The Front Runner Read online

  I hesitated only a moment, wondering if he were a plainclothes policeman. Then I did what I'd seen had to be done. I went into the row, along the seats, and sat down by him. My heart was pounding like I'd just run the mile. Feigning indifference, I looked straight ahead at the screen. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn his head. Was he rating me or just getting ready to arrest me? If he was rating me and didn't like what he saw, I'd have to keep walking.

  What happened next is still burned in my memory after all these years.

  He moved his thigh over and touched his knee to mine. I turned my head a little. His thighs were long and slender, their corded muscles visible through the thin, tight pants. A runner? Who knows? He was cer­tainly athletic-looking. The open jacket displayed his narrow hips and his full crotch, with the cock bulging in the left pantsleg. Even his hands, on the armrests, were attractive, lean, strong-looking, with long fingers.

  I returned the pressure of his knee, then shakily laid my hand on his nearest thigh. Its hardness and heat hit my fingers like a shock. He laid his hand over mine tenderly. I had not expected tenderness. My hand was startled into turning over so that our moist hot palms touched and our fingers twined.

  As we held hands, I finally dared to let my eyes slide up to his face. He was looking at me unsmiling, that provocative witchy look with which the gay in rut riv­ets his peer. This was no cot. His sex seemed suffused into his features like a bright light. His eyes seemed to say, I can make your fantasy real.

  Then, with his free hand, he reached inside his jacket and drew out a shiny metal thing like a lipstick tube, and held it over to me. It was the rite of the of­fering of amyl nitrite. I relaxed just a little. Trying to look as expert as possible, I put the inhaler to one nos­tril as I'd seen others do. Breathing deeply and slowly, I wondered what it would do to me. After a moment, a burning delicious rush flashed through my body, ex­ploding in my genitals.

  Neither of us spoke. He was already caressing my thigh. I gave him back the amyl nitrite and he inhaled it himself. On the screen, to the accompaniment of tender violins, a couple of young heterosexual lovers were kissing frantically. But the man beside me was unhurried, and drew me into his own rhythm.

  His hand had already slid down to his fly and was slowly undoing the half-dozen small buttons there. His hips were grinding and thrusting up slowly in the seat, and he looked as if he were in an ecstatic trance. His eyes were half-closed, his lips parted, and a couple of locks of hair stuck to his iridescent cheek. For a mo­ment I panicked a little, realizing that he was going to precipitate me into it without any foreplay.

  But after another drag on the inhaler, I had my hand on the bulge in his pants-leg, rubbing it tenderly. He caressed my hand, pressing it there while he kept unbuttoning with the other. He wore no underwear, and the opening fly bared his lean sucked-in abdomen, then the light bronze pubic hair and the hip bones moving sweetly under the skin.

  My whole body was vibrating with excitement—no woman had ever made me feel like this. I put my hand on his abdomen, feeling the muscles ripple in it, and slid my arm around his shoulders. Rapt and terrified, I watched as he raised his body a little and pushed his slacks down to his knees. The long, rose-dark cock was swelling between his parted thighs, that thing that so­ciety most severely forbade me, and that I wanted most. I had my face buried in his hot neck, running my hand up and down his bare thighs, and he was tenderly rubbing my fly, then unzipping it.

  Finally I had the courage to touch his genitals, and he lifted his hips and pressed them into my hand. He groaned, a barely audible sound that seemed to come up from his pelvis, and slid his hand in along my bare flank. Never till that moment did I realize how many nerve endings there were in that sensitive skin. My own eyes closed, my own mouth opened, and I was ready to give all my hoarded passion and tenderness to this stranger, as he was willing to give it to me.

  About half an hour later, I was in the grimy little lavatory in the theater basement, washing myself and shaking violently. When I went back upstairs, I glanced back in the theater. He was still lying in his seat with his head hanging back, shirt open, exactly as I'd left him. Probably his pants were still down around his ankles. In the light from the screen, a few splashes of my semen glistened on his face.

