The Front Runner

into my head that I lived in a different
    world than the other kids. I mean, I grew up in the gay ghetto in San Francisco. It was all I knew."
    As a veteran of secretiveness and agonizing, I was fascinated by the kid's openness and directness. I was shortly to learn that Billy didn't volunteer personal information unasked. But if you asked him something straight out, he would give you the cold answer, without dramatics and without hesitation, no matter how personal it was.
    When we had cleaned up the kitchen, I motioned him to the fireplace and threw one more log on the fire. He sank down onto the rag, and the setter immediately came over and curled up against him blissfully. I sat down in the wing chair.
    "Did your father actually take you around in the gay world?" I asked.
    "Not right away," said Billy. "He was pretty careful about what he let me see when I was smaller. He let me find out about things little by little, as I was ready for them. You know, like straight parents do."
    "The straights would say you've been brainwashed," I said.
    "Maybe," he said. "On the other hand, they brainwash their kids too. Anyway, I might have grown up straight. My father didn't force it on me. I mean, I chose it freely."
    I was curious to see just how far I could force my probing.
    "The straights might wonder about the relationship between you and your father," I said.
    Billy shook his head and smiled. "No way. He was always very concerned about that. He wanted our relationship to be as healthy as possible. He never fooled around with men in front of me. He and Frances were very modest. He knew it had to be that way if I was going to grow up with my head in one piece."
    I was shaking my head slowly in disbelief. John Sive had to be some kind of gay Dr. Spock.
    "When did you have your first lover?" I asked.
    "When I was fifteen." Billy was gazing into the fire, stroking the dog slowly. "It was kind of an unhappy
    business. I mean, I was happy with it, but he wasn't. Ricky was a mess, he couldn't accept himself. We broke up. Later on I heard what happened to him. In college he got busted on drug possession, and sentenced to twenty years. In prison he got gang-raped and committed suicide."
    For a minute I had a terrible image in my head of Billy being gang-raped by five or six macho convicts. "Anything like that ever happen to you?"
    He shook his head. "I got beat up by straights a few times, that's all."
    "I presume," I said, "that you don't mess around with drugs."
    "No," he said, "I was never into dope. That's something my dad is pretty uptight about. I don't even use poppers. I've always been afraid they would take away my edge in a race or something."
    "Who came after Ricky?"
    "Three more. All unhappy. Like, I haven't had much luck. My father was always saying, 'I raised you to be such a well-adjusted boy, what's going wrong with you?'"
    He was still gazing into the fire, and his hand had stopped stroking the dog. He looked sad, and somehow older. I got my first glimpse, at that moment, of a tremendous sense of loss that he lived with. He was only twenty-two, and two mothers and four serious lovers had already caved in under him.
    "So you weren't open about being gay in school," I said.
    "No, I wasn't," he said. "I kept very quiet about it. I didn't feel guilty or anything. But I felt very, you know, very intimidated by straight attitudes, the more I learned about them. I'm not really a very brave person, maybe. But when I felt troubled, I could always go and talk it out with my dad. By the time I got to my junior year at Oregon, I wasn't really worried about it. So when Lindquist blew my cover, I thought, what the hell, from now on I'm going to come out."
    His casual low-key confession was giving me a lump
    in the throat. We sat listening for a few moments to the soft sighing of the log on the fire. It was getting late, but I couldn't resist prolonging the moment.
    "Have you ever slept with a girl?" I asked in a half-teasing tone of voice.
    He shook his head and laughed.
    "Do you hate girls?" I asked.
    He laughed again. "No. Why should I? They just don't interest me. I mean, I'm not totally indifferent. I can feel amiable toward a girl, and be friends. There was a girl at Oregon, Janet Huss, we were friends. A lot of people assumed we were serious. Once in a while I thought I'd tell her I was gay, but I didn't. Then she found out about it when Lindquist kicked me off the team." He paused a moment, gazing into the fire. "She