Beauty Queen

(William Morrow, 1976)
    THE FRONT RUNNER (William Morrow, 1974)
    THE LAST CENTENNIAL (Dial Press, 1971)
    POETRY BY PATRICIA NELL WARREN
    HORSE WITH A GREEN VINYL MANE (Novi Poezii, 1970) ROSE-HUED CITIES (Novi Poezii, 1966)
    LEGENDS AND DREAMS (Novi Poezii, 1962)
    A TRAGEDY OF BEES (Novi Poezii, 1959)
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Patricia Nell Warren was bom in 1936. She grew up on a Montana cattle ranch, and worked as a Reader's Digest editor for 22 years. Three of her novels were bestsellers. She has won numerous awards, including a Walt Whitman Award for Gay Literature and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. She lives in California today.
    PRINT HISTORY
    1978    William Morrow & Co. (U.S. hardcover    edition)
    1979    Bantam Books (U.S. mass market    paperback)
    1979    Bantam Books (U.K. edition)
    1995    Wildcat Press (trade paperback)
    Introduction
    By Rev. Mel White Dean, Cathedral of Hope, Dallas, Texas
    I cut my gay baby teeth on The Front Runner. Patricia Nell Warren's sensual and yet deeply spiritual novel was hidden in my study for years behind a stack of biblical commentaries. I felt guilt every time I locked the study door, stopped all calls, and stole a few more minutes to read her hopeful words about being gay and proud.
    Now, fifteen years later, I've stumbled onto Warren's The Beauty Queen. What a tragedy that I missed it in 1978 when it was released the first time. The Beauty Queen is a dramatic and prophetic look at the world we live in today. The story of a homophobic politician gay-baiting her way into political power reads like this morning's headlines.
    But this is not just another look at false and inflammatory rhetoric and its terrible consequences. This is also the moving account of a gay father who must decide between supporting his ambitious homophobic daughter in her campaign to be governor of New York or leaving his closet forever and taking his stand for truth.
    How do we respond to the anti-homosexual campaigns of Robertson, Falwell, Helms and Doman? Each character in The Beauty Queen confronts his or her anger in a different way. The lesbian policewoman who wants desperately to use her handgun to silence one intolerant voice knows the rage we all feel. How she deals with her rage is a valuable lesson for us all.
    What a movie this will make!
    And underlying each exciting subplot is Patricia Nell Warren's call to each of us to accept our sexual orientation as a gift from God, to celebrate our lives and live them with integrity, and to take a stand against intolerance wherever we find it.
    Why has The Beauty Queen been hidden all these years? Thanks, Patricia, for giving us this second chance.
    Rev. Mel White's history in the religious-right movement included ghostwriting for Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Oliver North. After 25 years of marriage, fatherhood, therapy and inner struggle, White finally came out as a gay man. He directed his writing skills into telling his own story in the riveting Stranger at the Gate (Simon & Schuster, 1994). Today Rev. White stays in the news as an outspoken advocate of religious tolerance for gay people.
    Author's Foreword
    For the writer, a book always begins with a quiet question to the winds and the weather.
    In the mid-1970s, when the revival of authoritarian Christianity was still a distant thundercloud on the American horizon, and Anita Bryant became the first politician to make homosexuality a national issue, I asked myself this question:
    "What if a born-again woman politician found out that one of her own parents was gay?"
    The Beauty Queen explores this question. First published in 1978, it was the third of my novels about how gay Americans experience the tension between individual freedom and authoritarian religion. This tension has dislocated our country ever since colonial days.
    My novels of the '70s were not aimed solely at the newly identified "gay market." I hoped to open up these questions for mainstream readers as well. The first novel in the series was The Front Runner, published by William Morrow in 1974. Second came The Fancy Dancer in 1976. Both books became immediate bestsellers, and are still selling steadily today, with well over ten million copies in print in seven languages today. My fan mail came from straight readers as well as gay readers. Universities kept the books on reading lists; liberal ministers and mental-health professionals have used them in