The Front Runner Read online

  "Okay, Mr. Brown," he said.

  2

  All my life, I have been haunted by the ghost of a runner.

  I was born in Philadelphia on August 14, 1935. My father was a track nut, and among my earliest mem­ories is being taken to meets. He'd hold me up so I could see over the crowd at the distant, flitting figures of men in shorts and singlets. "Look there," he'd say, "look how fine they are, my boy."

  My father, Michael Brown, was a big, strapping man, half-English, half-Scot, who owned a small printing plant there in Philadelphia. From 1941 to 1945 he was off in the Pacific fighting with the Marines. He helped take Guadalcanal, and he came home with a slight limp and a Purple Heart.

  He was a strict man, but also warm and merry, and I adored him. My mother was less close to me—she was a devoted, dutiful Black Irish woman, but a little cold and always nervous. He and my mother were both staunch Protestants, and they gave me the up­bringing that one would expect. No smoking, no drink­ing, no dancing, church every Sunday, pledge allegiance to the flag.

  And running. For my father, running was almost part of his religion. "Runners," he used to say to me, "those are the real men. Baseball is for babies, and football is a brainless business. Running takes more ef­fort and more discipline than any other sport."

  Ironically, then, it was my fine, big, straight father who taught me to worship at the altar of manhood. Whereas if stereotype had its way, I should have had a milquetoast father, a fierce and castrating mother, and grown up disturbed and shy with girls. That was not the case at all. My father, at odd variance with his puritanism in other areas, had no objection to girls. He said it was part of being a real man. Already in grade school, I discovered that the sexual part of my nature was pow­erful and insistent.

  When I got to the Fairview High School, the main thing on my mind was getting onto its famous track team. I wasn't much of a student. But I worked at it, because if I got poor grades, my father scolded me and asked what I was doing with the school taxes he paid so painfully.

  I loved competition, and pitting myself against the other boys. But running was also good for its own sake—the discipline and the joy of motion. And physi­cally, running made me different from boys (especially the fat, pampered ones, whom I despised) who didn't engage in high-stress sports. Very early, I got to think­ing of myself, and of all runners, as a separate and superior species of human being.

  In the summers, we always vacationed in the Po-conos. My mother had asthma and said the city air was bad for her, and my father loved to fish. So we had a tiny cabin in a remote area of the mountains. My father would drive up to be with us on weekends. I was alone there all week long with my mother, and missed him very much. So I hunted up any boys I could find in the area, and spent the days roaming with them.

  The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I met a boy whom I'll call Chris Shel-bourne. His family had just bought a summer cabin nearby. He was blond, with calm, blue eyes, very quiet, lean and sun-browned. It turned out he was a runner. We were delighted to discover this common passion, and we quickly became close friends.

  In fact, my feelings for him became so strong that I wonder now why I didn't understand them correctly. Perhaps it was because I was so poorly educated about these things. My father had told me what he thought I needed to know about girls. But he had never told me such feelings could exist between two males. As far as I knew, there was no name for what I felt. But instinc­tively I realized that these feelings were something to be hidden from everyone, even from Chris, even from myself.

  Chris, possibly, felt the same confusion. He feverish­ly sought every opportunity to be with me that summer, but he never discussed his feelings.

  An hour passed without Chris was an eternal loss. We fished, hiked, or just lay in the sun and talked about track. We daydreamed out loud to each other about being top college runners, then of going to the Olympic Games.

  Every day we took long runs together through the woods, following the many lonely trails for eight or ten miles. We jumped the streams and ran brushing through the mountain laurel. The laurel was all in bloom shortly after we met, heavy and fragrant with pink and white blossoms. We tore up hills and ran sliding down them, running free like two deer. We dashed through the dappled sunlight under the great trees. We were hyper-oxidated and deliriously happy. The act of running was all tied up in my mind with the feelings I had when he was near me.

