The Front Runner (3 page)

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.
I
n 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 stu-

dents. 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
t
alk 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 suf-

fering 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 their 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.

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.