The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  "I told you, you gotta have a bodyguard," said Stella.

  Having him on our side was a real coup.

  The next day, the meet officials were still sticking to their decision. It, and our threat, were aired on the sports pages and TV news nationwide. Never before had an athlete threatened court action to get a Trials decision reversed. Aldo told us that the USOC had a lawyer checking into their position.

  Meanwhile, the Trials ground on. An overflow of athletes was camping on locker-room floors, living on hamburgers.

  Billy had a very sore foot and hip, but he wasn't badly injured. He ran his 5,000 heat conservatively, and placed third, qualifying for the final. No one tried to bump him—possibly the guys were worried about all the talk of courts and lawyers.

  All this time, I was being the behind-the-scenes paranoid.

  Every angle had to be thought of. The dope" tests, for instance. After every event, the officials took a urine sample from each athlete. Supposing they alleged that they found traces of amphetamines in Billy's urine? Billy's trancelike look in races had always brought comments that he must use dope. Some runners do take bennies. Billy scorned them. (The dope tests were partly ineffectual anyway, because the blood doping and a new caffeine-derived drug that was around both left no traces.)

  So I contacted a respected athletic physician in Los Angeles, George Hofhaus, and he made a show of collecting extra specimens from Billy. The USOC must have gotten the message. While two other athletes were disqualified for doping, Billy was not bothered on this score.

  All during the Trials, I was the shield that every­body else was bouncing their bullets off. I worked with John on the legalities, and made myself just a little unpopular with the press by restricting their access to Billy. Behind that shield, he had the peace to com­pete, work out, rest and think only of running.

  At night we consolidated that peace in bed. We had carried it away from Prescott with us, and we shel­tered it avidly. I felt angry as I looked at his bruised hip, his torn foot. How could anyone dare to hurt him?

  Stella and his girlfriend were around a lot. A few of the other runners were dropping around too, and they would sit around on the beds in our room and gab about running. Mike worked out with Billy, and was busy showing everybody that he didn't give a goddamn what they thought.

  "You're a weirdo-lover," said Dellinger to Mike.

  Mike looked him right in the eye. "I'd rather be a weirdo-lover than get on the team the way you did."

  For the first time, we began to feel that we weren't alone against the world.

  On July 12, the last day of the Trials, the 5,000 final was run. The stands were jam-packed again, and scalpers outside were selling tickets for fifty dollars. Billy's people were chanting:

  Billy, Billy He's our man Catch him, Bobby, If you can.

  Once again, Dellinger chose to force the pace. He knew that Billy's injuries were still hurting him, and he counted on the pain to erode at Billy's ability to hold the pace. But he hadn't counted on Billy's ability to block out pain.

  So it was the two of them again, a front-runner's race, slugging it out far ahead of the rest. Stubborn, furious, Billy stayed in the lead. This time he made no mistakes. He burned Dellinger off, and won by twenty yards, for a 13:22.8. Stella came forging up for third place.

  It seemed like half the stands went wild at Billy's victory. A lot of young people spilled down onto the track. Billy took a grinning victory lap, jogging in their midst while they jumped up and down and pounded him on the back.

  So the 5,000 team would be Billy, Dellinger and Stella.

  Then the announcer said, "We also have a special announcement. At a meeting of the officials, it has been decided to reverse a decision in the 10,000 meter event.

  On viewing the videotape, they found that the foul was caused by Bob Dellinger, not Billy Sive ..."

  There were screams of joy from the stands. John Sive's face split into a grin. I felt myself going slowly limp. You could hardly hear the announcer still talk­ing.

  ". . . So it's a no harm for Sive . . . Dellinger is disqualified . . . Billy Sive is now on the 10,000 meter team with Martinson and Stella .. ."

  Billy was so drained from the race, and from all the tension of that week, that he didn't dance for joy. He simply sat down on a bench, with his sweat jacket over his shoulders. He put his head down on his knees and cried helplessly.

