.
Let’s get it out of the way: No, testicles do not taste like chicken. Nor, when battered thickly with flour and tossed into searing oil, do they taste like chicken-fried steak. They don’t taste like meat or like morels, though I was impressed with the suggestion, given to me by a Nebraskan gourmand who claimed he comes to the event known as the Testicle Festival—held annually over Father’s Day weekend at Round the Bend Steakhouse, in Ashland—because he thinks of cow balls as an affordable alternative to rare mushrooms. Instead, cow testicles taste, simply, like offal—toothsome and musky, the occasional gristle between your teeth, like an afterthought.
My tasting experience is limited to bull nuts, testicles shorn from male cows in spring so their testosterone levels remain relatively low, leaving the animals relatively placid and their meat tender enough to sell at market. (No, you can’t call them Rocky Mountain oysters, one testicle enthusiast explained to me—that term is reserved exclusively for pig nuts.) But years ago, the Testicle Festival showcased a menagerie of animal testicles: beef, pork, lamb, and, more unexpectedly, turkey. Lately, to keep prices low enough that everyone who works in and around Ashland might attend—bikers, farmers, mechanics, attorneys, accountants—only cow testicles are used, about twenty-two hundred pounds of them, shipped in from all over the country and processed an hour’s drive away in Diller, Nebraska. They are deep-fried, then wedged ten or twelve to a red-check paper tray, with a piece of rye bread, a pickle chip, and a squirt of a ketchup-based dip called cock sauce.
.A man eating fried cow testicles, known as "Bull Fries."
When I arrived the evening before the twenty-fifth festival began, the sun cast orange and pink light over rippling cornfields, as far as the eye could see. The bar was set on top of a gently sloping hill, and at the foot of it, an enormous sign beckoned to drivers along the highway: “Welcome to right smack dab in the middle of everywhere.” I walked into the ten-thousand-square-foot event space known as The Ball Room (pun intended), and an enormous man in a sleeveless T-shirt, arms covered in tribal tattoos, introduced himself as TJ, the owner of Round the Bend, before scooping me up into a bear hug that squeezed the breath from me. “I like to tell people, ‘Thanks for coming out and putting my balls in your mouth,’” he said, laughing.
.Round the Bend Steakhouse, which holds the annual Testicle Festival each Father’s Day weekend, in Ashland, Nebraska.
While the Testicle Festival in Ashland is well attended, it isn’t singular in form. Testicle Festivals of all shapes and sizes have been held regularly across the country, from California to Oklahoma to Virginia. Many of them, as you might expect, have a reputation for being the stuff of frat-house nightmares, and I admit that I was a little anxious about what I might find in Nebraska. Right before I arrived in Ashland, papers reported that another, more prominent Testicle Festival just two states north in Montana had been shut down for good after two people were struck and killed by a shuttle hijacked by a drunken attendee. That festival, more commonly known by its attendees as “Testy Festy,” had been infamous for its debauchery and violence—fights, fatal crashes, and stabbings were all but expected. Chuck Palahniuk once wrote an essay about the selfsame event that opened with a woman slicked with whipped cream and chocolate pudding deep-throating a cowboy onstage, to an audience whooping like frenzied hyenas.
The cultural and historical origins of these events are humble by comparison. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, the tradition of eating testicles in spring is common, at least in pastoral communities where cattle farming is a way of life. There, in keeping with the tradition of honoring the Earth and its inhabitants, nothing goes to waste, including in spring when young cattle are branded and castrated. Testicles, in this tradition, are a delicacy, enjoyed tossed on the coals of a campfire, brought home to share, or, in Nebraska, carried to Round the Bend Steakhouse after a long day, tossed on the grill, and chased with a few Budweisers. That is, at least, how TJ’s father, Ron, the original proprietor of Round the Bend, came to be inspired to create a ticketed yearly event called Testicle Festival. Eventually, his party grew from a few hundred attendees to upward of thirty-seven hundred—some years they have even hired headlining country artists like Neal McCoy to perform.
