The Front Runner

shoulder at us.
    In a state of mild shock, the group started to break up. "I'll help you," Betsy said to Billy and went to the tea urn with him. People were leaving, discussing what they'd heard in low voices. Shakily I sat down on a bar stool. Vince had his hand on Jacques' shoulder. Jacques was white and silent. A number of people, runners and families, stayed, looking at us.
    Billy and Betsy came slowly back, carrying four
    Steaming cups of tea laced with honey and lemon. He slid onto a bar stool by me. Finally there were about twenty-five people left. I sensed they were sympathetic, and it made me feel a little better. If there were always these few around us, we would make it somehow.
    Billy glanced at the others, sipping at his tea. "Well," he said, "you've just seen something that not many straights get to see. The gays call it coming out."
    One runner said softly, "What you're doing takes a special kind of guts."
    I managed to laugh a little. Billy's gay pride was buoying me. "Coming out on Christopher Street is one thing. Coming out at a cross-country meet is something else," I said.
    "Somebody can have my sandwich," said Billy. For one awful moment I thought he might say that the only meat he ate was mine. But he didn't. He hauled a handful of walnuts out of his blazer pocket, gave me a couple and handed the rest around the little group of runners.
    Moved, they responded to his firm attempt to put what had just happened in the context of normalcy. In a moment, everybody was dexterously cracking nuts between the palms of their hands, and talking about that subject so dear to runners' hearts: diet.
    A couple of days later the National Intelligencer was on all the supermarket magazine racks across the country, along with TV Guide and Reader's Digest. Housewives checking out with their forty dollars' worth of groceries could see the big photograph of Billy and me frozen in that moment, looking at each other, the silver bowl in Billy's arm and that anguish in our eyes. The headline: STAR ATHLETE AND COACH
    ADMIT TO HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.
    The article paid due attention to Vince and Jacques, to the little gay ghetto at Prescott and even to Billy's father. But it dwelled on Billy and me, because of the shocking (to the straight) fact that I was older and Billy's teacher.
    This blast of publicity had a number of very unpleasant repercussions for us.
    First, Billy and I started getting letters from all over the country. About three-fourths of them were hate letters. Many were addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Brown." I didn't let Billy read the hate letters, because I was afraid they'd upset him. But, perversely, I read them myself, and some were really frightening. They said we should be dead. For the first time it hit me that someone might try to harm either or both of us.
    We also started getting threatening phone calls. They talked of bombs and kidnapping. The police investigated the calls with a curious lack of enthusiasm. We quickly had our numbers changed to unlisted ones. We gave the new numbers only to a handful of intimates, and had the college switchboard screen all our calls. Reporters, track officials et al could reach Billy only through me.
    As Billy's coach, my duties extended to shielding him from all this. He needed the peace and solitude to train in. An athlete can take only so much mental pressure before his performance suffers. Emotional stress causes the blood lactate level to rise—the same lactate that produces fatigue from physical stress. I had a lot of faith in Billy's toughness and in his ability to tune things out, but I wasn't taking any chances.
    Second, to counter the bias of the National Intelligencer article, Billy and I decided that an article closer to the facts ought to get published. Bruce Cayton had been doing his promised research on homosexuality in sports. He had talked to a lot of people quietly, and gotten a lot of quotes, most of them anonymous. So we offered him an exclusive interview with photographs.
    Delighted, he accepted. We sat down with him and talked fairly frankly about our feelings and gay attitudes and sports. We were pleased with the sensitive article he wrote, in which this interview was the centerpiece for all the background he'd gotten. He tried to air the subject impartially. Was there enough homosexuality in sports to worry about? Was it worth worrying about? He presented both sides of the argument,
    but wound up implicitly suggesting that too much