  Miles off in the woods, there was a small, lonely, clear lake. We would always strip there and go swim­ming. I had seen hundreds of boys naked in the locker rooms at school. But when I saw this adored friend of mine naked, my feelings turned to sexual desire. In confusion and distress, trying to be casual, I always smothered this feeling. Chris apparently did the same.

  So we squandered the summer of '52 that way.

  At the end of our last run, as we were nearing the edge of the woods but still out of sight from our cabins, Chris suddenly stopped and said, "I want to say good­bye here."

  He put his arms around me. But panic equaled af­fection, so we did no more than embrace each other awkwardly with our panting sweaty bodies brushing together. He touched his lips to my cheek, near my mouth, and after a moment's shaky hesitation I did the same to him. We swore that we would write to each other, and that we'd see each other next summer.

  The next day his family closed up their cabin and returned to New Jersey. I ran alone in the woods that day. I would have cried bitterly, but my father had taught me that real men don't cry.

  I didn't have the courage or the verbal ability to put my feelings on paper, so I never wrote to Chris. He never wrote to me either. The next year we heard that the Shelbourne cottage had been sold to somebody else. I never saw Chris again.

  My senior year in high school, I went through two or three casual girlfriends, searching in vain for that feeling that Chris had stirred up in me. Part of the problem seemed to be that their intensity about sex did not match my own. That year, too, I won the mile run at the Penn Relays. My dad was tremendously proud, and kept those first newspaper clippings framed on the living-room wall till they yellowed.

  After graduation in 1953, I was a little torn. I wanted to go straight to college and run, but the Korean War was still on, and I was itching to go over there and collect a belt-full of gook scalps. So my parents let me enlist in the Marines. But I had scarcely finished boot training when the truce was signed.

  This was a big disappointment, but I thrilled at being a Marine anyway. They promoted me to lieutenant, put me on the Marine track team and let me compete as much as duty would permit. I trained hard, and my personal best in the mile was a 4:04.3, which was con­sidered very good in those days—Roger Bannister had broken four minutes in 1954. I began to hope I could make the Olympic team in 1956.

  But when my four-year hitch ended early in 1956, my dad's business was in trouble. Instead of training, I had to help him out, and to take a job as copy-reader at a newspaper. Bitterly I sat in the noisy city room and proofread the results of the Olympic trials.

  That fall I went to Villanova on an athletic scholar­ship, majoring in journalism and minoring in phys ed. But I was still working nights and my training suf­fered. While I made the varsity track team, my running went nowhere near as well as in the Marines.

  To make things worse, in 1959, my senior year, I was dating a girl named Mary Ellen Bache. While look­ing for the Chris feeling, I managed to get her in trouble. Of course it was my duty to marry her, and I did. Neither of our families was happy with the event. It was a bad way to start a marriage.

  Out of college in 1960, the next Olympic year, I had to face it. With two family responsibilities weighing on me, there was no place in my life for amateur track competition.

  But I could stay close to the sport by choosing a profession connected with it. I still didn't have the graduate credits for teaching physical education, so it had to be newspaper work. I went to work for the Philadelphia Eagle as a track
writer, and went to school nights. By getting up early every morning and run­ning a few miles, I managed to stay in minimal shape.

  The work was exciting and paid pretty well. I could travel to all the big meets, which got me away from the uneasy situation with Mary Ellen. I could chum with the big-time runners, share vicariously in their griefs and glories. I was the classic sock-sniffer.

  Only now was I beginning to admit to myself how dangerously deep my feelings about all this went. In the Marines, the discipline and hard work had helped me suppress it, but now it was boiling up again. On the excuse that we weren't getting along, I stopped having relations with Mary Ellen, and used prostitutes and pickups while traveling.

  I went to meets with a throbbing excitement that de­voured me. Outdoors under the sky, or indoors in the smoky arenas, I devoured the sight of those other fine-looking young men. They were stretched out in full flight, gleaming with sweat, as their muscles and tendons strained toward the unattainable. Now and then I'd see someone whom I found so attractive that he gave me that hurting, wanting feeling that Chris had.

