"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 history is a lot like mine-we try to combine those features of modern life we believe are morally neutral, like a Ford pickup, with the simplicity and cooperative spirit of traditional Amish life.
"It's hard sometimes. Isaac has never really dealt with his family's rejecting him, and he sometimes falls into black bouts of depression that last for days. And I get restless once in a while and yearn for my comical lost career as a jazz musician and my not-at-all-comical exciting youth, when I was the scourge of homophobes. But basically we like the lives we've made, and we manage pretty nicely. And since Sarah and Esther joined us three years ago, it's been even better-and easier, too, with the four of us working the farm. Financially, it's touch and go, but it helps that none of us are big consumers."
I said, "No twin Range Rovers parked side by side in the driveway of the Diefendorfer farmhouse?"
"No, but I have no objections
to a beautifully made machine. It's one of the theological differences I had with the elders of my community in Ephrata. That and-as the J-Bird so eloquently put it-an appetite for corn-holery."
"Speaking of which," I said, "what became of Ronnie?"
Diefendorfer's sunburn seemed to intensify for an instant. He said, "Ronnie died. Years ago."
"Oh no."
"I did manage to get him sprung from the psych hospital his parents had put him in.
When I found out where he was and tried to see him, they wouldn't let me in, naturally, or even let me talk to Ronnie on the phone, because I wasn't family. And, of course, because I was the coconspira-tor in ungodly activities and the alleged cause of what Ronnie's family called his mental breakdown. But I met some gay hippies in a park near where Ronnie was locked up in Philly, and one of them knew about the FFF and said this was exactly the type of cruel and unjust situation they specialized in.
"A week later, we had Ronnie out. As with most FFF rescues, we got help from sympathetic gay lower-level employees in the hospital. Ronnie was relieved and grateful, but neither one of us had a job or any money or even any marketable skills, really. Ronnie was a high-school kid who liked track and field, and I didn't know much more than how to drive a plow horse. It was all I could do to get on and off a subway train.
"We stayed with some of the Fairmount Park kids for a month or so. But Ronnie became more and more frustrated with the hand-to-mouth life and the overall uncertainty, and he told me one day that he was sorry but he was going back to Ephrata. He did go home, for a while, and lied to his parents that he had been cured of his homosexuality by the electroshock treatments at the hospital. I felt hurt and betrayed and lost, but I couldn't face going back to a place where a lot of people considered me an agent of Satan. I hooked up with the FFF, which was being financed by a rich stockbroker in Chicago whose parents had given him the treatment when he was a teenager, and I stayed with the group for almost two years. The FFF was righteous, it was a cooperative community, it was gay, and for me it was home. I was happy and fulfilled and free, for the most part.
"As soon as Ronnie hit eighteen, he left Ephrata for San Francisco, and I saw him a couple of times when some of us were doing rescues in California. By then, I was involved with Sammy Day, one of the FFF guys, and Ronnie was deep into the seventies San Francisco scene, with lots of happy-go-lucky screwing around. His timing was unlucky, though. When the plague hit, Ronnie went with the first wave.
He was twenty-six when he died."
I said, "Those were the people who never knew what hit them. It didn't even have a name in the beginning."
"No, just things like 'gay cancer.' Most guys suspected, though, that it had something to do with all the fucking. That it was some kind of communicable disease. I saw Ronnie six months before he died, and he said, 'It sure was fun while it lasted.' That could have been me. I did a lot of casual screwing around, too. But I was moving around so much with the group that we tended to pair up, like some ancient Greek army of fuck-buddies."
"But in an age that had Edith Massey there to record it instead of Edith Hamilton," I said. Then I asked, "Did you know a man named Kurt Zinsser? He was involved in the rescue of two Albany kids around 1970 from a mental hospital in New Baltimore, New York. I met Zinsser briefly in seventy-nine when he sheltered one of the two kids, Billy Blount, when Blount was being set up on a phony murder rap."
"Sure, I knew Kurt. He was still with the group in seventy-three when I joined up. He was a bit of a doctrinaire lefty, always quoting Fanon and Marx, and a bit tiresome in that regard. He stuck with the FFF after several of us got fed up and left in seventy-five."
"Any idea where he is now? In seventy-nine he was living in Denver."
"No, I've kept in touch with several of the old gang, but not Kurt."
"Thad," I said, "I certainly admire your going off and doing the Lord's work, so to speak, for the two years when you were with the FFF. But I'm wondering about one thing."
"What's that?"
"The first real skill you developed beyond eighteenth century-style farmwork was there's really no more accurate way of phrasing it-kidnapping. That's what the FFF's work amounted to. True?"
Diefendorfer's big ears reddened now, and he laughed. "That's one way of putting it."
"So, I have to ask you. Let me just blurt it out. Have you had anything to do with the kidnapping of Leo Moyle?"
He grinned some more. "Nope."
