The Front Runner

was near.
    Possibly we were all wanting to get it over with, and tired of pretending.
    At any rate, when we were back in New York, we started to get a little careless, and went about more openly in gay society.
    The gay community wanted to lionize the three of them. Jacques refused to go to the parties, mostly because big parties made him nervous. But Vince and Billy went with John and me. We went to a big party at Steve Goodnight's and a few other parties. Billy and Vince didn't stay up too late, and they didn't drink anything, and they managed to handle all the intense interest in their persons graciously. They had become the reigning sex gods.
    The gays threw themselves on their necks. People who had never looked at the sports page were subscribing to Track & Field News and Runner's World. Delphine de Sevigny and a number of others announced their intention of going to every eastern meet where the boys would be running. In his old age, Delphine had become a track nut.
    A number of men made some heavy passes at Billy. It enraged me. Several were far younger and (I thought) far more attractive than I was. Had Billy shown a flicker of interest in any of them, I think I might have been capable of killing him. But he looked at them pleasantly through his glasses and said, "You'll have to ask my coach."
    To even things up, a number of men made heavy passes at me. Billy didn't like it any better. His eyes were on me, clear, trustful—but also level and watchful. I never knew if, despite all Buddhist nonviolence, he thought of killing me.
    We didn't exactly send out press releases about those parties we went to. But one of them got into the news. In a way, it helped precipitate all the trouble that came that fall.
    Steve Goodnight was suddenly a celebrity. His book The Rape of the Angel Gabriel had emerged as the great break-through gay novel. All the straights were reading it, and some were saying, How shocking, and others were saying, How moving. So his big party got written up on the "People" page in Time. My name, Billy's, Vince's and John's were listed among the people present. There was a photograph of Billy and me, he in his velvet suit and ruffles, both of us holding glasses of what looked like gin on the rocks (it was mineral water) and looking social and happy.
    The track conservatives all over the country read this, and they shuddered. Billy's and my publicly associating with a man famous for his novels about gay sex was just too much for them.
    Meanwhile, the four of us sadly went back to Pres-cott to start the school year. Billy and I returned to our life of seeing each other only a few hours a day.
    TEN
    THAT fall, several class high-school runners came to Prescott for the express purpose of being coached by me. Not one of them was gay. They had been reading about me in the papers, and thought also that Prescott sounded like a school worth attending. Also on the strength of the European publicity, five top college runners had transferred to Prescott. Of these, three were straight and two were gay. The gays came for shelter.
    It all meant that, for the first time, my track team was gong to have some real depth. And when the crosscountry season started, we went to the NCAA regional championship in Van Cortlandt, and we wiped out Penn and Manhattan and a few other fine teams, and came in second in the team ranking.
    If Billy and I had been living together, my happiness would have known no bounds. For the first time I was really enjoying everything I did, and feeling that what I did meant something. The humanization of Coach Brown was finally complete. If I barked now, it was a joke. The kids laughed—and they obeyed me instantly. I became something that I'd never wanted to be or planned to be—a popular teacher.
    But Billy was a more popular teacher than I was. I can still see him bicycling across the campus, with his briefcase full of the brand-new gay studies program. I can still see the warm autumn sun shining on his windblown curls (now that he was a prof, they were as uncombed as they'd been while he was a student). As he pedaled past the track, he'd always wave at me if I was out there yelling "Get those knees up" at the girls' team.
    With Vince and Billy working on it, the gay studies program grew into a counseling service that was the
    first of its kind on an American campus. Back in 1971 and 1972, a few tiny programs like this had sprung up at big universities, as well as administration-condoned