The Front Runner Read online

  So I tried some modeling. My ad read: "Handsome ex-Marine, athlete, miler's build, 6' 1", 155 pounds, 25-inch waist, 42-inch chest." I did get some calls, but it wasn't totaling more than the $200 a week I had to send my ex-wife.

  There were just a few weeks to make up my mind what I was going to do, and I did it.

  In a bar one evening, I had met a personable gay named Steve Goodnight, a struggling serious writer who kept himself alive by doing pornographic books. Steve and I became friends, not lovers. Through him I met a number of other gays in a kind of inner artistic circle and hidden high society. To these people I revealed my true identity, and found that the Penn State dismissal made me something of a martyr/celebrity in a small way.

  So it happened one night that a well-to-do and las­civious gay acquainted with this circle thought I should go to bed with him, and I was needing money and I said, "I think that's going to cost you $200." That was how I became a hustler. I was a very expensive, very exclusive hustler. None of your twenty-five-dollar sodomies in hotel rooms, none of your selling your meat on the street. I couldn't risk it. Nobody got to me except through a blind of telephone calls. I usually charged $200-250, and some­times went higher. I was worth every penny of it, and pretty soon had more business than I could handle, but I didn't have to exert myself. At $200 a trick, twice a week was enough to satisfy the divorce court and to pay my living expenses.

  They tell you a hustler's career is over at thirty, when his youth starts to fade. I started mine at thirty-four, and found that there was a small but solid market for meat like mine. My numbers didn't want faunlike boys. They wanted a hard, angry, bitter, mature beauty. Sometimes they wanted a whipping too. I am not a sadist at heart, but I was angry enough to pass for one —I gave a damn good whipping for $200. It was clear profit, because I wasn't working for a pimp.

  There was something about the harshness of hustling that reminded me I was surviving, that the straights would not crush me. There was something of raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the way I said, "Eight inches." It was, in a way, my first gesture of gay pride.

  One of the reasons I stayed off the street was that it was more dangerous than ever now, and I wasn't look­ing to go to jail. On June 28, 1969, just after I arrived in the city, the New York City police started their now-famous crackdown on the gay bars. The first to be blitzed was the Stonewall. During the next twelve months, they raided and closed the Zoo, the Zodiac and about twenty others, mostly on Barrow Street

  . It was the watershed in gay history, and—in a way—it was my watershed too.

  The night the Stonewall was busted, I was in the neighborhood on business. Someone called my client and told him what was happening, and we got out of bed and ran over there to see, because we hadn't been able to believe our ears.

  The street was full of cops and flashing red lights. But what was more amazing, the street was full of hundreds of gays, and they were fighting the cops. For years "they had run, let themselves be shoved to the wall, submitted to harassments and arrest, because they felt in their hearts that it was their fate. But the night of the Stonewall, they made the instant visceral deci­sion that they had had enough. They were throwing rocks and bottles, your "powderpuff pansies" were. They were fighting New York's Finest with their bare hands. They were daring the nightsticks to crunch on their bodies.

  I watched with growing anger and sorrow. I didn't drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could un­derstand how precious they were to us. I had always be­lieved in law and order, supported the police. But those cops were busting me, busting my entire lifetime of anguish. They were riding over me with their big horses, and shoving me into vans handcuffed.

  Then an amazing thing happened. I had a rock in my hand, and I threw it with all the deadly accuracy of a Marine throwing a grenade. Me, Harlan Brown, the pride of the Marines, I threw a rock at the cops. I punched a cop. I completely forgot that I might wind up in jail. I found myself against a wall, being beaten by two big cops. Then I was on the ground in the crush, being kicked and stomped. Somebody rode a horse over me.

  Somehow, in the confusion, I managed to get away, bleeding and battered, with three cracked ribs and a broken nose and a few hoofprints on me.