  The great Roman circus was over. The stands and the parking lots emptied for the last time. The area was littered with programs and paper cups. Media crews were checking out of hotels. Athletes were driving home with broken dreams. We took a plane back to New York.

  We had begun to feel—we thought—a subtle shift in people's sympathies. Stella made a blunt statement to the press, and said: "I've gotten a little sick of watching Sive being harassed and laughed at. How much does an athlete have to do before he is respected and let alone? Since when is an athlete's private life any of their business? Who are these people, anyway, who are playing god and setting themselves up as the moral guardians of track? I think this whole thing is setting a very dangerous precedent."

  The bellwether of opinion, Mike focused the issue for many other athletes. Several other activists made noises at the USOC that enough was enough.

  The sports press was more sympathetic too, now. They had been moved by the sight of Billy running blind, shoeless, bleeding and balls-out in the 10,000. The Los Angeles Times trackwriter wrote: "This is a pansy? I don't know what Billy Sive is. But he ain't no flower."

  But many other Americans were very unhappy at the fact that the U.S. was going to be represented in Montreal by an admitted homosexual. There were still six weeks before the Games, and a lot of trouble could be made.

  The brand-new Olympic team possibly was antici­pating this trouble when they got together for some important business, shortly after the Trials. They looked thoughtfully at Billy, and pondered his struggle to get where he had. And then by a majority (though not unanimous) vote, they exercised their USOC-granted democratic right to elect the flagbearer who would carry the Stars and Stripes in the opening ceremonies in Montreal.

  The new flagbearer was Billy Sive.

  The AAU and the USOC were furious, and de­manded they elect another.

  The athletes said no.

  16

  "Me, the flagbearer," Billy chortled softly.

  We were lying in bed in the cheap motel room that I had taken a few miles from the Olympic training camp in Alamosa, Colorado. John and Vince were sharing a room in the same motel. The mountain air was cool, so we were not sprawling around nude—we had the blanket over us. The afternoon sun had no way of coming through the small dingy window at the back of the room. All you could see was a patch of blue sky and the tops of some tall spruce trees.

  I had sworn that Billy and I would never make love in this kind of place, and here we were.

  The antiquated black-and-white TV was shut off. The room smelled of cigarette mustiness no matter how much I kept the windows open. The thin chenille bedspread had seen better days, and the sheets had been darned with machine stitching. On the wall by the bathroom hung a calendar from the previous year with a Frederick Remington painting of Indians on it. Our clothes were flung over the only chair in the room. My suitcase lay open on the floor.

  This was already the third motel that I'd been in. Two others had thrown me out when they realized who I was. "Corrupting that innocent boy," said one elderly lady owner. "I don't want your tainted money." Western puritanism seemed to differ little from East­ern, except that out here they called us "sheepherders."

  Billy stretched luxuriously beside me. I ran my hand along him. He was as thin as he had ever been, even while overtraining, and I hoped he wouldn't get much thinner. Now he was suffering sometimes from the liver cramps that afflict thin distance runners, brought on by the glycogen deficiency that comes toward the end of a long, hard run. But he was bursting with energy and glowing with health. He moved restl
essly, plea-surefully under my stroking hand, hard and smooth as living, stainless steel, trying to kiss me. I remembered my despair that first day watching him work out back at Prescott, wanting to run my hand along his smooth, young, sun-speckled skin as I was doing now, and being sure I would never do it.

  "Are you going to dip the flag?" I asked.

  At every Olympic Games, the burning question was whether the U.S. flag would dip like all the others, or whether it would stay loftily, conspicuously high. So far it had never been dipped.

  Billy was nuzzling in my chest hair. "No," he said. "I'm going to keep the flag up, as a symbol of gay erection."

  I put my hands over my eyes and laughed. "No political gestures at all? No upraised fists or shuffling around on the victory stand?"

  "Mr. Brown, I am a walking political gesture. I don't have to do anything, just be there." Billy sat up. "Anyway, you'd say that dipping the flag was an irrelevant provocation."

