The Front Runner

opening day of the convention. Vince masterminded it, and did much of the work. The boys spent hours on the phone, stirring up gay activists and sympathetic student groups all over the metropolitan area. They even managed to stir up some local runners who had no Olympic ambitions.
    Part of the zap would hit the Metropolitan AAU office on Park Place, since it would be hard to transport so many hundreds of demonstrators to Lake Placid, just a few miles from the Canadian border. But several busloads of angry gays would go up north and zap the convention hall in Lake Placid.
    The reason the boys were able to stir up so many students was that the gay issue was becoming fashionable on many campuses. With black and women's civil rights already somewhat old hat, the gay thing was new and daring. Several rock musicians had helped out by professing bisexuality. And the front-page photograph on the National Intelligencer had made us the overnight sensations of this new cause.
    John Sive, Aldo Franconi and I got our heads together on the legal angles.
    On Sunday, October 21, the day before the convention began, the three of us drove up to Lake Placid. The magnificent drive through the Adirondacks, with the maple forests turning flame red and yellow, and the steep mountains reflected in the lakes, was oddly at variance with our grim mood.
    The little winter-resort town of Lake Placid, its Olympic days decades gone, was already stirring with AAU arrivals. Cars unloaded in front of hotels, people
    registered for the convention, milled in and out of bars, or went out jogging on the trails around the lakes. We found everybody at a wine and cheese party at the Mont Blanc Hotel, and asked Steinbock if we could meet with him and several other officials immediately.
    Steinbock was mild but firm. He had come out of the party room sipping his California burgundy, with a piece of cheese still in his hand. "I don't have anything to say to you," he said. "I'm not answerable to you."
    "Well," I said, with equal mildness, "this is the boys' lawyer, and I think we'd better talk."
    The word "lawyer" rattled Steinbock a little. He stood there, wearing a nylon parka and a baseball cap, looking at John, who was elegant and citified in a dark gray Bill Blass suit.
    "All right," he said.
    He rounded up national track and field chairman Mickey Reel, long-distance chairman Bob Flagstaad and two others who had supported his decision. Shortly we were sitting down in a stuffy smoky little meeting room in the hotel, that must have been vacated by another informal meeting a while ago. The overflowing ashtrays had not yet been emptied, and convention schedules and agendas lay around.
    I introduced John to them.
    "This is Billy Sive's father, John Sive," I said. "Possibly you've read about him in connection with the Supreme Court decision on sodomy. John was the architect, so to speak, of the case."
    The officials shook hands with John gingerly. They sat sipping their wine.
    "We want to talk to you about the blacklisting," I said. "Maybe we can work something out."
    "As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed," said Steinbock nicely, playing with his half-empty glass. "We simply can't have this kind of thing in amateur athletics, and it's my duty to discourage it. Frankly, I think you have a lot of nerve to come here."
    "I'm not here as Billy's lover," I said. "I'm here as the coach of the three boys."
    They all actually flushed. It amused me to see how just my talking like that put them on the defensive.

We fenced around for a while, trying to get them to see reason, to persuade them that they were meddling in an area that was none of their business. But they were more or less adamant. I could see that Flagstaad was disturbed (he wasn't a fanatic either), but he went along with Steinbock.
    Finally I said pleasantly, "All right, let me put it this way. If the ban isn't lifted immediately, then we're going to take immediate legal action."
    "That's your privilege," said Steinbock. "It's a free country."
    "Is it?" I said. "When you guys can crush the careers of international-class athletes who have broken no written AAU regulation, is that freedom?"
    "Nobody has ever contested a blacklist legally," said Mickey Reel.
    "We can fight you as long and as hard as we like," I said. "We have one of the best civil-rights lawyers in the country. We have unlimited money to fight you in court. Two wealthy gays have decided that the boys are a cause worth supporting, and