Harlan's Race

Catalog Card Number 94-060438 ISBN: 0-9641099-5-6
    OTHER NOVELS BY PATRICIA NELL WARREN
    ONE IS THE SUN (Ballantine, 1991)
    THE BEAUTY QUEEN (William Morrow, 1978) THE FANCY DANCER (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 the 1978 Walt Whitman Award for Gay Literature and the 1982 Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. She lives in California today.
    For
    all my readers and all the bookstores who have hung in there with me and
    all who helped with this book.
    Author's Introduction
    After The Front Runner became an international bestseller, my William Morrow editor, Jim Landis, was enthusiastic about a sequel.
    The new book would answer the question of what happened to Billy Sive’s son, described as born in 1977. But dealing with a teenage boy, as I wanted to do, meant writing a book set in the early 1990s. In the late 1970s, this amounted to writing science fiction! After grappling with the story for a year or two, I finally had to tell Landis that I couldn’t get a handle on Billy’s Boy.
    Time has brought many changes and challenges to the gay community and the U.S. that track coach Harlan Brown knew in The Front Runner. Among other things, AIDS was unheard of when I wrote TFR in 1973. Not many Americans of the late ’70s saw ahead to how heavily our world of the 1990s would be marked by environmental and economic decay, media power, a resurgence of racism and intolerance, and new Vietnams. Above all, few foresaw the growing social violence, and the need for self-defense.
    Starting in 1982, I wrote my fifth novel, One Is the Sun. Ballantine brought it out in 1991.
    With my thoughts turning back to The Front Runner, I realized it was time to write the sequel. And there needed to be another book to bridge between The Front Runner and Billy’s Boy. Titled Harlan’s Race, this book would answer the question of how Harlan Brown survived the violence and challenges of those changing times.
    Patricia Nell Warren
    PART ONE
    A Question of Innocence
    ONE
    In the summer of 1990, when I was 55, with so many things coming full circle for me, I went back to New York for the first time in many years. The Gay Games were held there, and I attended — made some new friends, and saw a few of the old ones who were still alive.
    “Hi, Harlan, how are you? God, it’s been ages. Yeah, we’re still together . .. hanging in there. Did you know Justin died? And Chen? So, tell us about you. Got a boyfriend these days? Why the hell aren’t you down there in the mile run?”
    The usual stuff.
    Afterwards I took off alone, and found myself drawn to places where I’d spent the Seventies — that blurred time of my own race through life.
    I’d always been one to brood on the past. So that old curve of the American earth called me back, to run down a missing clarity. It wasn’t going to be any sentimental journey. More yawned in wait for me than mere years. An era had vanished into a holocaust of time — a present-time version of what people like to see as those sunny antebellum days. A point of view had belonged to me, and to other gay men and lesbians, and also to many straight Americans of those times. It had vanished, without our knowing that it was at risk.
    In New York City, I felt the first little shocks. The Village was more dangerous and decrepit than ever, with less reason for a dyed-in-the-wooler to go on insisting it was the best turf on earth. Many businesses and bartenders and bars and bookstores and coffeehouses that I remembered were gone with the wind. Steve Goodnight’s apartment, where I’d faced the end of my coaching career and struggled to become a self-supporting writer, was gone. The old brownstone building, and half the block, had been razed for a new apartment tower.
    North of the city, all those green reaches of Westchester County that I’d known so intimately in the Seventies, were patchworked with crass new shopping centers. The campus of Prescott College, where my track team sweated for eight