The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  "Is it true?" asked McGill.

  "I don't like that phrase 'sexual relationship,'" I said. "Why don't you say that Billy and I are in love? You can quote me on that."

  McGill was writing it all down. You could have heard a pin drop in that bar. "How long has this re­lationship been going on?"

  Billy stood at bay, the animal against the wall, the silver bowl held forgotten in the crook of his arm. He smiled a little. "Since April. Right after the Drake Re­lays. April 27, if you want the date."

  McGill was really warming up now. He looked at me. "How do you feel about the fact that many people feel you, as the coach, are doing a very improper thing by having a sexual relationship with the boy?"

  "What's so improper about it?" I said. "I can name you half a dozen straight coaches who are married or engaged to their female runners. I could also name you another half a dozen who are just sleeping with their female runners."

  "Don't you think this is different?" said McGill.

  "I'm sorry," I said, "it's my gay point of view. But I don't see it as different at all."

  "The rumor mill says that you seduced him," said McGill. "Is that true?"

  "I don't think you've been listening to the rumor mill very carefully," said Billy. "What it really said was that all three of us were gay when we were at Ore­gon. That was why Gus Lindquist kicked us off the team. And I had four other lovers before Harlan, so nobody was doing any seducing."

  McGill was still looking at me. No, he really wasn't obnoxious. The whole group around us was beginning to stir with comments and rustlings. People were nudg­ing, looking at each other, saying this is incredible, etc.

  "Would you care to comment on your dismissal from Penn State in view of all this?"

  "Yes, I will comment on that. I was innocent at Penn State. The kid was gay, and he sensed I was gay. He wanted to sleep with me, and I didn't want to sleep with him. I'm a discriminating guy, McGill, I don't screw just anybody. The kid made the charges out of pique, that's all."

  "Have you been in the habit of sleeping with ath­letes through the years?"

  Was it really possible that they were doing this to me? Was it really possible, right at this race, after the good race and the softly falling rain and that sea of runners on the wide lawn?

  "No," I said. "I made it a habit of separating my love life and my profession, so to speak."

  "Could you tell me how many?"

  Billy was white with fury, his lips twitching.

  "Only Billy," I said. "But I'm sure you don't believe me."

  Jacques had turned away and had his hands over his face, sobbing. Betsy tried to comfort him.

  "What do you feel is the future of your relation­ship?" McGill said.

  I was ready to kill somebody. "Are you asking me if I think such a relationship has a future?"

  "Well .. ." said McGill.

  "If I didn't think it did, do you think I'd be in it? Would I stand here and answer idiotic questions like yours for a matinee with somebody?" I could hardly breathe. "Of course it has a future. As far as we're both concerned, it's forever."

  Still holding the silver bowl, Billy reached to me with his free hand and closed it comfortingly around my arm. Anguished, we looked at each other. The sadistic photographer flashed a picture of us at that moment.

  "Have you got everything you want?" Billy asked McGill savagely.

  "Yes, I think so. Thanks," McGill said, closing his notepad.

  "In that case," said Billy, "if you don't mind, I'm going to have some tea."

  I had been ready to run out of that damned bar the minute McGill was done. But suddenly it occurred to me that Billy was instinctively doing the right thing. If we all left in a big hurry, it would look like shame and fear.

  Billy gave the bowl to Vince and started toward the tea urn, dignified, controlled. Silently the group shifted aside to let him pass. "You guys want anything?" he said over his shoulder at us.

  In a state of mild shock, the group started to break up. "I'll help you," Betsy said to Billy and went to the tea urn with him. People were leaving, discussing what they'd heard in low voices. Shakily I sat down on a bar stool. Vince had his hand on Jacques' shoulder. Jacques was white and silent. A number of people, runners and families, stayed, looking at us.

  Billy and Betsy came slowly back, carrying four

  Steaming cups of tea laced with honey and lemon. He slid onto a bar stool by me. Finally there were about twenty-five people left. I sensed they were sympathetic, and it made me feel a little better. If there were always these few around us, we would make it somehow.