  I fled out of the theater, blinking in the cruel day­light, and walked shakily down the street. Coming to a bench, I sank down on it. I couldn't stop shaking, and my skin was burning under my clothes. I had hoped for some excitement from the first go at oral sex with a male. What I had not expected was to be so totally and agreeably shattered. For the first time in my life, an­other human being had made me lose control of myself —and all in silence, without a word spoken. I had al­ways thought of the male's erotic sensations being cen­tered at the groin. But I could still feel the ghosts of his hands and his mouth on my body, touching me about the neck, the nipples, the sides, the flanks, the buttocks —as much of me as he could reach in the seat.

  I looked back at the Loews-Sheridan entrance for a while. He didn't come out. I wanted to go back in there and find out his name and address. But I didn't dare. Like a Spy, I could leave no traces. There would be no seeing him again. But I knew I would never for­get him as long as I lived.

  Finally I got up and walked shakily to the subway station at Sheridan Square

  and Christopher Street

  . My objective attained, I might as well go back uptown to the Port Authority and catch the next bus south.

  On the bus, roaring along the parkway, I sat motion­less in my regular clothes, with sunglasses still on, still shattered. But there was also a gloating manic elation at having tasted what my nature had craved so long. I was surprised to find that I did not feel in the least guilty and soiled. I was sure I was not insane. It might be possible to feel good about being gay—as long as I could keep it hidden from the rest of the world.

  But back at Villanova, amid the cold reality of Ace bandages and stopwatches, my elation vanished. If it could be so good with a pickup, then it must be even better with a man you loved. Yet my own peculiar sexual logic told me that I could love only an athlete. And that was impossible.

  I sneaked off to New York a few more times, and it became obvious that I'd had dumb luck at the Loews-Sheridan. Not until years later did I find anyone quite so satisfying as the kid in the red leather jacket. Maybe it was because of the amyl nitrite, and its being the first time.

  I had a horror of the screaming queens and the TV's (transvestites). Nothing that smelled of women was acceptable. What I wanted was an athletic-looking guy in his late teens or early twenties. And there were plenty of them. If the athlete is at the heart of the straight man's vision, it is at the heart of the gay vision also. For the gay, looking athletic is as important as being well hung.

  The sad thing was, as I usually found when I got their clothes off, that so few of my bed partners were real athletes. You know at a glance when somebody has been working hard: the fined-down look, the big veins. Most of my lovers were lean, but limp—as much a facade as my tough Marine act. So there I was, searching pathetically for the image of my Villanova milers, and of Chris, in the bodies of those soft kids. I'd end up getting it over with fast. Wham, bam, pay them if they were hustlers, back on the street in twenty minutes, catch the next bus. I learned fast not to waste my tenderness on them. Often I'd wonder if I'd run into the youth in the red leather jacket. But he never crossed my path again.

  Once in a while, a man offered me money. A hand would be laid on my arm, a voice would say, "How much?" After all, I really was an athlete. I was only twenty-eight, and looked younger, and didn't weigh an ounce more than in my miling days. I even fluttered the heart of more than one queen. "Darling, how divine you look." But the idea of selling my body didn't ap­peal.

  Sometimes my nameless lovers asked me how I kept in shape. They recognized that I was the real thing. I'd lie like mad, tell them I was a rower, a long-distance cyclist, anything but the truth: that I w
as assistant coach for one of America's plushest track teams. I was so mortally afraid of being recognized that I never took my dark glasses off, even in bed. When we were at meets with the team, I'd manage to avoid having my picture taken, for fear somebody who'd chewed my cock on some tenement stairway might read Track & Field News.

  Those were dangerous weekends. I always felt like a spy going behind the Iron Curtain on some nerve-wracking mission. One misstep and I'd be dead. It wasn't the gays that I feared, though a hustler did steal my wallet once. It was the straight homophobes who preyed on gays that I feared. Fascist male hets some­times roamed the streets downtown and beat up gays for fun. On two occasions I set some kind of new world record out the back door of a gay bar when the police bust came in the front. On another occasion I went straight through the bathroom window into a back al­ley, amid shattering glass, and had to go bleeding to a hospital emergency room for stitches. There were al­ways the plainclothesmen lurking in the parks and the public toilets. And there was jail if you were caught in the only act of love that made sense to you.