.TJ Olson, the owner of Round the Bend Steakhouse, and his father, Ron Olson on the eve of the Testicle Festival.
That the event came to be held over Father’s Day weekend speaks mostly to Ron’s bawdy sense of humor, but it’s also helped the Ashland Testicle Festival find a counterintuitive niche. They may not be the largest or the most prominent ball-eating event, TJ told me over the phone in the weeks leading up to the festival, but they are the most family-friendly. He said that he and his wife, Tifini, who now run the bar and festival together, wanted to make sure their community had a place where anyone could afford to celebrate their fathers. It was never a place too crazy to bring kids—in their twenty-five years of operation, he said, they’d never had a single brawl.
I should mention that there’s something else that drew me out to Nebraska. Lately, when it comes to men, I find myself in a confusing and dispiriting headspace, compulsively pondering questions like, is my date a feminist, or is he a shitbag with decent fluency in the cultural discourse? Is my colleague successful because he is objectively talented, or because our manager is misogynist? How should I feel when a formidably large male stranger is friendly? Five years ago, I might have acquiesced, radiating in the unchecked affection and warmth of a stranger, defaulting to trust rather than suspicion. I would have laughed, genuinely, at jokes about balls and cocks—why not? But observing the ongoing spate of high-profile sexual-assault cases as they play out on the national stage has left me more than a little paranoid about my interactions with men, to the extent that I find myself struggling with an unsettling contradiction: I am certain now, intellectually and emotionally, that men are structurally advantaged to a toxic extent in this country—but can I really dismiss 50 percent of the population based on a designation they had no say in being born into?
Can I really dismiss 50 percent of the population based on a designation they had no say in being born into?And this is why I found myself in the arms of TJ Olson on the eve of the twenty-fifth annual Testicle Festival. I flew 1,274 miles to the predominately white, Trump-supporting state of Nebraska, to an event that exudes masculinity in its most stereotypical forms, in order to spend time considering maleness away from the coast, where it sometimes feels as though anything male or male-adjacent carries intrinsically negative connotations. I wanted to see what it might be like to arrive someplace where masculinity is, instead, a neutral value, where I might observe men being themselves—are there qualities of masculinity beyond those born from the privileges of bearing a penis and an Y chromosome? I wanted to know, in other words, what it means to be a man.
To observe TJ next to his father, Ron, in the flesh, is uncanny. They are both enormous—at least six foot three, if not taller, with kind, wide faces like laughing Budais. To use the term “barrel-chested” would be like calling a Nebraskan winter cold. Where TJ is bald and energetic, his face often flushing red with emotion, his father has piercing blue eyes and long silver hair, and he’s reserved, his cadence deep and measured, as if everything he says is meant to crackle through a transistor radio.
.Samuel Gauthier, 18, prays with the staff of Round the Bend Steakhouse, before the first night of the festival.
A few hours before the Testicle Festival opened to the public, staff from the bar milled around us, setting up friers and stacks of merchandise. The weekend’s schedule was tightly organized and distributed on clipboards; there were piles of brightly colored wristbands, for guests. The well-oiled operation was a far cry from what the Testicle Festival had been twenty-five years ago, when it was really just a couple of kegs and an outdoor lot covered by a tent. In those days, Round the Bend was located in nearby South Bend, in a dive bar that the Olsons lovingly describe as a dump. The ceilings were so low you could reach up and touch them; there were rolling chairs bought at auction upstate, and the carpeted floors were slanted in such a way that, “if you didn’t hold on to the table or hook your leg around a table leg, you’d roll away from the table,” TJ recalled, laughing. He fondly remembers Ron bartending back then—people would come by just to have a drink and talk with him.
TJ speaks about his father in mythic terms, relaying impish tall tales about Ron that romanticize his father’s irreverent bullheadedness while forgoing plot or motive. There was that time that Ron rolled up to a bank and paid a fine with two overflowing buckets of pennies, to prove some long-forgotten point. When customers at the original Round the Bend complained about their food, TJ recalls his father charging out of the kitchen himself to tell them they were wrong, they were still paying for it, and if they didn’t like it, they could go pound sand. More significantly, there was the time that the old bar was falling to pieces and Ron marched into a bank, informed a lender that he intended to buy land in Ashland to build a new bar, and walked back out with a sizable loan, the same day, no questions asked.