  "Right," I said.

  Billy reached over me and looked at my watch, which was lying on the bedside table. He sighed. "Well, this has been great, darling. But I better get back to the camp before the housemother comes looking for me."

  The "housemother" was head Olympic track coach Gus Lindquist, whose status as Oregon track coach had dictated that he be assigned to Montreal. Lindquist lived in a state of perpetual unhappiness these days because he had one of the Sodom and Gomorrah three back on his "skvad." He was also a little piqued that the stone he had rejected had been made by me into the cornerstone of such an impressive building.

  Reacting to criticisms in 1972 that the Munich men's and women's track teams had been lax in discipline, the USOC was trying to clamp down this time. They had set up celibate men's and women's training camps with military-type dormitories, visiting hours and early curfews. Husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and I were being forced to room outside the camp, in ho­tels, motels, apartments, campgrounds or wherever we could find room. Every day, athletes made a mass exodus from the camps for purposes of sex and com­panionship.

  The athletes were furious at this girls' finishing-school treatment. They were breaking rules right and left, and making life as miserable for Lindquist and the USOC as possible. When Lindquist suspended two rebellious trackmen from the team for violating the curfew, about thirty other athletes violated the curfew just out of sheer spite. It then dawned on Lindquist and the USOC that if they kept suspending people, they weren't going to have a team. After a week's squabbling and politicking, the two men were rein­stated.

  Billy, following our rule of "no irrelevant provoca­tions," was being more obedient than most. Neverthe­less, Lindquist was livid every afternoon when Billy left the men's camp to visit me. But since the other athletes were being allowed to visit their sex-mates outside, and since there was nothing about sex in the obedience agreement the athletes had to sign, there really wasn't much he could do about it. Lindquist took his revenge cheaply by denying me entry to the camp, so that I couldn't see Billy work out on the track. This deprivation was mostly emotional, because Billy was carrying out his program meticulously and was coming up fine, so he didn't really need me hanging over him. But I did get to see him during his longer runs—he had to do them out on the road, and John, Vince, and I met him at the gate and went with him in the car to protect Mm.

  Lindquist derided me as a camp-follower. That didn't bother me—by now I'd been called worse names than that.

  Outside the motel, we could hear gravel crunching on tires as a car pulled up before our unit. The horn tooted. "Break it up in there, you horny bastards," said Mike's voice. "Time to get back to the convent."

  Billy got out of bed and went to the window, pulling back the faded curtain a little. Mike Stella and Sue Macintosh were sitting out there in Sue's convertible. Windblown, grinning, they had been somewhere and had some fun of their own. They were quite open about living together, and no one knew when or if they ever intended to get married.

  "You're early," said Billy. "Go have a beer with Dad and Vince. I'll be right out."

  "Okay," said Mike, and shut off the engine. We heard them getting out of the car.

  Billy went into the bathroom. Standing in front of the washbasin, he assiduously soaped his genitals. I got up too, and followed him in. He looked at him­self in the mirror. He was starting a beard, and looked poignantly like the busted overtrained youth who had landed on the Prescott campus that winter day a year and a half ago. I put my arms around him and stood pressed behind him, feeling how hard his but­tocks were.

  "I feel like I'm turning into two people," he said. "One Billy Sive is very excited about going to Mon­treal. The other one wishes he was back at Prescott mowing the lawn." He was rinsing himself off carefully.

  "Yeah," I said. "Oh, well, just a few more weeks." I was pressing against him very tenderly.

  He moved his rear end a little. "Oh, you're such a sexy old man," he moaned. "If you make Mike wait, he'll leave and I'll have to walk back."

  "He won't leave," I said. "He's a friend."

  "That's a fact." Billy moved aside and let me get up to the washbowl myself.

  We pulled on our clothes. We felt very relaxed. We went out into the winey air and down the row of units to where John and Vince were staying. The door was open, and they were all in there sitting around on the beds with cans of beer.

