now live. When he was seventeen, he was briefly involved with the KKK. At eighteen he was married, and at nineteen, left for Vietnam. He's a tall, quiet, solid-looking man who used to drive trucks and carry one hundred-pound bags of flour on and off his truck. He barely reads or writes. He quit his trucking job in 1984 because of back problems and then split his time between working on the house and working in Mark's cleaning business Dale separated from his wife in 1976. By then he and his wife had two children: We had a pretty good marriage, but it faded away. I've always been gay and just not known it. When I went to Nam I found out there was a different life. She didn't accept it right off and had a bard time, but she realized that separating was for the best and realized that I wasn't going to change. Now she's made friends with both of us. Mark is articulate, sandy blond, and blue-eyed. When I met him, he looked older than his twenty-eight years, which wasn't surprising, given the hard time he had growing up coping with being gay and living with an alcoholic mother. I tried the suicide routine in high school. I felt worthless and use-less. At one point I committed myself to a mental hospital. Mark made it through college, but wasn't managing his life much better than before when he met Dale. My friends were all eager for me to settle down and stay on one track. I was doing lots of drugs, drinking, and tricking. The way the world is now with AIDS, I wouldn't be alive. Mark and Dale met in 1979 through Dale's trucking partner and on-again, off-again lover. Mark: I was living with friends at the time. I was in a foul mood one night and didn't feel like hitting the bars or bookstores, and a room mate and some of his friends suggested we go to a bar in a nearby town. I met a fellow down there, Ray. He looked like an easy mark. I went home with him but found out he was awful and got up to leave. I found Dale in the living room. Dale was driving a truck then. Ray was his partner. I wound up spending the night with Dale instead. Dale: I was really attracted to Mark because I was into young men an Mark was a real young guy. That started it and then I found on about his personality. I discovered that he was a lot like me. He was' easy to be with. Mark: Dale fascinated me. I was real lonely up to that point. I had bee running around a lot and wasn't getting any satisfaction from it. found Dale very interesting and very strong, dependable, supportive. He flattered me. He made me feel good al)out myself-at ease and very protected. Over the next few months Mark and Dale got to know each other between Dale's long-haul driving assignments. Around Halloween, Dale moved in with Mark. Mark: We didn't discuss it or plan it. It was just the thing to do. We had a lot of people living in the apartment then. Mark was home two days out of the month, so it was more of a telephone relationship for the first year. We talked every day. Dale: I missed him a lot. For two and a half years Mark and Dale lived in the city. Dale had wanted to move up to his family's property, and Mark eventually gave in. Mark: I was very nervous about it because I didn't know his mother well at that time or his brother or his other brother. After we moved to the country and were in the middle of family land that Dale's family had had for years and years, I just knew that the minute Dale left for the road, the lynch mob was going to come for me. But the family met us the first day with apple pies. Dale: I wasn't worried. I didn't care what other people thought of my life. They didn't give me any reason to be worried about it. I didn't know how they would accept it. We didn't talk about it. The sub-ject's come up since then. I had one brother in Texas who had some negative things to say about us living up here and Grandma living with us and it took Charlie, my brother who lives next door to us, all of five minutes to put him in his place. My brothers here and my sister in Baltimore are the most open-minded. Mark: Now I don't see us as any different than any other family up here because they don't make us feel any different. Even Dale's siblings' children have been respectful. They give us the same kind of respect they would give any other married couple who was their neighbor or family. Dale: Since Jimmy [Dale's son] has lived up here and is going to school here, more friends come in from outside who we haven't known before and they're all just as respectful and abiding as everyone else. I don't know it for a fact, but I feel sure they've had to defend us to outsiders, maybe people in the church asking questions or making comments. I know my family and I'm sure they have defended us and supported us. Mark's parents were not supportive at first, but since his mother’s death four years ago, he and his father have gotten along fairly well. Mark: My mother spit in my face when she found out I was gay. We never talked about it again. My father took her negative view of me and