TJ had always dreamed of taking over for his father one day, running the family business. In high school, he passed notes to Tifini waxing at length about his plans to take over for his father. They were crowned homecoming king and queen, left for school, broke up, got back together again, and before long had taken out a loan and bought the business from Ron. TJ was twenty-eight. “I wanted to take care of my mom and dad,” TJ said. “I wanted them to retire and enjoy life, because Dad worked his ass off for a lot of years, and he needed that. He deserves that.”
What was most difficult for TJ about taking over the business was reckoning with what it meant to take charge of an operation that had for so long been defined entirely by his father. “[Dad and I] would sit at the end of the bar and talk. We were both finding out I’m a grown-ass man now. And that was a struggle for me,” he said. “You’re raised a certain way and you just do life the way your parents raise you to do it. We all have to figure out our own way.”
.The color guard, comprising U.S. Marine veterans, prepares for the national anthem to be sung at the festival.
He and Tifini hired a consultant to help them grow the company and bring the business above board. Little by little, TJ began to make Round the Bend his own. “I was tired of arguing with the customer and I thought, I’m just going to go and we’re going to talk to them...I mean, you go out and they’re like, 'This isn’t medium rare,' and they’re still wrong. But it’s not ‘You’re wrong, still paying for it, now get out.” It’s ‘This is medium-rare when you come here, and I apologize that this isn’t what you were expecting, but this is what we do.’”
I asked Ron if it was difficult to watch the transition. He paused and TJ interjected, grinning at his father. “I told her, we’re good to talk tension,” he said. “We’ll just hit each other, it’ll be fine.” Ron smiled and told me the hardest part for him, in truth, was losing access to the bar. “They didn’t give me a key,” he said. “I couldn’t do the things I used to do. I couldn’t go and grab a bottle of whiskey to take home, couldn’t grab a case of beer.” TJ nodded solemnly and told me, “We changed the locks, no key. No alarm code. We wanted a clean break.”
.Brian Kaiser and Steve Kaiser with their father, Jim Kaiser.
“They just ran things different than I was,” Ron said. He sighed. “It was tough to break for a while there, but you know, I'm enjoying retirement now. I don’t have to get up in the morning if I don’t want to, and if I wanna go to Montana, I go to Montana and enjoy God’s country.”
As much as the bar had changed, TJ said he felt it still hewed to the same values with which Ron had raised him—the words were different, but the tune was the same. “You’re going to provide for your family,” he said. “You’re going to screw up along the way, you’re maybe not going to do it right, but you’re going to try.” That’s what being a man was about, he told me. And he’d increasingly come to believe that part of his responsibility to provide meant providing for his community as well, by bringing folks together at a bar with good prices and good food, through the Testicle Festival. He paused, for a moment struck by a thought, uncharacteristically stern.
“Look, we just want to be honest with you,” he said, looking me directly in the eyes. I wondered what could possibly be on his mind. “We’re Christians,” he says, maintaining eye contact with me, while gesturing to himself and Tifini, as if to say, if I didn’t like it, I could go pound sand. He told me that when he and Tifini took over, they felt like the Testicle Festival was an opportunity to exercise the values of their faith. (Ron, for his part, does not identify as a Christian, but he didn’t have any problems with his son’s faith or a less secular Testicle Festival.)
“Jesus welcomed everyone, he took care of everyone,” TJ said. And while he and Tifini didn’t actively proselytize, if the opportunity to share his faith presented itself, late into the night or over a couple of beers, he said he would not shy away. I marveled at the richness of the connection. A Testicle Festival, held annually over Father’s Day weekend, as a way of honoring a holier patriarch.
“God created everything. Testicles, too.”“It’s why we like to call this our little city on a hill,” Tifini said.
“Yeah, it’s like, let’s spread the word, through balls,” TJ said, laughing.