  Billy glanced at the others, sipping at his tea. "Well," he said, "you've just seen something that not many straights get to see. The gays call it coming out."

  One runner said softly, "What you're doing takes a special kind of guts."

  I managed to laugh a little. Billy's gay pride was buoying me. "Coming out on Christopher Street is one thing. Coming out at a cross-country meet is something else," I said.

  "Somebody can have my sandwich," said Billy. For one awful moment I thought he might say that the only meat he ate was mine. But he didn't. He hauled a hand­ful of walnuts out of his blazer pocket, gave me a cou­ple and handed the rest around the little group of runners.

  Moved, they responded to his firm attempt to put what had just happened in the context of normalcy. In a moment, everybody was dexterously cracking nuts between the palms of their hands, and talking about that subject so dear to runners' hearts: diet.

  A couple of days later the National Intelligencer was on all the supermarket magazine racks across the country, along with TV Guide and Reader's Digest. Housewives checking out with their forty dollars' worth of groceries could see the big photograph of Billy and me frozen in that moment, looking at each other, the silver bowl in Billy's arm and that anguish in our eyes. The headline: STAR ATHLETE AND COACH ADMIT TO HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

  The article paid due attention to Vince and Jacques, to the little gay ghetto at Prescott and even to Billy's father. But it dwelled on Billy and me, because of the shocking (to the straight) fact that I was older and Billy's teacher.

  This blast of publicity had a number of very un­pleasant repercussions for us.

  First, Billy and I started getting letters from all over the country. About three-fourths of them were hate letters. Many were addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Brown." I didn't let Billy read the hate letters, be­cause I was afraid they'd upset him. But, perversely, I read them myself, and some were really frightening. They said we should be dead. For the first time it hit me that someone might try to harm either or both of us.

  We also started getting threatening phone calls. They talked of bombs and kidnapping. The police investi­gated the calls with a curious lack of enthusiasm. We quickly had our numbers changed to unlisted ones. We gave the new numbers only to a handful of inti­mates, and had the college switchboard screen all our calls. Reporters, track officials et al could reach Billy only through me.

  As Billy's coach, my duties extended to shielding him from all this. He needed the peace and solitude to train in. An athlete can take only so much mental pressure before his performance suffers. Emotional stress causes the blood lactate level to rise—the same lactate that produces fatigue from physical stress. I had a lot of faith in Billy's toughness and in his ability to tune things out, but I wasn't taking any chances.

  Second, to counter the bias of the National Intelli­gencer article, Billy and I decided that an article closer to the facts ought to get published. Bruce Cayton had been doing his promised research on homosexuality in sports. He had talked to a lot of people quietly, and gotten a lot of quotes, most of them anonymous. So we offered him an exclusive interview with photo­graphs.

  Delighted, he accepted. We sat down with him and talked fairly frankly about our feelings and gay atti­tudes and sports. We were pleased with the sensitive article he wrote, in which this interview was the cen­terpiece for all the background h
e'd gotten. He tried to air the subject impartially. Was there enough homo­sexuality in sports to worry about? Was it worth worry­ing about? He presented both sides of the argument, but wound up implicitly suggesting that too much fuss was being made, especially in view of the Supreme Court decision.

  But then he had a hard time selling the article. Mag­azine after magazine turned it down, saying glibly, "Timely, but not for us." Finally Esquire bought it. When it appeared, it drew some of the heaviest reader mail that Esquire had ever gotten.

  Meanwhile, the AAU had been shocked out of its mind by the National Intelligencer disclosure. More accurately, certain AAU officials were shocked, includ­ing executive director Melvin Steinbock.

  Steinbock was not exactly one of the senile conserva­tive fanatics. He was an improvement over the previous executive director, and had changed or liberalized some AAU policies hated by athletes. But he was easily pres­sured by the fanatics, and his broadmindedness did not extend to homosexuality. "It's one thing to have this rumored around underground among track people," he said at a regional AAU meeting shortly afterward. "But it's something else to have it all over the front pages. It gives amateur athletics a terrible image."

