mental hospital by his parents.
'When word got around about Ronnie and me, I was treated shabbily enough,'
Diefendorfer said, 'but at least I had my freedom. I had already planned on leaving the community, so the shunning was tolerable. My mother and father didn't shun me, hurt and baffled as they were, and only one of my three brothers turned his back whenever I entered a room. But Ronnie just disappeared one day, and it wasn't until a week later that his eleven-year-old sister Beth told me what his family had done with Ronnie.'
'Were you both still in high school?' I asked.
'Ronnie was a senior. I was homeschooled. My family were all house Amish, the most conservative branch. Ronnie was going to go to Millersville State College the following fall, and I was going to live with him, work, get my GED, and then go to Millersville, too-even though I wasn't sure why, besides being with Ronnie, I wanted to go to college. I did have some vague idea that I wanted to be an agronomist maybe, or a jazz saxophonist. When I was eight or nine, I heard a John Coltrane piece coming from the radio in a parked car at the Ephrata Agway-it wasn't until years later that I understood who and what I had heard-and I thought, someday I want to be able to make that sound. That urge stayed with me right up until the sad day I discovered that I have no musical talent whatsoever.'
'Thad, this all sounds pretty gutsy for the early seventies. Especially an Amish kid being out. It was tough enough back then for the Methodists and Congregationalists.'
Diefendorfer considered this. 'I guess it was, but at the time I didn't think of myself as brave. During the year Ronnie and I were together-most of which time I most definitely was not out with anybody-I was torn between euphoria and sheer terror.
When I was seventeen, a Dairy Queen went up near our farm, and my brother Emmanuel and I started hanging out there. That was pretty racy in itself for a Mennonite kid. It's where I met Ronnie when I was hanging around alone one Friday night having a shake. We kept looking at each other, and finally he came over and asked me if I was Amish-I had my farm clothes on-and he asked, were Amish people allowed to eat food made in a machine that ran on electricity?'
'That would have been my first question, too,' I said.
'Well, the answer is no. But on an Amish sin scale of one to ten, ingesting a Dairy Queen product is probably only a one or two. The trouble was, however, that the more Ronnie and I talked, and the more that we looked at each other, the more I felt that a sin-scale ten was just around the corner for me.'
'It was obvious that soon?'
'He invited me to go sit in his car with him. Which I did with no hesitation. I had been inside cars twice before, and I'd even ridden in one once. This alone made me a kind of Mennonite James Dean. Live fast-that is, go somewhere in a car-and die young. But when I climbed into Ronnie's dad's Pontiac that June night, it wasn't the car's internal combustion I was the most worried about, it was mine.'
'You each guessed the other was gay?'
'Ronnie told me later he wasn't sure about me at first. Like most people, he naively believed that the Amish were somehow unlike the rest of the human race in that regard. But as soon as I got into the car with Ronnie and noticed that his hand was shaking, I was sure of what was happening, and I started sweating, and my hands started shaking too. I held up a palsied hand to Ronnie and said, 'Look.'' Diefendorfer raised a large, tanned, well- used hand above the table, as if to demonstrate. He made the hand tremble lightly, and I felt my own palms moistening and took a sip of iced tea.
'The only sex I'd ever had up until that time was with farm animals,' Diefendorfer said, as casually as I might have mentioned carving polar bears out of Ivory soap when I was a Cub Scout. 'But,' he went on, 'I'd been fantasizing about human beings-all guys-since I was nine or ten. And Ronnie was pretty close to my ideal: dark eyes, a mop of black curls, clear skin, reserved but not so shy that I had to worry he might panic and bolt. Anyway, when I showed him my trembling hand, he showed me his, and ten minutes later we were parked in a dark corner of my family's west pasture.'
I said, 'The male of the species is so efficient in these matters.'
'It's our vestigial caveman genes. Spread that sperm around.'
'And love followed close on the heels of lust?'
'Not close,' Diefendorfer said, 'but Ronnie and I liked each other immediately, and the sex was wonderful, and we kept finding ways to meet. Then, over the next year, as the time got closer for Ronnie to go away to college, we began to talk about our feelings for each other, and talking about how we felt made it even more intense and real. And the idea of actually separating for any length of time began to seem excruciating. Until, that is, it dawned on us that we didn't really have to separate. We were each an emotional and physical habit with the other that didn't really have to be broken, we realized.'
'And all of this was kept secret from your friends and families?'
'Amazingly, yes. People found it a little peculiar that Ronnie and I were friends-he lived in town and went to Ephrata High, and I was house Amish out on a farm-but I was open about wanting to live with the English, so it was generally assumed that Ronnie was simply my modern-world guru. This was the case right up until Ronnie's Uncle Lloyd came over to borrow the Busbys' weed whacker one day while they were at an insurance agents' convention in Hershey, and he walked in on us while we were going at it in the Busbys' rec room. Then word spread fast, and a week later Ronnie was gone.'
'His parents had him committed involuntarily? This was legal in Pennsylvania? I know it was-maybe is-in too many jurisdictions.'
'Ronnie was legally underage,' Diefendorfer said. 'His parents owned him. Legally, it was no different than if he had been a plow horse or a hog.'
'It's hard to imagine that this medieval stuff has gone on in our lifetime.'
'Well, it still goes on, I've read. Certainly in a lot of traditional societies. In the Middle East and parts of Asia and… where else? Alabama? Idaho? I know people here in the city who think the gay revolution is over. The legal fights that directly affect them have been pretty much won. Their main worry is that gay culture whatever the term might mean to each of the wide variety of people who use it-is being diluted or is even disappearing. But for most gay people in most places west of Hoboken and east of Sweden, they might as well be living in 1951-if not 951.
It's something I think about down on the farm. I've got a pretty good life now, but I know that an awful lot of people don't, and I'm not doing anything about it anymore.'
'Do you go back to Ephrata?' I asked.
'Not often,' Diefendorfer said evenly. 'Last year my mother died. I wrote to the elders and requested permission to go to her funeral. They said no.'
'They can do that?'
'I could have gone. They wouldn't have called the police. But… that's not the point.'
'No.'
'They complimented me on the righteous life I've led. They knew about my FFF exploits. Within the context of my being a sinner, I've been a man who helped others. They respected that and said so.'
I said, 'I guess it's a distinction Pat Robertson and his type of Christian don't take the trouble to make.'
'That's right,' Diefendorfer said. 'It's why I still consider myself Amish. Through its history, the Mennonite faith has always had its dissenters. People breaking away and going off to found yet another branch. Mine is the Diefendorfer farm branch, I guess you could say. It has a membership of five.' 'You and who else?'
'On the farm, it's my partner Isaac and me, plus Sarah Mintz and Esther Fenstamacher and their daughter Lizzie, who's three. Sarah is pregnant, and it'll be six of us in October. Isaac is Lizzie's biological father, and I'm the father of Sarah's baby-though only, so far, as a sperm donor through a clinic in New Brunswick.
Sarah and I are the best of friends, though not lovers, praise the Lord.'
'It sounds like a nice family,' I said. 'Though not, as the J-Bird pointed out, your classic, picturesque Amish household.'
Diefendorfer laughed. 'You don't know the half of it. We all met on-guess where?
The Internet.' 'I'm not surprised.'
'There are Mennonites I know who've moved from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first in a matter of weeks. It's time travel, like science fiction. And I know some, too, who've visited the future-i.e., right now-and they've beat it right back to the less complicated past. Isaac and I- he's from Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, and his