our relationship until Momma was gone. Then he changed entirely. He met Dale the day after she died. I talk to my dad weekly. I don't feel real comfortable there. Maybe because of his new wife. Mark and Dale lived together for a short while before Dale' mother, who's in ill health, came to live with them. She's a long-time fan of a homophobic television evangelist, but turns off the TV when ever he starts in about homosexuality. Dale: If she weren't living with us, she wouldn't he alive. Mark: It was the thing to do. She needed us. Dale: We needed her, too. Mark: She goes to the doctor two or three times a month. Last summer her left knee was replaced. She had to have somebody with her at all times. We can't go anywhere without making sure she's taken care of. Dale: For any couple having to care for an ill parent it would put strain on their relationship. It can make tensions high, but we're thankful we can do something for her. Mark: We get mad at her sometimes. Senility can make you angry. But she's not a burden. She's a lot of trouble sometimes, but she's not burden. She's been through a lot in her lifetime. We get a lot ( pleasure out of caring for her. Dale and I put a lot of value on our family. You don't turn your back on your family. Dale: My mother has adopted Mark. She tells everyone that Mark is part of the family. She wouldn't know what to do without Mark. A couple of years after Dale's mother came to live with them, Dale's son Jimmy moved in full time. After Dale left his marriage, he never expected either his daughter or son would live with him. Mark: Dale felt the road he had taken would take him away from his kids. Dale: I wasn't going to push any of the kids to live with me, even if I could take care of them. I felt my life wasn't right for raising kids, but everything changed around. Before I met Mark I wasn't much at all. I didn't have a life, let alone a life for children. It was a lot of empty space. Mark: At first I saw the kids as a hindrance to me being with Dale. But the more you're around them, the more you love them. We talked about the possibility of Jimmy moving in for years, because we knew Jimmy would eventually want to move in. Dale: He stayed the summer with us every year. Mark: He wasn't happy living in the city. It became obvious that he needed to be with his daddy more than we needed to keep together the brother and sister. When it comes to raising Jimmy, we both jump right in there feet first. Dale: It's everybody's job to keep him in line. Mark: Dale's never called me for being out of line. I've never been told that he wasn't my kid or it wasn't any of my business. We disagree sometimes, but no one has ever questioned my authority. Dale: He's a lot stricter than I am, but he can also be very wishy-washy. All Jimmy has to do is act right, and he gets his way with Mark. Mark: I've asked him if any of his friends have ripped him about his dad being gay and he's told me no. It doesn't seem to bother him or embarrass him to talk about it. We let him know that we're here to talk about it if he wants to. I've always been paranoid and so scared that someone was going to give him a hard time, but no one has. Mark is credited by their friends for pulling Jimmy together scholastically. Mark: We just let him know we expected that from him. We put a lot of time into doing homework. I’m strict, and Dale doesn't put up with laziness either. We all get our jobs done. When Mark and Dale first got together, they never imagined they would be living on the family property, taking care of Dale’s mother, and raising Jimmy together. They never even imagined their relationship would last. Mark: I didn't think those relationships lasted. I had that same stereo-typed belief that gay couples never lasted. I figured that two years was a record. Dale: One of my biggest questions at first was why Mark was staying with me. I thought that these gay relationships didn't last. But it’s good and it's better than when we first met. We have more and more roots tied down. Mark: At first we clinged desperately to each other. We were desperate for love and someone to love. It felt good so we hung onto it. Dale: I was worried that it might hot he there tomorrow. Mark: We weren't sure at first that it would last. I'm sure it was a couple of years before we realized that it was something that could last. Now we can't imagine anything different. I also thought that if I did find someone, that I would have to withdraw from society, but yon don't have to. We don't screen from the rooftops or throw it in anyone's face. We just approach it honestly. Mark and Dale view their relationship as rock-solid and permanent. Mark: I see what we have as above marriage. What we've got is more binding than a ceremony or paper. It's a commitment. Dale: It's more binding than the marriage I had with my wife. I feel like Mark was the one I was meant to be with. It's everything I always wanted. Mark: It's love and commitment that makes it what it