  It wasn't long before I felt that bewilderment, that choking rage, that the gay feels. We were hunted ani­mals. We were huddled underground in the dark, like the Christians in the catacombs, sheltering the tiny flame of our sexual faith. What just emperor would declare the edict that would let us out into the light? What harm did we do? Murderers and thieves harmed others, but we harmed no one except possibly—in our confusion and unresolved guilts—ourselves.

  I could never relax until I was on that bus back to Pennsylvania. It was always with a feeling of unreality that I came home to my comfortable suburban house just off the Villanova campus. I would sit in front of the TV with a Coke, with my two little sons (little Mark had been born two years after Kevin). They would be rough-and-tumbling around me on the living-room rug, and I would be haunted by the memory of some strange man's body. The dishwasher would be noising in the kitchen, and I would still be vibrating with the fear of the police bust I'd just escaped.

  "Daddy, Kevin took my airplane," little Mark would yell, and come weeping to me.

  "Kevin," I'd say in my Parris Island tone, "give that airplane back right now." And before my eyes, like a hallucination, would be an erect penis pumping its milky life out over the lean, male hand holding it.

  "Have a good time with your newspaper chums?" my wife would ask sarcastically.

  "Oh, we had a great time," I'd say. "Dinner at Mam­ma Leone's and a burlesque show downtown."

  "You're disgusting," she'd say. "And you never take me out."

  "Who'd want to take a sourpuss like you out?" I'd say. "If you want to go out that bad, find someone."

  Paradoxically, I tried to cover up by seeing that she had every comfort. My two little sons were growing up, and I found that I loved them more and more as my fear of being exposed grew stronger. Someday they'd find out about me. That would be a hard moment.

  After two years at Villanova, the U of Iowa offered me the job of head track coach. But I turned it down. Out there in the cornfields there was no gay under­ground for me to lose myself in.

  A year later, my frenzied patience paid off. Penn State offered me a contract as head track coach. It was heady stuff for a man only thirty-one years old, and $30,000 a year was more money than I'd ever had in my life. The team had had a slump under the previous coach, who was a soft, permissive guy. The adminis­tration and the alumni hoped I would whip things into shape.

  And I did. I was Mr. Parris Island of track. I was Mr. Drill Instructor of distance running. I was the toughest, barkingest coach in the U.S. at that time.

  The reason that my boys didn't hate my guts was that I made them respect me. I was not one of your coaches with a bowler belly and a big cigar, who tells a boy to bust fifteen 63-second quarters while he goes off and has four beers. I went out running with my boys, and they knew I could do much of what they did. They knew that I cared deeply about the sport, and about what happened to them. I made them want to meet my challenge. I made them reach down and discover themselves. I would have run through fire for them, and the ones that survived the first few weeks on my team ended up running through fire for me.

  By then it was the Aquarius generation coming onto the campus, and we were having battles with the boys over sex, drinking, long hair and the rest. I am a Leo myself, so I didn't have any truck with that Aquarius crap. I won every one of those battles. I was adamant about crewcuts and pre-meet chastity. If a boy didn't conform, he was dropped from the team.

  Needless to say, I knew I was a hypocrite. I shut them away from their girlfriends because I wanted them myself. I made them cut their hair because I went into New York and ran my fingers through the shaggy locks of twenty-five-dollar fantasies.

  Along about 1968, the pressures of being head coach on a big-time team, and the terror of being discovered, were finally starting to get me. I didn't have much time to go to New York any more. That year, my team was sweeping college titles everywhere, and I was about ready for a strait jacket.

  It was in 1968—March 1968 to be exact—that the atom bomb fell on my world.

  Early that spring, a sophomore half-miler, Denny Falks, nineteen years old, started flirting with me. That's the only way I can describe his behavior. He was open about it, though he was careful to do it only when we were alone. Of all the runners who'd gone through my life by then, only Denny had divined what was going on in my mind.

  He was always coming around to my office for solo chats about pretended problems. Denny, it seemed, had more family problems, and more aches and pains, and more psych problems about running, than anyone else on the team.

