The Front Runner: A Novel

Hard to believe that I first read this excellent book in 1976. It changed my perception of many things. Got to admit that I really love this book, just ordered all of the other books by Patricia Nell Warren. Highly recommend this book.

The Front Runner is a love story involving an athlete and his coach that was the first positive portrayal of gay life to reach #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 1974. The novel dates from just a few years after Stonewall, when the nascent consciousness of gay liberation was still making its way around the country. The lead characters, Billy and Harlan, are exemplars of a steadfast and self-conscious pride that sustains them through overwhelming adversity attributable to homophobia. They are attractive, engaging role models for living and loving as openly gay people, when such images were still transgressive.The novel suffers from the device of having been written about the near future from the vantage point of 1973. Warren has the Supreme Court invalidating sodomy laws in 1975 and the title character, Billy, winning a gold medal as a runner in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She has Billy and Harlan appear on the cover of Time and become the most famous gay couple in the world. They accomplish positive awareness-building and image-enhancement for the LGBT community on a scale barely conceivable for the mid-70's. Warren conjures demonstrations too easily to keep the plot moving; community organizing is an accessory to the plot. It looks a little contrived that Billy's dad is a gay civil rights lawyer and pioneer advocate so effective as to get a positive result from the Burger Court, which ruled against the LGBT community in 1986, only to be overruled in 2003. She makes the hard work of advancing fairness and equality for gays look, ultimately, a lot easier than it has actually been, and proffers an inappropos "superstar" model for the LGBT movement. (The LGBT community has never had a figure as major as Billy would have been; the movement has always characteristically been decentralized, and almost all of our heroes are unknown to history.) So from an activist's or an historian's perspective, the plot misrepresents the profound and immense work of achieving social change for LGBT Americans as it has unfolded in the last 40 years.Nevertheless, the novel offered people in the 1970's a vision of gay heroism to uplift the spirit, nourish our collective self-esteem, and spur a transformation in the gay Weltanschauung. The book imparts the commodity of hope for a happy gay life that Harvey Milk was so focused on disseminating. At a critical time, it was an instrument for revolutionizing consciousness among gay people, and held up the work of the movement as something making a difference in people's lives. The Front Runner must have inspired countless activists.Whether the book passes muster as gay-positive in the 21st century is debatable. A homosexual character in the book is killed in a spectacular hate crime that would not have happened were he in the closet. It's a minus in my view that a book has one or more homosexual characters come to a bad end because they embrace homosexuality; it smacks too much of an implicit morality tale that says "the wages of sin is death." I wouldn't describe the literary quality of the book as particularly notable, and the character development (other than Harlan the narrator) is weak. Billy is more mythic than believable. Still, the story draws you in, and the climax will not fail to blow the reader away. I can only imagine what reading this book was like to a gay man coming of age in the mid-70's. While it's easy to see the story as a little hackneyed by present-day standards, it bears remembering that The Front Runner was a prototype of gay coming-of-age romance. It was the genuine article before the others came along. Fiction was one of the means harnessed in the cause of gay liberation, and The Front Runner is an early standard bearer. I can't wait for the movie!

I first read this in the mid-1980s when trying to find my way as a lesbian in her early thirties. I have never forgotten this novel. I actually found this at a paperback-trade rack in the local supermarket--you put up a book you didn't mind sharing with others and then took one or two home to read. I was absolutely blown away by this book as this was the first gay or lesbian love story...that presented love and even marriage as something worthwhile and of which GLBT people are equally deserving as straight people. There were parts that just blew me away--and the ending, well, I could see this happening, unfortunately with all the hate in the world. I have to say I shed a lot of tears when reading THE FRONT RUNNER.I saw Harlan Brown evolve from an uptight, ex-Marine Jock who hated women, to a man who could at last appreciate Betsy, who carried Billy's child for them. He actually grew and evolved...just like many of us have had to. You see him warm and in a way blossom with the love Billy and he have for one another, as well as the support of the founder of the college and other straight allies. And if people think that only gay men don't like women...well, it goes the other way as well. There are lesbians who hate men (in many cases for valid reasons). Remember, he got treated pretty rottenly by his ex-wife, who even turned his sons against him. And in that era, there was (and I suspect there still is) in some quarters,hyper-macho men who really do not like anything remotely feminine. I've known a few but never met one, though, who truly HATED women.I have discussed the book with gay friends and they seem to think that Patricia Nell Warren understands gay men quite well. As for the datedness of the book, it was written in the late 70s and takes place just a few years earlier, so of course it feels "dated". I lived through that time and thought she did a great job of capturing gay life. I remember the big clubs and dance bars and well, the Continental Baths were legendary. This was not all of gay culture in the 70s but it was a lot of it. AIDS has changed so much...life is different now. My life is different...came out and married in Canada. When I reread the wedding scene, it reminded me of my own wedding, but of course in the changed world of 2007. I suggest this book as a great love story and a peek into what those heady years following Stonewall were like--so much hope, so much struggle.All in all, I recommend this book.