  Something cracked in my head that night, and in the heads of the gays. That night saw the coming out of the militant gay. After that they were fighting everybody in" sight, demanding human rights and fairer laws. I was not exactly ready for radical activism. But it had dawned on me that I was now a citizen of a nation where straight Americans did not permit the flag to fly.

  So I stuck to my hustling. It might be felt that if I'd really wanted to spare myself the degradation, I could have. Surely I could have found honest work. Or I could have done what some upright men do: starve first.

  The answer was that I didn't see it as degradation. Venal, perhaps. But I was earning my living like every­body else. The Protestant work ethic never shone forth in my life so clearly. Hustling, I could earn far more money than I had at Penn State. My ex-wife never failed to get the biweekly check. I even paid my income taxes down to the last cent. Most prostitutes don't, but I wasn't looking for trouble with the IRS. My earnings were on record through my ex-wife, and I was still patriotic enough to think it was my duty to pay.

  In fact, in my pain and anger, I was wallowing in my gayness a little, trying to get to the very bottom of it. There was the period when I liked parading around in macho paraphernalia. But sometimes I'd get a glimpse of myself in a mirror, in that black leather harness with gold studs and chains on it, and a cock-ring on, and that long whip in my hand, flailing hell out of some quivering delighted score, and something inside me would cry out: "This isn't me. I'm really a peaceful man." And I'd long for the simple eroticism of the jock strap.

  One of the gay celebrities I met through Steve Good­night was filmmaker Gil Harkness. His name isn't a household word to most Americans, but to the gays he is an Ingmar Bergman or a John Ford. He made one of the first gay art films, The Double Cross, that broke away from the la-de-da pornography of the little nine-to-midnight all-male theaters. If you ever catch this sadomasochistic classic (it sometimes makes a second run in uptown art theaters now), note the Roman offi­cer who whips the sexy Jesus. That's me. My anonymity was preserved by a shiny helmet, and a pseudonym ap­peared in the credits.

  Hustling being the job it is, I quickly learned to hoard my feelings for off-hours. There were several men —two my age, the rest younger—that I became fond of. It was with them that I was first able to explore the gentler and more passionate side of my sexuality. But I continued to live alone, and I never fell in love. In fact, I found myself always holding back, as if in waiting for something better to come. None of them was that ghost of Chris.

  I kept in shape by running eight miles a day round and round Washington Square

  or down to Battery Park. Sometimes I did it in the afternoon, after being up all night doing my work. I felt a lonely figure in my gray sweats, striding along past the students, the junkies, the hippies and the derelicts that thronged the square. Sometimes I looked up at the statue of George Wash­ington on top of the triumphal arch and thought, "You bastard, if you only knew where duty, honor and country lead some people."

  Sometimes, to treat myself, I took the subway up­town and ran in Central Park, where the struggling trees and grass passed for woods. Or I went all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, whose steep rocky wooded trails are the scene of so many metropoli­tan-area collegiate and open cross-country races. Al­ways those trails were thronged with runners. I didn't go there often—I felt too alone there. How I longed, sometimes, for the freedom and innocence of those sum­mer runs in the Poconos so long ago.

  During those two years in Manhattan, I even man­aged to hang onto the shreds of my religion. Other gays felt the same outrage at being shut away from God for performing sexual acts which differed little from those that society sanct
ioned in holy matrimony. So the little gay churches were springing up in the metropolitan area, with a priest here and a minister there who were brave enough to care.

  Every Sunday I went to the small Church of the Beloved Disciple on Fourteenth Street

  , and I prayed rather desperately. I did not pray to be miraculously changed back into a heterosexual. I prayed for knowl­edge to know myself and accept myself totally. Being gay, I now realized, was not merely a question of sex— it was a state of mind. Society had told me I was a disease, but I was now convinced that I had come to homosexuality by natural inclination. I prayed for someone to love, and I prayed for a less venal way to make my living. The Gospel of St. John was comfort­ing—he loved the Lord and laid his head on His breast.

  I could not believe that Jesus had less compassion for gays than for the thieves that He was so gentle with.