  Steinbock's knee-jerk reaction was to blacklist Billy, Vince and Jacques on a nationwide basis.

  The blacklist is a time-honored AAU punishment. It's castration pure and simple. It's usually reserved for coaches and athletes who openly criticize AAU poli­cies, and it cuts them out of competition. An outspoken coach, for instance, finds that his team is being kept out of meets.

  In this case, Steinbock was very open about the blacklisting. Why not? It had always been done that way. He put out a memorandum saying that "action would be taken" against any meet promoters who in­vited any of the three boys to compete. "Action" meant that AAU funding to these meets would be cut off.

  The effect within the track world was explosive.

  Liberal AAU officials, long ashamed of the blacklist, protested. The angriest was Aldo Franconi, whose dis­trict the boys were in. Meet directors were unhappy

  because, whatever their moral views, they viewed Billy, Vince and Jacques as good box-office. The name of their game was selling tickets to track meets.

  A number of track and field athletes were highly dis­turbed. Many of them certainly did not approve of homosexuality. On the other hand, the younger ones were inclined to be tolerant. Their attitude was, What is the fuss about? The sight of the AAU blacklisting three of them on such a naked broad-scale basis gave them all the horrors. But, with an Olympic year coming up, none of them dared to protest publicly. They were all afraid that they'd be blacklisted themselves. Several of them did write letters to Steinbock about it, and sent carbons to us.

  The angriest letter was written by trackman Mike Stella, a leading activist. He scarcely knew Billy, Vince, or Jacques, so it surprised us a little to see him so vehement.

  Stella wrote Steinbock: "Your action sets the ath­letes' rights movement back approximately five hun­dred years. In other words, into the Middle Ages."

  But even Stella didn't protest in public.

  The blacklist put the whole subject on the pages of the track and field publications for the first time. Up until now, they had been delicately avoiding it, on the ground that it was irrelevant. {And they were right.) Track & Field News and Runner's World were sud­denly carrying pages of editorials and letters from run­ners, coaches, fans, school principals, AAU officials— the whole spectrum.

  None of them talked much about homosexuality per se. They disguised their upset by talking mostly about the political question of blacklisting. But the letters were all masterpieces of emotional writing. Some thought that the three boys and I should be awarded Purple Hearts. Others thought we should be lynched and burned.

  For the moment, Jacques and Vince were not hurt by the blacklisting. They had planned not to compete hard again until the indoor season started in midwinter. But Billy had set his heart on running in the national AAU cross-country championship in Kansas City on

  November 15. Obviously his entry would not be ac­cepted now.

  But we were going to get a chance to strike back. The annual AAU national convention was going to be held in Lake Placid, New York, during the last week in October. So we decided to try to meet with Stein-bock and the others—they would all be there. We planned some ball-crushing maneuvers to force them to lift the ban.

  First, Billy, Vince and Jacques organized a zap (gay parlance for demonstration). This zap would be held on the opening day of the convention. Vince master­minded it, and did much of the work. The boys spent hours on the phone, stirring up gay activists and sympathetic student groups all over the metropolitan area. They even managed to stir up some local runners who had no Olympic ambitions.

  Part of the zap would hit the Metropolitan AAU office on Park Place, since it would be hard to trans­port so many hundreds of demonstrators to Lake Placid, just a few miles from the Canadian border. But several busloads of angry gays would go up north and zap the convention hall in Lake Placid.

  The reason the boys were able to stir up so many students was that the gay issue was becoming fash­ionable on many campuses. With black and women's civil rights already somewhat old hat, the gay thing was new and daring. Several rock musicians had helped out by professing bisexuality. And the front-page photograph on the National Intelligencer had made us the overnight sensations of this new cause.

  John Sive, Aldo Franconi and I got our heads to­gether on the legal angles.