Really captures a time in our culture, which is pleasantly reminiscent of the 70's or a little unsettling depending on your perspective. There's an element of prejudice and privilege - you can be accepted for being gay even to the extent of being able to have children if you're "masculine," wealthy enough for private school, high-achieving and white.There's another thing that there's a relationship with a big age difference. It's because of a phenomenon that was more true in gay land in the 70's and is changing now. Gay relationships often spanned years because older partners were role models and mentors as well as lovers. When a young gay guy can't come out of the closet, can't find support in parents, older relatives, institutions where he can't express himself, his relationship partners will sometimes have a component of role-modeling and mentorship so the partners will often be older. That's the pleasant version that could really be genuinely positive for everyone concerned. Sometimes the difference in age can be about taking advantage but it really doesn't always have to be and certainly wasn't back then.The book feels, long like the author felt duty-bound to get down every little thing her friends told her.

When oh when will they finally make this book into a movie! AND they'd better do a good job! Time to once again tell the horror story of gay men living invisibly in our world!

The audio book arrived in a timely manner and was of good quality as advertised

Bel libro, diverso dal precedente, ma interessante.

It's very difficult to give an authentic, frank, public commentary about this book.Either it needs a lot of work to do, to locate this book in the literature of its time; either there isanother kind of work to do, a serious literary analysis to try to assess the fair value literary speaking; either we have to consider it from a sociological point of view in the history of the gay liberation movement; either it is considered to be a manifesto commitment and we have to evaluate the effects it has had in the benefit of the cause; either we have to consider how it brought relief, help to personal life of many people who read it since its release. And, in this case, bring some negative criticism would risk not respect or hurt these people.So I shall try to be as careful as possible to give a subjective opinion. If you want a training manual for distance running: it's a perfect book; if you want a look of the class gym a few decades ago; also perfect; if you want a beautiful sense of nature; its perfect ; you want a lovely romantic gay love story ; it's also perfect ; and it must be emphasized, the date of its publication fact makes that we escape the pornographic scenes that have become common place in many gay novels today.I will conclude with a kind of metaphor; some will, understand, may be. I think that one of the problems of the life of a gay person is that when being a child he, or, she never had the opportunity to hear or read a fairy tale where two princes or two princess who love each other, experiencing problems to love, but in the end "they married and had many children".In a way, this book is the reverse of that kind of tale. The people here are too perfect to be real. Well, we deserve, also, gay fairytale, don't we ?

Most of the reviews of this book converge on the 'classic' theme. Possibly the word 'popular' would be more accurate. I've read hundreds of gay novels from all decades and I wouldn't put this one up there as the greatest gay love story ever. I don't know where that came from. Not being particularly sport minded I did find the running context rather over whelming as the amateur sport of running is the vehicle for the story. No running no story. We get an awful lot of details on the diet and training and problems of competitive runners which did get a bit tedious after a while. Warren is a good writer and as she was an editor for 20 years I would hope so but she has not written literature. If the book had been about a young woman and an older coach I wonder how long it would have been on the shelves? You won't need a pen to take down any quotations either.In saying that it moves along at a hearty pace but has a rather extreme denouement which I found totally unbelievable and am amazed that readers just take it for granted that this could happen. There are better books out there.

One of the most beautiful, heart wrenching, uplifting, crushing, and all round emotional books I've ever read. It's 40 years old now, but I'd still rate it as one of the most important books I've ever come across, with so much to teach us today whether LGBTQ or not. Absolutely everyone to read it, and it's no wonder there's a global running movement named after it.

One of the best gay themed novels I have read in a long time. Good story, good plot and good writing