Tifini puts her hand on my arm, gently. “God created everything,” she said. “Testicles, too.”
That afternoon, following a heartfelt opening prayer, a local band took the stage, playing a cover of Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down” as if it were a bar-fight banger. Servers swooped around The Ball Room and its adjacent outdoor space in bright yellow shirts, clearing tables, greeting old faces, and hawking koozies emblazoned with the words “King of Balls.” There were bikers in studded leather jackets and red bandanas sunning themselves in good Nebraska sunlight, and bronzed women in crop tops and cowboy hats chatting idly by the bar. And, of course, there were fathers and sons. It was Father’s Day weekend at the Testicle Festival, after all.
.Noah Arent, dressed in a bull costume, poses with attendees at the festival.
Sitting just outside at a wooden table was a father coaxing his young son into trying a bull nut. “It’s just fried chicken, buddy,” he lied, tousling the boy’s hair with a hand. Nearby, a seven-year-old boy had eaten an entire carton of nuts on his own. “Does your dad teach you what it means to be a man?” I asked him. “Not really,” he responded. “Really?” his dad said, incredulously, picking him up and placing him on a table, to look him in the eyes. “It’s important to take care of sister,” he said softly. The boy nodded and looked at me. “He taught me how to break a tree branch with my hands to build a tent,” he said, and his father put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We talk about how important it is to do what’s right,” he said. “And no matter what he does,” he turned back to look at his son, “your sister should feel safe when she comes to you.”
Nearby a group of four strapping middle-aged men leaned against a chain-link fence wearing ripped T-shirts—and kilts. "I had all these older ladies keep trying to up-skirt me," one of them told me, when I asked about their outfits. He explained that they were wilderness survivalists, an old group of friends who occasionally ventured into the Nebraskan wilds, to practice living off the earth. The kilts were a practical consideration—wearing a skirt and nothing else makes attending to the call of nature, let’s say, a breeze. They told me they regularly took their sons out into the woods for survival weekends, too, in part to help them learn about becoming men. When I asked what that meant, to them, they listed off what they described as “five qualities for good men,” as if they knew them by heart: leading courageously, resisting passivity, accepting responsibility, investing eternally, and embodying a spiritual patience.
.Attendees, Jessica Barrineau, Ginger Muhlbach, Todd Flodma, and Danielle Juedes drink beer at the festival. Juedes’s shirt reads “Real men smell like diesel and cowshit.”
I drifted over to a woman wearing a shirt that read, “Real men smell like diesel and cow shit.” She told me she’d made it herself, and I asked her what she meant by the aphorism. She explained that she worked on a farm and was interested only in men who could share that experience. "We prefer the country boys to the city ones," she said. “With city boys, it's all about money and items in stores. Country boys have empathy and compassion for nature,” she said. And in place of flowers or gifts or expensive dinners, “a country person goes out and looks at the stars," she added. When I asked her if she thought good men resided primarily in the country, she paused. "Well, there are shitheads anywhere." A few women in cropped T-shirts and cowboy hats overheard me and wandered over. They heard I was asking about good men. “Good men dance,” one said glibly, and urged me to spend some time observing the men who hit the dance floor and those who didn’t.
Well, there are shitheads anywhere.Close by was a group of men—friends whose sons had grown up together and were now raising sons of their own. I asked them all what they felt was most important to teach boys: “For sure patience, not everything goes your way, but you still have to deal with it,” one said. And another: “Act in accordance to the Bible; that’s the base of how you’re supposed to act as a person, really.” Themes began to emerge as I chatted with countless fathers and sons about how to teach boys to become good men: Treat women with respect. Take responsibility for yourself and your loved ones. Develop a strong work ethic. And something less expected: “You gotta show them love—as far as I’m concerned, that’s all there is,” one father told me. “You can’t be afraid to show them affection.”
.Justin Oliver with his son, Sean Oliver.
