The Front Runner

films, The Double Cross, that broke away from the la-de-da pornography of the little nine-to-midnight all-male theaters. If you ever catch this sadomasochistic classic (it sometimes makes a second run in uptown art theaters now), note the Roman officer who whips the sexy Jesus. That's me. My anonymity was preserved by a shiny helmet, and a pseudonym appeared in the credits.
    Hustling being the job it is, I quickly learned to hoard my feelings for off-hours. There were several men —two my age, the rest younger—that I became fond of. It was with them that I was first able to explore the gentler and more passionate side of my sexuality. But I continued to live alone, and I never fell in love. In fact, I found myself always holding back, as if in wait-
    ing for something better to come. None of them was that ghost of Chris.
    I kept in shape by running eight miles a day round and round Washington Square or down to Battery Park. Sometimes I did it in the afternoon, after being up all night doing my work. I felt a lonely figure in my gray sweats, striding along past the students, the junkies, the hippies and the derelicts that thronged the square. Sometimes I looked up at the statue of George Washington on top of the triumphal arch and thought, "You bastard, if you only knew where duty, honor and country lead some people."
    Sometimes, to treat myself, I took the subway uptown and ran in Central Park, where the struggling trees and grass passed for woods. Or I went all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, whose steep rocky wooded trails are the scene of so many metropolitan-area collegiate and open cross-country races. Always those trails were thronged with runners. I didn't go there often—I felt too alone there. How I longed, sometimes, for the freedom and innocence of those summer runs in the Poconos so long ago.
    During those two years in Manhattan, I even managed to hang onto the shreds of my religion. Other gays felt the same outrage at being shut away from God for performing sexual acts which differed little from those that society sanctioned in holy matrimony. So the little gay churches were springing up in the metropolitan area, with a priest here and a minister there who were brave enough to care.
    Every Sunday I went to the small Church of the Beloved Disciple on Fourteenth Street, and I prayed rather desperately. I did not pray to be miraculously changed back into a heterosexual. I prayed for knowledge to know myself and accept myself totally. Being gay, I now realized, was not merely a question of sex— it was a state of mind. Society had told me I was a disease, but I was now convinced that I had come to homosexuality by natural inclination. I prayed for someone to love, and I prayed for a less venal way to make my living. The Gospel of St. John was comforting—he loved the Lord and laid his head on His breast.
    I could not believe that Jesus had less compassion for gays than for the thieves that He was so gentle with.
    I also thought a lot about the hatred and intolerance that we were subjected to. I had lived on the butter-rich crest of America, on the star-spangled crest of the wave. I had been intolerant myself, though I had called it by other names, such as "tough-minded," "upright" and "clean-living." I had thought these were the qualities that made America great. For the first time in my life, I had been made a butt of these virtues. They had been poured over my bare body like acid.
    Sometimes I wondered if that peculiar American hatred of homosexuality isn't a result of its being so rooted, so silent and unacknowledged, yet so pervasive, in our history. In school we are taught the Victorian proprieties of this history. Yet much of that early history is men alone with each other out on the reaches of the continent. Strong young men with all the urges, like my athletes horsing around in the shower rooms. Explorers, scouts, mountain men, trappers, Indian fighters, cowboys, prospectors, trailblazers. Men with their women left hundreds of miles behind, or men with no women at all.
    They came to the frontier with that Western puritan-ism in their consciences, and there they were broken by sexual need, and forced to deny this puritanism and reach out to each other. Once need was satisfied, who knows how many male loves grew up there in the Kentucky wilderness, or out on the plains, or in the dry-baked desert canyons?
    They were the vanguards of Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, yet a glance at their