The Front Runner
circumstances and you know that many of them were gay. Sometimes I think that we reached from sea to shining sea over these young macho bodies in their buckskins and corduroys and khakis. There was no gay ghetto then—nowhere to take shelter if you were forced to come out. In those days, the penalties for being found out were far more crushing than they are even now.
In their fear and helpless guilt, they denied what they had felt, repressed it, called it by other names, such as having a partner or a sidekick. When they got to town,
they wore out the whores, and they brought their docile perfumed wives out to the frontier as fast as they could. And we have gone on denying it to this day.
While I don't want to overdramatize the thought processes of that period in New York, the whole experience did radically change my view of American society. Steve Goodnight made me realize how uneducated I was, and I started reading a lot. For the first time in my life, I was reading something besides Track & Field News with enthusiasm.
Most of all, I came to hate violence. While I was being violent myself; it was only because I was angry. I wondered how I could ever have thirsted to go to Korea and kill gooks. I even started to wonder about Vietnam.
The thing that really depressed me the most was being away from track. When the big indoor meets came to Madison Square Garden, I yearned to go, but I didn't. My only touch with events was the sports magazines, and a few people I still saw. Bruce Cayton from the Post sometimes took me to lunch. Aldo Fran-coni was another, a Long Island coach and local AAU official who was a crusty liberal.
All anybody in the outside world knew about me was that I was a very respectable masseur, and sometimes appeared in men's fashion ads. Bruce and Aldo had their suspicions, but never mentioned them.
I didn't cry. Tears were not in my education.
If Joe Prescott had not come along with his incredible offer to go to Prescott, I suppose I would still be there in Manhattan. Sooner or later, my growing anger at the gay sufferings would have led me—unwillingly but inevitably—to violent gay activism. Possibly I would have ended up in jail. Who knows? In recent years a number of godfearing men have ended up in jail. Look at the Berrigans.
So when Joe got in touch with me, it was—I assumed—God's answer to my prayer.
Joe was busy building Prescott. He had lost his athletic director. He wanted a high-quality replacement, but had been unable to pry the kind of man he wanted away from the big schools. He had remembered my
case. Joe also loved to rescue people. He applied his Yankee thrift to people as well as money. "Waste people not, want people not," he used to say. His faculty was full of brilliant castoffs: ex-alcoholics, ex-convicts, ex-junkies, handicapped Vietnam veterans.
So he traced me through Bruce Cayton, and came to see me.
I'll never forget that evening. We sat in my small apartment on West Ninth Street. Joe made me his pitch. I vacillated. Joe kept talking.
I sat there looking at this tall, genial, old curmudgeon with his thatch of prematurely white hair and his baggy, gray suit. He was drinking a whiskey straight up, and I was drinking a glass of milk.
I thought about being back in the locker rooms with naked athletes again, and all the torments that would mean. I was now a battle-hardened gay veteran, used to indulging my sex, and I might lose control of myself with some really attractive runner.
"Look," I said, "I think I have to be honest with you. It's something you ought to find out now, rather than later. I was forced to resign at Penn State because a rumor went around that I was a homosexual."
"Yes, I heard the rumor," said Joe, "when I was trying to track you down."
"The kid started it himself. I didn't touch him, and that's a fact. He was gay, and he knew I was gay. I wasn't interested in him, so he started the rumor out of spite."
Joe sat thinking.
"Nobody knows it for sure outside," I said, my voice shaking a little. "But if it ever comes out, your school might be embarrassed. And your alumni, the parents . . ."
"My alumni are still mostly under thirty," said Joe. "And nobody pressures me."
He sat thinking a moment more.
"Well," he said, "I've already got a couple of gays on my faculty. They haven't given me any problems. I offer you the job with just one condition. If you feel like shacking up with one of the students or faculty,
that's your business—as
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