  I quickly got discontented with reporting because it didn't get me really inside the sport. In 1961 I heard about a coaching job open in a Philadelphia high school, St. Anthony's, applied and got it. It paid less, but it opened up a whole world to me. That very first year, I fielded a crack little team that burned up the Penn Relays and attracted a lot of attention.

  The drawback was that I didn't like high school students. They were noisy little animals. The next year, my beloved Villanova offered me a post as assistant track coach, and I fell over my own feet accepting. College boys were more comfortable to be with, because they already had a sense of self.

  In fact, I felt too comfortable with them. It was in 1962, that first year of coaching at Villanova, that I finally had to confess to myself that my feelings had a name: homosexuality.

  It's hard to convey the intensity of the suffering I felt. Everything in my upbringing made me see myself in the worst possible light. Runners are men, my father had said. A Marine is a man, the armed forces had said. A coach is a man. For chrissake, even reporters were men. The reporters I knew were a raunchy, whor­ing bunch.

  What puzzled me most was that I couldn't see in myself the mannerisms that society said were the mark of homosexuals. I. knew all about "queers," or thought I did. Queers were ballet dancers, interior decorators and actors. They were effeminate, pretty, fluttered their hands, wiggled their rears and talked in high, breathless voices.

  Every day I was in the locker room with those beau­tiful naked bodies, close enough to touch.

  Those Villanova runners used to do some pretty wild horsing around. Supposedly it was all just manly fun and games to grab at somebody else's goodies in the shower. But now and then I'd divine some real feelings there. You can't bring together a bunch of high-spirited young men full of all the urges, and teach them the cult of the body, and throw them together nude in a locker room, in such a physical sport, and not have a few random feelings happening.

  Runners are the most highly conditioned and shame­lessly physical of athletes. They have a love affair going with their bodies: how the body responds to training, how it doesn't respond. Runners talk obsessively, like little old ladies, about their injuries and illnesses and bowel movements and mineral deficiencies. They are more avid about physiology than sex researchers. Run­ners even swear that they make better lovers than other men because they have stronger hip muscles. They are so addicted physiologically to running that if you take it away from them, they climb the walls like junkies. Their very hormones are intimate in the gush of power they put out: male hormones with strength, female hormones with endurance.

  A man's body is good to look at only when he is con­ditioned, because of the muscling. So it follows, as the night the day, that sports harbor as much homosexual­ity as anywhere else in American society—possibly more. But everybody goes on pretending that sports are the bunting-draped sanctuary of the straight American he-man. Once in a while somebody is brave enough to hint at the truth, as Jim Bouton did in Ball Four, and he quickly gets shouted down as an enemy of sport. Homosexuality is the great skeleton in the closet of American athletics.

  So there I was in the Villanova locker rooms with all those fine-looking male bodies.

  Now and then I saw a boy who—I sensed—might respond if I chose to start something. In fact, I knew two at Villanova who were carrying on, because I caught them at it, just as Gus Lindquist would. By threatening to reveal their activities to the head coach, I could have blackmailed them into bed with me. But I let them off with a Marine-type lecture about moral purity. Unfortunately, they were both so frightened that they dropped off the team.

  I was close enough to touch—but I didn't.

  Religion, discipline, military experience, upbringing and just plain fear gave me the strength. Every day I used to pray to God to give me strength, just for that day, to keep my hands off my boys. I felt I had a sacred trust in not fouling their lives with what I then re­garded as my monstrous feelings. And it also occurred to me that I couldn't indulge these feelings without risking being caught at it myself.

  It helped to keep up my Marine facade. I was poker-faced, harsh, hair cut close to my skull, conservatively dressed, barking at my athletes as if they were recruits on Parris Island. Running helped me too. More ac­curately, the fatigue from running helped blot my suffering and need from my mind. That year at Villanova, I started training seriously again. Not to compete (I couldn't anyway, since I was now a pro), but to sur­vive. Every morning I got up extra early, put in ten miles on the road at a fast pace, even did some speed work on the track if I had time.