  I also thought a lot about the hatred and intolerance that we were subjected to. I had lived on the butter-rich crest of America, on the star-spangled crest of the wave. I had been intolerant myself, though I had called it by other names, such as "tough-minded," "upright" and "clean-living." I had thought these were the quali­ties that made America great. For the first time in my life, I had been made a butt of these virtues. They had been poured over my bare body like acid.

  Sometimes I wondered if that peculiar American hatred of homosexuality isn't a result of its being so rooted, so silent and unacknowledged, yet so pervasive, in our history. In school we are taught the Victorian proprieties of this history. Yet much of that early his­tory is men alone with each other out on the reaches of the continent. Strong young men with all the urges, like my athletes horsing around in the shower rooms. Ex­plorers, scouts, mountain men, trappers, Indian fight­ers, cowboys, prospectors, trailblazers. Men with their women left hundreds of miles behind, or men with no women at all.

  They came to the frontier with that Western puritan-ism in their consciences, and there they were broken by sexual need, and forced to deny this puritanism and reach out to each other. Once need was satisfied, who knows how many male loves grew up there in the Ken­tucky wilderness, or out on the plains, or in the dry-baked desert canyons?

  They were the vanguards of Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, yet a glance at their circumstances and you know that many of them were gay. Sometimes I think that we reached from sea to shining sea over these young macho bodies in their buckskins and corduroys and khakis. There was no gay ghetto then—nowhere to take shelter if you were forced to come out. In those days, the penalties for being found out were far more crushing than they are even now.

  In their fear and helpless guilt, they denied what they had felt, repressed it, called it by other names, such as having a partner or a sidekick. When they got to town, they wore out the whores, and they brought their docile perfumed wives out to the frontier as fast as they could. And we have gone on denying it to this day.

  While I don't want to overdramatize the thought processes of that period in New York, the whole ex­perience did radically change my view of American so­ciety. Steve Goodnight made me realize how unedu­cated I was, and I started reading a lot. For the first time in my life, I was reading something besides Track & Field News with enthusiasm.

  Most of all, I came to hate violence. While I was being violent myself; it was only because I was angry. I wondered how I could ever have thirsted to go to Korea and kill gooks. I even started to wonder about Vietnam.

  The thing that really depressed me the most was being away from track. When the big indoor meets came to Madison Square Garden, I yearned to go, but I didn't. My only touch with events was the sports magazines, and a few people I still saw. Bruce Cayton from the Post sometimes took me to lunch. Aldo Fran-coni was another, a Long Island coach and local AAU official who was a crusty liberal.

  All anybody in the outside world knew about me was that I was a very respectable masseur, and some­times appeared in men's fashion ads. Bruce and Aldo had their suspicions, but never mentioned them.

  I didn't cry. Tears were not in my education.

  If Joe Prescott had not come along with his in­credible offer to go to Prescott, I suppose I would still be there in Manhattan. Sooner or later, my growing anger at the gay sufferings would have led me—un­willingly but inevitably—to violent gay activism. Pos­sibly I would have ended up in jail. Who knows? In recent years a number of godfearing men have ended up in jail. Look at the Berrigans.

  So when Joe got in touch with me, it was—I as­sumed—God's answer to my prayer.

  Joe was busy building Prescott. He had lost his ath­letic director. He wanted a high-quality replacement, but had been unable to pry the kind of man he wanted away from the big schools. He had remembered my case. Joe also loved to rescue people. He applied his Yankee thrift to people as well as money. "Waste people not, want people not," he used to say. His faculty was full of brilliant castoffs: ex-alcoholics, ex-convicts, ex-junkies, handicapped Vietnam veterans.

  So he traced me through Bruce Cayton, and came to see me.

  I'll never forget that evening. We sat in my small apartment on West Ninth Street

  . Joe made me his pitch. I vacillated. Joe kept talking.

  I sat there looking at this tall, genial, old curmudgeon with his thatch of prematurely white hair and his baggy, gray suit. He was drinking a whiskey straight up, and I was drinking a glass of milk.