  Since I had never before been cruised by a runner, it scared hell out of me.

  Out of self-defense, I was extra hard on him. But he saw through my Marine act too. Once during a work­out, he actually faked a groin injury so that he could bare that part of his body to me in the locker room. I sensed he was malingering, and I had the doctor deal with him.

  Denny was attractive too. He would have caused a riot on Sheridan Square

  , even though I had forced him to cut off his long blond hair. I kept chewing him out and running him into the ground and trying to break his spirit. Then I'd have to get up at 4:30 A.M. and run fifteen miles to kill the thought of him.

  For two months, Denny tried every way he could think of to get my hand inside his jock strap. Then he did what so many piqued lovers do: he took revenge.

  He cheerfully and casually told a couple of his team­mates, "Hey, you know, I think the coach is a queer."

  "No kidding," they said, quite amazed.

  "Yeah," said Denny breezily, "he kinda flirts with me when I'm in his office to talk."

  The rumor went like wildfire, and wasn't long in reaching the ears of the dean, Marvin Federman. Fed-erman called me in and told me about the rumor.

  I was simply stunned.

  Federman was cold and brusque. "The boy says that you have shown sexual interest in him."

  I was seared with shock and panic, but I managed to keep a calm exterior. "That's simply not true."

  "The rumor has reached a few of the trustees and alumni," said Federman. "There is heavy pressure on me. We can't have that kind of scandal. I'm sure you understand my position."

  "But this is ridiculous," I said.

  "Are you prepared to contest his statements legally?" said Federman.

  How could I contest them? I was afraid they would find out the truth about me. I was silent.

  "The best thing for you to do would be to resign. I've noticed that you look tired and strained lately. You can say that it's for reasons of health."

  With that rumor, and that brief chilling conversation with the dean, my coaching career at Penn State ended. I submitted my resignation that day.

  As I left my office for the last time, I saw Denny, beautiful Denny, walking out the building in his sweats. He was going to the track to work out, whistling.

  But the rumor
stayed around, and continued to poi­son my life. It reached my wife. She had been looking for an excuse to divorce me, and now she had one. She put on a big act of self-righteous anger, got the divorce, and the house, and the children, and a really punitive alimony and child-support settlement of $12,000 a year. She told the rumor to my mother and the rest of my family, and they turned their backs on me and froze me out. (At least I didn't have to bear my fa­ther's disapproval—he had died the year before.)

  There were no headlines, except penn state track coach resigns for reasons of health, and a casual quote from me that I was thinking of going back to newspaper work. But the rumor washed gently through the track world and died out. A number of people said they didn't believe it. "After all, he was married, and he acted so masculine." But the thought stayed there, in the back of people's minds.

  Shattered and angry, I fled to New York and took a small apartment downtown in the gay ghetto. My sav­ings went to pay my lawyer and the initial alimony pay­ments, and then I was faced with finding money or go­ing to jail for nonsupport. "The first check you miss," my wife had sworn, "I'm having you arrested."

  Bruce Cayton, an old buddy from the New York Post, offered to help me find a newspaper job in town. But I was all panicky, sure that everybody in the world now knew the rumor, and that I would be turned down because I was a homosexual. Besides, the last thing I wanted at the moment was to be part of a big institu­tion again, where I could be scrutinized and pressured. The best thing would be self-employment, that would let me drop out of sight and sneak over into the gay world sometimes for relief.

  So I told Bruce thanks, and I forged off on my own.

  There wasn't much skill I had, to start earning im­mediate money on my own. I tried freelance writing, but the market had become very difficult to break into. I ran ads offering to work as a free-lance copyreader and editor, but it paid pitifully little—four or five dol­lars an hour, and even this market was tightening up due to the recession. Coaching had taught me how to give rubdowns, so I tried to set myself up as a licensed masseur. My ad, a typical one, ran in the Village Voice and other papers: "Rubdowns by Chris, athletic mas­seur." (I didn't want to use my real name.) But New York was full of masseurs who went out at all hours of the day and night to rub down sleepless middle-aged ladies. The customers came in slowly.