Harlan's Race

life, and join Billy. But I was only 42, in good health, no quitter. If I just made the effort — I believed — I could slap a Band-Aid on my psych, and jump back in the race.
    The need for an iron psych started in 1936, when I was born into an Irish-American family. They were Protestant, Bible-reading, conservative, blue-collar, patriotic, military. Dad was a Marine lieutenant, wounded at Guadalcanal during World War II. I loved and feared my dad, and tried to live by his belief. Like so many military men, his language brimmed with scorn for faggots and pussies. “Only a real man,” he said, “can take a hill.”
    So I wasn’t exactly thrilled to discover that I was gay.
    From an early age, I was a highly sexed kid. Like some boys, I had the high-school flame, Chris Shelboume, who set the first brush fires of passion in my heart. Chris had his own problems — his family was even more puritanical than mine. White heat of sex with males, and our hunger to know it, had our knees shivering in our jeans, and our spirits frying with guilt. I desired a lot, and dared very little. In high school, in college, I was curious about women, enough to bumble into fatherhood and marriage. But women were a quiet moon-glow — too quiet. They couldn’t outshine the sun-heat of men.
    As a top college miler, I had my own Olympic dream.
    But my dad’s dream for me was the Marines. By the time I was 10, he had pushed a .22 rifle in my hands, and sent me out to plink at rabbits. Dad was furious when I shrugged away an appointment to the Academy. I loved my country, and wanted to serve Her. But I was a feisty, abrasive, stubborn kid, and a hitch as a common jarhead was all I’d agree to. It was the first time I crossed my dad, and he never forgave me. My mom backed him up.
    The only hills I took in the Corps were the Marine track team, and my last efforts to choke down the hunger for men. They hammered it into my head that my rifle was my friend. I was the fighting machine — followed orders to shoot, knew
    I’d shoot before “they” shot me — but knew I’d cry inside as I did. Scuttlebutt told us of court-martials for men caught bare-assed with men. Of course I sneered at faggots myself, in self-defense.
    Back home, the Olympic dream died. Dad was ailing, the family needed help. Tangled in marriage, I slaved as a sportswriter, went to night school for the credits to teach phys ed — and wound up with the plum job of coaching track at Penn State.
    One desperate night in New York City in 1964, at age 28, as America was fracturing into the “now generation” and the “establishment”, I finally chucked my dad’s morality, and had sex with a man for the first time. My mouth tasted the wild joy — and also the loss, like blood from a split lip. Loss of conservative illusions about America. Loss of career—Penn State unloaded me on suspicions that I was gay. Loss of my parents’ love. Loss of my two sons — my wife divorced me, and got custody.
    The last thing that Dad ever said to me was, “If you’d been a real Marine, this would never have happened.”
    I moved to New York, and came out.
    With Vietnam happening, guns couldn’t hurt me worse than the baseball bats of gay-haters who prowled the streets. Child acceptance of“biblical authority” exploded into a quest for my own authority. I was the glowering crew-cut stud, flaunting his star-spangled cock, carrying a stick inside his denim jacket. I’d learned stick-fighting in the Marines, and God help the baseball-batter who messed with me.
    But neither generation was my home. I was no flower child. I was no hard-shell either — the kind who said that long-haired kids should be shot. In 1970, when Kent State students were ripped by killing machines in National Guard uniform, I shuddered to think I might have been one of those machines.
    In the 1970s “the gay community” was born. It was a span of outlawed viewpoints, that shared a hunger for political muscle and pride. Yet even when little Prescott College offered me a coaching job, and the chance to be an openly gay faculty member, part of me still saw being gay as a cross to bear. When I met Billy in 1974, his selfacceptance lured me because I had so little self-acceptance of my own. Youth like Billy and Betsy and Vince, so glorying in their queer nature, were a different breed.
    Now, with this trial over, what I hungered for was not sex. I hungered to sit in front of a window with shades pulled up, and