  Mike grinned at us lasciviously. "The big advantage you guys have," he said, "is that you don't have to spend five dollars a month on the pill."

  Sue giggled and colored.

  Vince was sitting stooped, wearing a laced leather jerkin that left his arms bare. He had come back from Europe with more money, more tattoos, a few bizarre adventures in the gay undergrounds of London and Amsterdam, and a load of depression that none of us could lift from him, not even Billy. He had come straight out and moved into the motel with us. He was delighted that Billy had made the team, and was living vicariously in it.

  "Oh," said Mike, pulling something out of his jacket pocket, "I've got something for you. Saw it on the newsstand in town." He threw it across the bed to Billy.

  It was Time, with Billy's and my faces on the cover. I was behind, with my Marine crewcut and poker-face. Billy was in front, slightly lower down, smiling and hairy. The artist had rendered his curls as carefully as Botticelli (I had learned about Botticelli from Steve Goodnight). The band across the cover said

  THE GAY PHENOMENON

  "So they finally ran it, huh?" said Billy, leafing through it to find the cover story. There were three pages of color photographs giving the straight reader glimpses into the gay world. Gays sunning themselves on the grass in Central Park. Gays touch dancing in a downtown Manhattan bar. A religious service in a gay church, conducted by a gay priest. There were several photos of Billy and me, taken by Bruce Cayton. The two of us sitting on the grass at our wedding, kiss­ing on the mouth. The two of us at the track, me tim­ing and Billy hurtling past, blurred.

  Time senior editor Ben Maddox and a girl researcher had come up to interview us in June. We had told them that we couldn't cooperate with them unless they signed something saying they would not use Billy's name in any advertising, as this would jeopardize his amateur status. They had agreed. They had done a big research job, and we were impressed with their effort to make some sense of the emerging gay com­munity.

  "Isn't there something about being jinxed if you've been on the cover of Time?" said Mike.

  "Buddhists aren't supposed to be superstitious," said Billy. He looked at me and grinned. "Neither are Christians."

  The magazine went from hand to hand. "Lindquist is not gonna like this," said Vince. "Neither is the USOC."

  "What're they going to do?" said Billy. "We talked to Time before the Trials. The hell with the USOC."

  In the obedience agreement that Billy had had to sign, there was a clause saying that the athlete would not have dealings with the media unless the USOC gave permission. Billy had actually been happy about that claus
e, because he was sick of talking with re­porters about being gay. He was even sick of discussing running with them. He just wanted to be left alone. The USOC were mystified at his docility about this, and relieved that Billy was going to be out of sight for a while. They weren't letting any reporters near him.

  Mike swallowed the last of his beer and stood up. "Well, folks, sorry to break up this gathering, but we have to get back. I promised Martinson I'd play chess with him right after dinner."

  We all got up and trooped out. At the door, Billy put his arms around me and kissed me. "Bye," he said. "See you tomorrow."

  Mike, Sue and Billy climbed into the convertible. A honk, a wave, a screech of tires, and they were out on the highway, speeding away.

  "Remind me to tell Sue to drive carefully," said John a little drily.

  We all went back into John's room.

  "Billy and Mike are pretty friendly, huh?" said Vince morosely.

  "Don't worry, you haven't been replaced," said John.

  "There's several of them that he's really solid with," I said. "He and Mike and Martinson and Sachs are going to room together in Montreal. I'm so glad he's not in there alone and being avoided."

  "Right," said Vince. "I shouldn't be selfish. But I am ..."

  Mike Stella was, in fact, the only good straight friend that Billy had ever had. And, in addition to his new allies among the athletes, Billy also had a couple on the coaching staff. I had been steeling myself to continue being his shield in Montreal, which would be difficult from outside the team. I had envisioned myself making sure he got to the stadium in time to warm up for his events, feeling that Lindquist might not bother to look after him.

  But the distance coach, UCLA's Ed Taplinger, had taken Billy under his wing, and sided with him in disputes with Lindquist. Like Stella, Taplinger had begun feeling that enough hassling had been done.