The Front Runner

frightened that they dropped off the team.
    I was close enough to touch—but I didn't.
    Religion, discipline, military experience, upbringing and just plain fear gave me the strength. Every day I used to pray to God to give me strength, just for that day, to keep my hands off my boys. I felt I had a sacred trust in not fouling their lives with what I then regarded as my monstrous feelings. And it also occurred to me that I couldn't indulge these feelings without risking being caught at it myself.
    It helped to keep up my Marine facade. I was poker-faced, harsh, hair cut close to my skull, conservatively dressed, barking at my athletes as if they were recruits on Parris Island. Running helped me too. More accurately, the fatigue from running helped blot my suf-
    fering and need from my mind. That year at Villanova, I started training seriously again. Not to compete (I couldn't anyway, since I was now a pro), but to survive. Every morning I got up extra early, put in ten miles on the road at a fast pace, even did some speed work on the track if I had time.
    I was curious to know what my father's attitude toward homosexuality would be. He was still getting around the shop in Philadelphia, his big hands black with ink. But he was a little creaky and bent with arthritis these days. Casually I mentioned one day that I had seen a queer at Villanova.
    He was very reluctant to admit that such people existed. But finally he said, "Well, Harlan, they're few. Very few. Thank God, for they are sick twisted people. The Lord will cast them into the eternal fire."
    Insane? Was I insane? I knew one thing. Maybe I wasn't insane now, but I would be shortly, if I kept repressing these feelings.
    So in 1963, while still at Villanova, I started making little forays into a tiny, underground comer of American society where, I had learned, these needs would be met. And I learned a few things right away. The right word for my feelings was not "queer," but "gay." And the right word for me, with my natural male mannerisms and my desire for other such men, was "macho gay."
    I told myself: You have to try it just once. Maybe you won't even like it, and you can go back to women and relax.
    There were gay bars in Philadelphia, but I couldn't risk going there because it was too close to home. So now and then, on weekends when there weren't any meets, or on holidays, or during the summer, I managed to slip away to New York.
    There, wearing the most extreme disguise I could think of—hippie clothes, sunglasses and a hairy wig— I started exploring the gay turf downtown with that familiar feeling of throbbing excitement.
    That first weekend I just cruised around the bars and porno stores. A few guys tried to pick me up, but I wasn't ready for it yet. I sat there sipping Cokes,
    amazed at the feverish crush of young men. Few, my father had said?
    No virgin where blue movies and dirty pictures were concerned, I was still overwhelmed by all-male pornography. After looking at some for the first time, I was like a drunk. The sight of men making love to each other seemed so shockingly beautiful, so right.
    I found one under-the-counter book with high-quality color photos that showed two runners of twenty or so. I knew at a glance that they were conditioned athletes. I wondered who the models were, and what kind of money need had driven them to do it. Would the AAU consider that they'd jeopardized their amateur status, since they had profited from their sport by fornicating in their track clothes?
    The photographs showed them starting off on a run through the woods together. Then they stopped to fall on each other's necks and strip each other. Picture after picture, they rolled on the leaves in the most abandoned fashion, their fine, lean bodies gleaming with sweat. With a terrible pang, I remembered Chris. What a fool I'd been, what a coward.
    Before I left New York that Sunday afternoon, I carefully destroyed the book and dropped it in a trash can, like a spy destroying his code book. But those powerful images stayed with me.
    It was several weeks before I got back to New York again. On that second weekend, I was doing what everybody else was doing. I was cruising the bars and streets around Sheridan Square, looking for a quickie and hoping I didn't pick up a "cot," one of those plainclothes policemen who hung around trying to nab gays.
    Of course, you could buy somebody for far less walking. You ask, "How much?" and he says, "Seven inches, twenty-five