The Front Runner

[silversolitaire]

I was just rummaging through my hard drive and found this excerpt of my most favorite book in the world, The Front Runner. I had to prepare this once for a class, to be made into a gap text. It's slightly abridged, but I think it gives this text an extra impact.

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All my life I have been haunted by the ghost of a runner. I was born in Philadelphia on August 14, 1935. My father was a track nut, and among my earliest memories is being taken to meets. He'd hold me up so I could see over the crowd at the distance, flitting figures of men in shorts and singlets. "Look there," he'd say, "look how fine they are, my boy."

My father was a strict man, but also warm and merry, and I adored him. He and my mother both were staunch Protestants, and they gave me the upbringing that one would expect. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, church every Sunday, pledge allegiance to the flag.

And running. For my father, running was almost part of his religion. "Runners," he used to say to me, "those are the real men. Baseball is for babies, and football is a brainless business. Running takes more effort and more discipline than any other sport."

Ironically, then, it was my fine, big, straight father who taught me to worship at the altar of manhood. Whereas if stereotype had is way, I should have had a milquetoast father, a fierce and castrating mother, and grown up disturbed and shy with girls. That was not the case at all. My father had no objections to girls. He even said it was part of being a real man.

When I got to Highschool, the main thing on my mind was getting into the famous track team. I loved competition, and pitting myself against the other boys. It made me different from other boys who didn't engage in high-stress sport. Very early, I got to thinking of myself, and of all runners, as a separate and superior species of human being.

In the summers, we always vacationed in the Poconos. The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I met a boy whom I'll call Chris Shelbourne. He was blond, with calm, blue eyes, very quiet, lean and sunbrowned. It turned out he was a runner. We were delighted to discover this common passion, and we quickly became friends.

In fact, my feelings for him became so strong that I wonder now why I didn't understand them correctly. Perhaps it was because I was so poorly educated about these things. My father had told me what he thought I needed to know about girls. Be he had never told me such feelings existed between two males. As far as I know, there was no name for what I felt. But instinctively I realized these feeling were something to be hidden from everyone, even from Chris, even from myself.

Chris possibly felt the same confusion. He feverishly sought every opportunity to be with me that summer, but he never discussed his feelings.

Every day we took long runs together through the woods, following the many lonely trails for eight or ten miles. We tore up hills and ran sliding down them, running free like two deer.

So we squandered the summer of '52 that way.

At the end of our last run, Chris suddenly stopped and said, "I want to say goodbye here."

He put his arms around me. But panic equaled affection, so we did no more than embrace each other. He touched his lips to my cheeks, near my mouth, and after a moment of hesitation I did the same to him. We swore we would write each other, and that we'd see each other next summer.

The next day his family closed up their cabin and returned to New Jersey. I ran alone in the woods that day. I would have cried bitterly, but my father had taught me that real men don't cry.

I didn't have the courage to put my feelings on paper, so I never wrote to Chris. He never wrote me either. I never saw Chris again.

When I met Billy Sive, I was just past thirty-nine years old, and beginning to think that my secret fantasy would die a quiet and decent death. But I found I was wrong. I watched him running past me, his long, floating strides had a eerie, slow-motion quality. He just ghosted along. He had the most beautiful natural form I had ever seen. He was almost unreal. He was the idea of a runner that haunts the minds of track people.

In just a few days he stirred up all the old feelings. For the first time in my life I was deeply in love.

excerpt from The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren

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*sighs* I love this book. To me this is the classic gay love story. I think everybody should read it, especially gay people. It's not just a very romantic and passionate book, it also teaches you about gay rights and the history of gay rights. And it's plain touching. Very touching. So, beware, you'll need a lot of emotional strength to get through it and then you'll probably want to read the other two parts as well ^.^;;. Word of warning though: when checking out the book, do NOT leaf through it, do NOT read any summaries of the sequels, ads in the back of the book or anything. All summaries spoil you immediately and that'd be such a pity.

Hm, I wanna read it again. Too bad a certain someone still has them... *glances in a certain direction* hehe...