  I thought about being back in the locker rooms with naked athletes again, and all the torments that would mean. I was now a battle-hardened gay veteran, used to indulging my sex, and I might lose control of myself with some really attractive runner.

  "Look," I said, "I think I have to be honest with you. It's something you ought to find out now, rather than later. I was forced to resign at Penn State because a rumor went around that I was a homosexual."

  "Yes, I heard the rumor," said Joe, "when I was trying to track you down."

  "The kid started it himself. I didn't touch him, and that's a fact. He was gay, and he knew I was gay. I wasn't interested in him, so he started the rumor out of spite."

  Joe sat thinking.

  "Nobody knows it for sure outside," I said, my voice shaking a little. "But if it ever comes out, your school might be embarrassed. And your alumni, the par­ents . . ."

  "My alumni are still mostly under thirty," said Joe. "And nobody pressures me."

  He sat thinking a moment more.

  "Well," he said, "I've already got a couple of gays on my faculty. They haven't given me any problems. I offer you the job with just one condition. If you feel like shacking up with one of the students or faculty, that's your business—as long as he's not a minor. I just don't want trouble with the law. Otherwise it's not my business, or the school's business, or society's busi­ness what you do. And frankly, nobody on campus would pay attention. It's a live and let live place, which is what I wanted."

  By now I was so scarred and cautious that I could scarcely believe the incredible Christian kindness of this offer.

  "I'm hard on kids," I said. "I'm not one of your mealy-mouthed permissive liberals." (This from a man who was having some second thoughts about conserva­tism.)

  Joe looked reflective. "I've talked to some men who were on your team at Penn State. One of them ex­pressed their sentiments pretty well. He said, 'Harlan Brown was a mean son of a bitch, but the runners that failed him went away knowing that they had failed personally. They were unable to blame it on his harsh­ness.' "

  He swallowed the rest of his scotch. "A four-year contract, Harlan. Twenty thousand to start with. Board and keep on campus, so you'll be spared living expenses. Think about it. Let me know sometime during the next week."

  I swallowed the rest of my milk. "I don't have to think about it," I said. "I'll take it."

  At Prescott, I found—for the first time since my childhood—a home. Joe's wife Marian was as kind as he was. Both of them taught me the real meaning of liberalism—a tough-minded and virile liberalism. The two of them were patien
t with me during the first few months as I licked my wounds and healed myself.

  Prescott was even structured like a family. It was, if you must, a kind of a commune, and it worked. Faculty and students lived mixed together, with no visible dif­ference in status. The students ran the campus, worked in the administration and even shoveled snow. Joe was almost never to be found in his walnut-paneled office in the main building (which had once been his house), unless he actually had some work to do there. He was

  Usually out on the campus with his clipboard, thinking, listening, talking. Or he was traveling to get new ideas and new people.

  No attempt was made to regulate anybody's morals at Prescott. Students and faculty were free to set up their own living arrangements. The dorms were coed. I found a few other gays already on campus. There was a tiny gay-lib student group, about four or five, 'and there were the two male faculty members he'd mentioned, who were living together. Since both the faculty and the student body were already so full of colorful heterosexual eccentrics, nobody paid much at­tention to them.

  Prescott was not a fancy place. The buildings were strictly functional, and the equipment was simply what was needed. Joe wanted something that really worked, not a glittering showcase full of problems and high overhead. As a result, it was one of the few private schools in the U.S. that wasn't having money problems, and whose enrollment was growing. When I came there, the school had 1,500 students, about the size of Oberlin.

  The reason that an ex-Marine officer could feel so comfortable at Prescott was that a lot of my ideas had changed. My hardshell conservatism had suffered a death blow. I was no longer able to judge people, or myself, by the same standards as before. I was still deeply patriotic, and loved the flag, and believed in America's mission. But my patriotism was now tinged by deep anxiety over the human flaws in my country, and I began to think that these flaws should be pol­ished away.