The Front Runner

fuss was being made, especially in view of the Supreme Court decision.
    But then he had a hard time selling the article. Magazine after magazine turned it down, saying glibly, "Timely, but not for us." Finally Esquire bought it. When it appeared, it drew some of the heaviest reader mail that Esquire had ever gotten.
    Meanwhile, the AAU had been shocked out of its mind by the National Intelligencer disclosure. More accurately, certain AAU officials were shocked, including executive director Melvin Steinbock.
    Steinbock was not exactly one of the senile conservative fanatics. He was an improvement over the previous executive director, and had changed or liberalized some AAU policies hated by athletes. But he was easily pressured by the fanatics, and his broadmindedness did not extend to homosexuality. "It's one thing to have this rumored around underground among track people," he said at a regional AAU meeting shortly afterward. "But it's something else to have it all over the front pages. It gives amateur athletics a terrible image."
    Steinbock's knee-jerk reaction was to blacklist Billy, Vince and Jacques on a nationwide basis.
    The blacklist is a time-honored AAU punishment. It's castration pure and simple. It's usually reserved for coaches and athletes who openly criticize AAU policies, and it cuts them out of competition. An outspoken coach, for instance, finds that his team is being kept out of meets.
    In this case, Steinbock was very open about the blacklisting. Why not? It had always been done that way. He put out a memorandum saying that "action would be taken" against any meet promoters who invited any of the three boys to compete. "Action" meant that AAU funding to these meets would be cut off.
    The effect within the track world was explosive.
    Liberal AAU officials, long ashamed of the blacklist, protested. The angriest was Aldo Franconi, whose district the boys were in. Meet directors were unhappy
    because, whatever their moral views, they viewed Billy, Vince and Jacques as good box-office. The name of their game was selling tickets to track meets.
    A number of track and field athletes were highly disturbed. Many of them certainly did not approve of homosexuality. On the other hand, the younger ones were inclined to be tolerant. Their attitude was, What is the fuss about? The sight of the AAU blacklisting three of them on such a naked broad-scale basis gave them all the horrors. But, with an Olympic year coming up, none of them dared to protest publicly. They were all afraid that they'd be blacklisted themselves. Several of them did write letters to Steinbock about it, and sent carbons to us.
    The angriest letter was written by trackman Mike Stella, a leading activist. He scarcely knew Billy, Vince, or Jacques, so it surprised us a little to see him so vehement.
    Stella wrote Steinbock: "Your action sets the athletes' rights movement back approximately five hundred years. In other words, into the Middle Ages."
    But even Stella didn't protest in public.
    The blacklist put the whole subject on the pages of the track and field publications for the first time. Up until now, they had been delicately avoiding it, on the ground that it was irrelevant. {And they were right.) Track & Field News and Runner's World were suddenly carrying pages of editorials and letters from runners, coaches, fans, school principals, AAU officials— the whole spectrum.
    None of them talked much about homosexuality per se. They disguised their upset by talking mostly about the political question of blacklisting. But the letters were all masterpieces of emotional writing. Some thought that the three boys and I should be awarded Purple Hearts. Others thought we should be lynched and burned.
    For the moment, Jacques and Vince were not hurt by the blacklisting. They had planned not to compete hard again until the indoor season started in midwinter. But Billy had set his heart on running in the national AAU cross-country championship in Kansas City on
    November 15. Obviously his entry would not be accepted now.
    But we were going to get a chance to strike back. The annual AAU national convention was going to be held in Lake Placid, New York, during the last week in October. So we decided to try to meet with Stein-bock and the others—they would all be there. We planned some ball-crushing maneuvers to force them to lift the ban.
    First, Billy, Vince and Jacques organized a zap (gay parlance for demonstration). This zap would be held on the