  I was curious to know what my father's attitude to­ward homosexuality would be. He was still getting around the shop in Philadelphia, his big hands black with ink. But he was a little creaky and bent with arthritis these days. Casually I mentioned one day that I had seen a queer at Villanova.

  He was very reluctant to admit that such people ex­isted. But finally he said, "Well, Harlan, they're few. Very few. Thank God, for they are sick twisted people. The Lord will cast them into the eternal fire."

  Insane? Was I insane? I knew one thing. Maybe I wasn't insane now, but I would be shortly, if I kept re­pressing these feelings.

  So in 1963, while still at Villanova, I started making little forays into a tiny, underground comer of Ameri­can society where, I had learned, these needs would be met. And I learned a few things right away. The right word for my feelings was not "queer," but "gay." And the right word for me, with my natural male manner­isms and my desire for other such men, was "macho gay."

  I told myself: You have to try it just once. Maybe you won't even like it, and you can go back to women and relax.

  There were gay bars in Philadelphia, but I couldn't risk going there because it was too close to home. So now and then, on weekends when there weren't any meets, or on holidays, or during the summer, I managed to slip away to New York.

  There, wearing the most extreme disguise I could think of—hippie clothes, sunglasses and a hairy wig— I started exploring the gay turf downtown with that familiar feeling of throbbing excitement.

  That first weekend I just cruised around the bars and porno stores. A few guys tried to pick me up, but I wasn't ready for it yet. I sat there sipping Cokes, amazed at the feverish crush of young men. Few, my father had said?

  No virgin where blue movies and dirty pictures were concerned, I was still overwhelmed by all-male pornog­raphy. After looking at some for the first time, I was like a drunk. The sight of men making love to each other seemed so shockingly beautiful, so right.

  I found one under-the-counter book with high-qual­ity color photos that showed two runners of twenty or so. I knew at a glance that they were conditioned ath­letes. I wondered who the models were, and what kind of money need had driven them to do it. Would the AAU consider that they'd jeopardized their amateur status, since they had profited from th
eir sport by forni­cating in their track clothes?

  The photographs showed them starting off on a run through the woods together. Then they stopped to fall on each other's necks and strip each other. Picture after picture, they rolled on the leaves in the most abandoned fashion, their fine, lean bodies gleaming with sweat. With a terrible pang, I remembered Chris. What a fool I'd been, what a coward.

  Before I left New York that Sunday afternoon, I carefully destroyed the book and dropped it in a trash can, like a spy destroying his code book. But those powerful images stayed with me.

  It was several weeks before I got back to New York again. On that second weekend, I was doing what ev­erybody else was doing. I was cruising the bars and streets around Sheridan Square

  , looking for a quickie and hoping I didn't pick up a "cot," one of those plainclothes policemen who hung around trying to nab gays.

  Of course, you could buy somebody for far less walking. You ask, "How much?" and he says, "Seven inches, twenty-five dollars," or whatever. But for my first time I didn't want a hustler. So I wandered around half the weekend, till I was half-deaf from the juke­boxes in the bars, rating faces and bodies. I was looking for that particular physiognomy, that hint of my ghost, that would strike the deep erotic response in me.

  About one o'clock Sunday afternoon, I was about to give up when I went into the Loews-Sheridan theater, notorious as a place where gays could have sexual en­counters. Several dozen men were there. Two couples were already twined together, and the others sat alone here and there. One of them had shaggy, bright blond hair that looked almost silver in the light from the screen.

  Needing a closer look, I walked slowly, nervously down the aisle. He was sitting slouched a little, with his thighs spread, wearing a red leather jacket and tight, striped, bellbottom slacks. A little too well dressed to be a hippie, but obviously not an establishment type either. (I, the ex-Marine, already talking about the establishment.) He was younger than I, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, very lean and hard-looking. The changing light from the screen lit up his thoroughbred profile in the smoky dark.