"Your showing up to try to divert attention from the obvious suspects in the kidnapping, the old FFF, is certain to leave some investigators wondering. I'm sure Lyle Barner will consider the possibility of a cunning, elaborate plot."
"I'm clean," Diefendorfer said easily. "Anyway, I believe that I arrived on the scene before Mr. Moyle was abducted, no?"
"Well, before anybody at the radio station knew about the kidnapping, yes. But of course you could have known all about it, and timed your arrival to sow doubt and confusion just as the investigation turned urgent. Not so?"
"Strachey," Diefendorfer said, looking pleased, "you know, you're really getting my blood racing."
"Thank you. Please elaborate."
"Look, I left the FFF after two years because, as with so many radical organizations, things got complicated and even ugly after a while. Disagreements developed over philosophy and even strategy, and I could deal with that. Men-nonites know how to find consensus. What I couldn't stand was the intrigue and backstabbing that got started after some new people came into the group. I came out of a background where people disagreed openly and resolved disputes in a mutually respectful way. The FFF conducted itself that way in the beginning, and that was one of the things I loved about it. The Forces of Free Faggotry was in a lot of ways Amish.
"But when the scheming got started, I was too naive and inexperienced in the world-and too shocked, really- to put up with the machinations, and I got out. I lived in a commune in Oregon for a while, and then ran a truck farm with some friends. 1 gradually adapted to the customs of life among the English, a lot of which I find reasonable and humane.
"But I'll tell you, Strachey, I really loved the excitement of those early FFF days before things went sour. It was a righteous life, and it was thrilling. So, when you talk about me being part of a kidnapping, it brings that all back. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. See?" Diefendorfer displayed a muscular forearm, and in fact the skin on it resembled the skin of a particularly masculine and well-shaped naked goose. This gesture was in keeping with Diefendorfer's apparent longtime habit of expressing his emotions with varying presentations of his limbs.
"I can see that you're feeling happily nostalgic," I said.
"I am, but that's all it is," Diefendorfer said. "Just nostalgia. The people the FFF snatched away wanted to be kidnapped. None of us would have carried off people who didn't want to be freed. Robbing people of their freedom, which is what someone has done to Leo Moyle, is the opposite of what we did. Being held against your will is a terrible thing. Some of the stories I heard from the kids we rescued would break your heart."
"But," I said, "don't you feel just a twinge of empathy- sympathy even-for the neo-FFFers, whoever they are, when they try to rid the public airwaves of a man who embodies the hateful impulse that got all those innocent young men and women you rescued locked up and tortured in the first place?"
"Sure, I sympathize," Diefendorfer said. "But, at the risk of sounding not righteous but self-righteous, I'll say that I also know that to fight evil with evil is to increase the amount of evil in the world. Usually. There may be exceptions, I know."
This sounded familiar. "Thad," I said, "I hope you can meet my cohort, lover and helpmeet Timothy Callahan. Your theology and his are similar. You two would hit it off. My own moral philosophy is somewhat more… English, you might say. Middle Eastern, even."
"I see."
"But if you sympathize even a little with the neo-FFF, as I do, just a tiny bit, you might be interest
ed in a short-term project that just occurred to me."
He perked up again. "What's that?"
"You help me locate Leo Moyle and rescue him."
"Oh, I don't know."
"And if we could get to Moyle before the cops do, we could do the rescue in the name of the old FFF-redeeming your group's good name-and maybe even keep the neo-FFFers from going to Leavenworth. Unless we decided they deserved a lengthy incarceration, of course. Which they might."
"Hmm. Oh boy. Hmm."
"The other reason not to mention to Lyle Barner that we're working on this together is that he's gay and he is sexually jealous. He can't help it. It's something between him and me that goes way back. There's a history. It would drive him crazy if he brought me into this for his own not-entirely-healthy personal reasons and then I worked closely with you instead. But I think you can be more useful in the rescue than Lyle can, even if it turns out there is no connection between the old and new FFF, as you believe-but which, by the way, I'm not so sure of. It sounds as if your group had some people in it capable of considerable middle-age mischief."
Diefendorfer peered at me for a long moment, and then said, "Is this some kind of setup?"
"No, I'm not that clever, or Machiavellian."
"Well, I don't know about that."
"So, what do you say? How about one last heist?"
"But I have other responsibilities. To a number of people, and to thirty-five acres of eggplants, squash and beans."
"I guess that's true," I said. "I'm overlooking the obvious. Farmers don't have extra time on their hands for living out the adventure fantasies of the middle-aged."
Diefendorfer suddenly brightened. "But I suppose I could hire someone to do my deliveries for two or three days," he said. "There's a Princeton grad student who likes an occasional break from his dissertation research. He's worked for us before on short notice. Maybe I'll check and see if I can be freed up for a couple of days. It's possible, if we hurry this up."
"That's exactly the way the J-Bird and his people-and especially Leo Moyle, I'm sure-want us to work. Fast."
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