It didn’t escape me that if I were back in New York, by this point, the topics of feminism, the patriarchy, and privilege would have surely become recurrent. And yet, though I never once heard those terms explicitly articulated, I still felt their presence throughout the weekend. Inextricable to my conversations about raising sons was the implicit recognition of how disadvantaged it is to be female in this country, and what it meant to raise children, to be human, in light of that disadvantage. I came to feel as though the people I spoke with were reckoning with the same institutional issues I was, in whatever shape or form they took in their lives. You don’t need to have a degree in women’s studies to understand misogyny and want to do something about it, after all. For their part, Tifini and TJ had described to me a plan for their own daughter, when I asked whether they would encourage her to take on the family business. They said they wanted her to learn the value of hard work from an early age and hoped she would go on to attend college, they told me. But they’d privately set up a fund that she’d be able to access in her thirties, so when the time came, she might pursue her own dreams, whatever they might be.
I ran into Tifini in a moment of chaos, and she stopped to see how I was doing, if I needed anything. We talked about her faith, what it was like for her to grow up in Denver and move to Nebraska. Eventually the conversation drifted to a recent Supreme Court case, in which a Colorado baker refused service to a gay couple for their wedding, citing religious freedom. I asked her if they’d ever encountered similar dilemmas in their work, and she said that, in fact, they’d had two women email them the previous year and ask to have their wedding reception at The Ball Room.
She said they’d welcomed the women, of course, because that’s what Jesus would do. But she said she had struggled with deciding whether she should conceal her own faith from the couple. She said that she and TJ had always considered transparency to be one of the core values of their business, and “all of the sudden the rubber met the road.” She decided, in the end, to disclose that they were Christians. “You have to know that we love Jesus, and you are welcome and we’ll treat you with dignity,” she said she wrote to them.
.The Lauby family and friends encourage Titus Lauby to jump.
Listening to her speak, it was hard not to consider my own presence at the festival. If I had been concerned about what it might be like to come to the Testicle Festival, it had been just as risky, if not more so, for TJ and Tifini to embrace a journalist from New York who has predominantly written for publications that tend to dismiss their part of the country as a conservative hellhole. Yet, I’d felt deeply welcome all weekend, and it didn’t escape me that a great part of that ease had to do with a pervasive compassion, allowing me to be who I was rather than expecting me to be a fake-news propagator, a coastal elite, or, really, anything at all.
As the sun set and a crowd gathered to watch a brilliant fireworks display set to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” my mind drifted back to my original fixations on masculinity. I tried to put words to what I’d learned over the weekend, observing men as they filtered in and out of The Ball Room. There were men who danced, men who didn’t. Men who were busy building pyramids of empty cans with their friends, and their girlfriends. Men who didn’t drink, or eat testicles, at all. And I realized that everything anyone told me that day about being a man had little to do with being male as much as it had to do with being moral: Strive to be a thoughtful human being who practices self-awareness in your treatment of others. In the face of human complexity, I suppose it is always disingenuous to concoct a thesis.
“No farm stuff at all?” he asked, incredulously.A father I interviewed earlier in the day approached me after the fireworks and said he’d only just learned that I’d flown in all the way from New York. “Just for this?” he asked. I nodded and explained that, in part, I’d come to try to better understand men. He laughed and joked that he could set me up, if I wanted to stay in Nebraska. “I can introduce you to some cowboys!” he said. He furrowed his brow. “Do you know how to do farm stuff?” he asked. I told him I didn’t. “No farm stuff at all?” he asked, incredulously. Really, no, I said. No farm stuff. “What did you do when you were a kid?” he exclaimed, throwing his hands up in disbelief.
On the last day of the festival, a few hours before the ball-eating contest, I spotted Ron sitting at a table in The Ball Room, having a beer and presiding over conversation at his table. I sat down next to him, and we chatted about how he thought the festival was going. It wasn’t long before he began dreamily recalling festivals past and his dreams long ago.
.The festival concludes with fireworks timed to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”
“I wanted to take the Testicle Festival on the road,” he said, his eyes growing soft. “I thought it’d be nice to get a semi and load all our crap in there and go to fairgrounds. I thought that’d just be the nuts...literally,” he said, laughing. “I always thought that people in New York should know what goes on here in the frontier.”
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