The Front Runner

"gay lounges" where the boys could meet, talk and be themselves. But our program at Prescott was something unique, and it grew out of athletics.
    The two new gay runners were very gifted and very messed up mentally. One of them was UCLA two-miler Tom Harrigan, and the other I can't name because he never came out. We had a really difficult time with those two boys.
    I was always mortally afraid of the track team splitting up into the "gay squad" and the "straight squad," with no communication or cooperation between the two. This would happen, I knew, if we started paying too much attention to the gay thing in front of the straight boys. They would start feeling crowded psychologically, feeling put on. They would start grumbling that the gays were taking over, and that all this had nothing to do with running.
    So we solved this problem by establishing a rule that sex preferences were not to be mentioned at track practice, in the dressing room or anywhere else where the team was as a group. Only in my house on Mondays and Thursdays did we mention these things. And we mentioned them only in a bigger context that could be called "The Athlete and Society."
    As the boys sat in front of my fire munching carrot sticks, we had open forum on feelings and hang-ups— any that were related to running and society. We spent a lot of time discussing the whole masculine mystique of the athlete. So timewise, we probably talked about gay problems only thirty percent of the time. The straight boys slowly learned to understand and respect the gay view of the world, and to understand the gay anguish. My heart used to hurt for Tom as he sat there struggling to come out with his feelings, fearful that he would be judged and punished. But when he finally did, he learned that the straights weren't always as smug as they seemed.
    Vince and Billy were always at these open forums, sitting in, and Jacques came whenever he could. Vince was the great talker, and good at helping me direct the discussion. Jacques was a genius of the mind-provoking gag. Billy was less of a manipulator, but it was always to him that the boys turned when they had something to confide that they hesitated to tell me because I was older.
    We finally decided that, one night a week, we would throw this forum open to the girls' team, and to anyone else on campus who wanted to attend. Quite a number of people did. It got so you couldn't shoehorn another person into my house on Thursday nights, and I thanked God that the head gardener had opted for a big living room. I needed a whole crew for KP afterwards.
    One of the most startling newcomers to the forum was a little half-miler from the girls' team, Betsy He-den. She was about five foot two, with shorty wavy hair and big astonished long-lashed eyes a la Bette Midler, and she was the only militant lesbian on campus. She started coming, I think, to stir up conflicts, and she and Vince would sit there and smart-ass each other till the rest of us had to quiet them down.
    But Billy took her on. There were evenings when the whole crowded living room would be silent and rapt as the two of them went at it. Betsy was the demagogue, waving her fist, jabbing her finger. Billy countered her with Buddhist nonviolence, putting out his simple observations in his quiet way, unruffled, sunny, always compassionate to her point of view. They fought their way through the whole verbal battle of male-female hostilities.
    One night he finally forced her to admit, "It's true. I don't want you. But I feel, that you reject me."
    Everybody laughed. The whole room just broke up.
    She and Billy ended up by becoming close friends.
    Vince would kid me, "Harlan, aren't you worried about this?" He would see Betsy hitching a ride across campus on Billy's bike, or Billy dropping by girls' track practice to give her a few pointers on half-miling
    that he'd picked up from Jacques. They could even be seen dancing together in the canteen. "Harlan, aren't you jealous?"
    I used to laugh at Vince. Those two kids would no more investigate each other's bodies than they would put their hands in a fire.
    But I found myself jealous of Tom Harrigan. The minute he landed on campus, he made a heavy cruise in Billy's direction, just to see if it would succeed. Billy rejected him, but Tom seemed to stay interested.
    The gay program and open forum ended up growing into a counseling service available to students from any other campus. Joe Prescott brought in a top young