is. It's an unspoken commitment. There are no rules or anything to tell you when you've run afoul of it. We support each other; look out for each other; draw strength from each other. That keeps us pretty glued together. It helps that we agree for the most part on everything that rolls by on the six o'clock news. We feel very strongly about things in the same direction-viewpoints on world affairs, religion, raising chil-dren. Our goals are things that drive us. It was not this way with me at first. At first when we got together the kids were a nuisance to me, but it was just something that had to be dealt with. There was not a lot of pleasure around the issue of kids at first. Now I love them. I would fight anyone tooth and nail who said they weren't mine. And I guess that's probably one of the biggest motivators for why we work so hard to make sure our relationship works well. We enjoy it and we have our kids and family to look out for. We see ourselves as being right here on this dirt until we die and we see the kids taking it after we're gone and enjoying what we've built for them. It's just the same good old red-blooded American dream that any family would have for their kids. That's why we get up and go to work. It isn't to take vacations and to buy big-screen TVs. It's to build a home for our kids. We hope that when we get old, they'll take care of us like we take care of Grandma now. Although they share values and beliefs about most issues, Mark and Dale are quick to note that they don't always agree and sometimes argue. Dale: We've had our fusses, but never knockdown fights. We've never struck each other. Mark: We've had our ups and downs, but we've never stopped loving each other. The problems are over the usual things. Making ends meet. Tensions run high when you're short on cash. Sometimes we disagree on how to raise kids. And we've had our problems here with constructing the house. Dale: I'm building the house, so things go where I want them to go. Mark: I can bring up the idea and draw it, but I wouldn't know how to begin to start building it. It just comes out of Dale's head. None of this came from blueprints. We get rough ideas. From that point I'm the carpenter's helper. We dream it up. He tells me what he's seeing in his mind. Then I get it on paper. He corrects it. Once he's finished building, the painting and furniture are up to me. Dale: I'm worst at that. Mark: I'm not wild about painting either. And even though Dale says he's not into painting or decorating, we still have arguments about paint color. Mark took out a loan in his name to finance the cost of construc-tion, and the mortgage on the mobile home is in his name as well. Where they live, Mark feels it would be a hassle to get the mortgage and loan in both names. They own the land together. Mark: Sometimes when people combine those things, they think it will force them to think twice before splitting. We don't see it that way. If it weren't a hassle, everything would be in both names. When we've worked separate jobs, our paychecks went straight into the same bank account. You get out there and do the best you can do and bring home as much as you can bring home and put it all together and make it go as far as it can go. We've got friends where one charges the other rent. We can't comprehend doing things that way. We feel like you've got a commitment to each other and you do it together. At the end of the interview, I asked Mark and Dale if they had any advice for men who were looking to be in a relationship or for men who were just starting a relationship. Mark responded: You just have to find someone who you're comfortable with, can be at ease with, who you can be yourself with, who you don't have to play games with. Sure, on your first date or encounter you're gonna play games and put up some fronts. You've got to become friends first, and be comfortable and honest. And when you get over the infatuation and you're not having sex six times a day, and you settle down a bit, that's when you have to put the effort into it. You have to decide if this is the right relationship, if this relationship is worth working for. And then you have to get in there and work every day, all the time. Don't go into a relationship and expect things. You've got to go in and do things. You have to show your love and show your com-mitment. That's what will get into someone's heart and make the relationship. Then you find somebody else who's willing to put the equal into it. Then you've got a relationship. When I left Mark and Dale early Sunday afternoon to return home, Mark was preparing a roast for Sunday dinner. Dale's ex-wife and daughter were expected any minute. When they arrived, Mark, Dale, Jimmy, Grandma, Dale's former wife, and his daughter all planned to head up to Dale's older brother's house on the hill to join several other family members at the swimming pool. I was sorry I hadn't planned to stay longer.
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