  On Sunday, October 21, the day before the con­vention began, the three of us drove up to Lake Placid. The magnificent drive through the Adirondacks, with the maple forests turning flame red and yellow, and the steep mountains reflected in the lakes, was oddly at variance with our grim mood.

  The little winter-resort town of Lake Placid, its Olympic days decades gone, was already stirring with AAU arrivals. Cars unloaded in front of hotels, people

  registered for the convention, milled in and out of bars, or went out jogging on the trails around the lakes. We found everybody at a wine and cheese party at the Mont Blanc Hotel, and asked Steinbock if we could meet with him and several other officials immediately.

  Steinbock was mild but firm. He had come out of the party room sipping his California burgundy, with a piece of cheese still in his hand. "I don't have anything to say to you," he said. "I'm not answerable to you."

  "Well," I said, with equal mildness, "this is the boys' lawyer, and I think we'd better talk."

  The word "lawyer" rattled Steinbock a little. He stood there, wearing a nylon parka and a baseball cap, looking at John, who was elegant and citified in a dark gray Bill Blass suit.

  "All right," he said.

  He rounded up national track and field chairman Mickey Reel, long-distance chairman Bob Flagstaad and two others who had supported his decision. Short­ly we were sitting down in a stuffy smoky little meeting room in the hotel, that must have been vacated by another informal meeting a while ago. The overflowing ashtrays had not yet been emptied, and convention schedules and agendas lay around.

  I introduced John to them.

  "This is Billy Sive's father, John Sive," I said. "Pos­sibly you've read about him in connection with the Supreme Court decision on sodomy. John was the architect, so to speak, of the case."

  The officials shook hands with John gingerly. They sat sipping their wine.

  "We want to talk to you about the blacklisting," I said. "Maybe we can work something out."

  "As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed," said Steinbock nicely, playing with his half-empty glass. "We simply can't have this kind of thing in amateur athletics, and it's my duty to discourage it. Frankly, I think you have a lot of nerve to come here."

  "I'm not here as Billy's lover," I said. "I'm here as the coach of the three boys."

  They all actually flushed. It amused me to see how just my talking like that put them on the defensive.

  We fenced a
round for a while, trying to get them to see reason, to persuade them that they were meddling in an area that was none of their business. But they were more or less adamant. I could see that Flagstaad was disturbed (he wasn't a fanatic either), but he went along with Steinbock.

  Finally I said pleasantly, "All right, let me put it this way. If the ban isn't lifted immediately, then we're go­ing to take immediate legal action."

  "That's your privilege," said Steinbock. "It's a free country."

  "Is it?" I said. "When you guys can crush the ca­reers of international-class athletes who have broken no written AAU regulation, is that freedom?"

  "Nobody has ever contested a blacklist legally," said Mickey Reel.

  "We can fight you as long and as hard as we like," I said. "We have one of the best civil-rights lawyers in the country. We have unlimited money to fight you in court. Two wealthy gays have decided that the boys are a cause worth supporting, and they have agreed to underwrite all the legal and activist costs."

  They sat drinking their wine, thinking. The AAU does not have the money to fight long expensive court cases. It barely has enough money to run its athletic programs.

  "We'll also call for the congressional committee on amateur sports to investigate the whole business," I said.

  "Amateur sports are supposed to stay clean out of politics," Flasgtaad said quickly. "That's the basis on which we belong to the Olympic movement."

  "This isn't politics," said Aldo. "It's civil rights. If you don't think you're answerable to the civil-rights laws, then you go tell that to all the black athletes in the AAU, and all the women."

  "Then," I said, "we've got that federal law behind us. Maybe you don't know about the law. John . . ."

  John sat smoking a little cigar and telling them about the Supreme Court decision, and how it would apply here. "You've put your blacklisting order on pa­per," he said. "I have a copy of it. So there's going to be no doubt in a court's mind what is going on. They would see it as a black and white case."

  They were all silent, listening, a little mesmerized by John's grim precise courtroom manner. Until just re­cently, AAU officials have had little to do with lawyers, because athletes did not seek legal redress—they just suffered.