The Front Runner (5 page)

So I told Bruce thanks, and I forged off on my own.

There wasn't much skill I had, to start earning immediate money on my own. I tried freelance writing, but the market had become very difficult to break into. I ran ads offering to work as a free-lance copyreader and editor, but it paid pitifully little—four or five dollars an hour, and even this market was tightening up due to the recession. Coaching had taught me how to give rubdowns, so I tried to set myself up as a licensed masseur. My ad, a typical one, ran in the
Village Voice
and other papers: "Rubdowns by Chris, athletic masseur." (I didn't want to use my real name.) But New York was full of masseurs who went out at all hours of the day and night to rub down sleepless middle-aged ladies. The customers came in slowly.

So I tried some modeling. My ad read: "Handsome ex-Marine, athlete, miler's build, 6' 1", 155 pounds, 25-inch waist, 42-inch chest." I did get some calls, but it wasn't totaling more than the $200 a week I had to send my ex-wife.

There were just a few weeks to make up my mind what I was going to do, and I did it.

In a bar one evening, I had met a personable gay named Steve Goodnight, a struggling serious writer who kept himself alive by doing pornographic books. Steve and I became friends, not lovers. Through him I met a number of other gays in a kind of inner artistic circle and hidden high society. To these people I revealed my true identity, and found that the Penn State dismissal made me something of a martyr/celebrity in a small way.

So it happened one night that a well-to-do and lascivious gay acquainted with this circle thought I should

go to bed with him, and I was needing money and I said, "I think that's going to cost you $200." That was how I became a hustler. I was a very expensive, very exclusive hustler. None of your twenty-five-dollar sodomies in hotel rooms, none of your selling your meat on the street. I couldn't risk it. Nobody got to me except through a blind of telephone calls. I usually charged $200-250, and sometimes went higher. I was worth every penny of it, and pretty soon had more business than I could handle, but I didn't have to exert myself. At $200 a trick, twice a week was enough to satisfy the divorce court and to pay my living expenses.

They tell you a hustler's career is over at thirty, when his youth starts to fade. I started mine at thirty-four, and found that there was a small but solid market for meat like mine. My numbers didn't want faunlike boys. They wanted a hard, angry, bitter, mature beauty. Sometimes they wanted a whipping too. I am not a sadist at heart, but I was angry enough to pass for one —I gave a damn good whipping for $200. It was clear profit, because I wasn't working for a pimp.

There was something about the harshness of hustling that reminded me I was surviving, that the straights would not crush me. There was something of raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the way I said, "Eight inches." It was, in a way, my first gesture of gay pride.

One of the reasons I stayed off the street was that it was more dangerous than ever now, and I wasn't looking to go to jail. On June 28, 1969, just after I arrived in the city, the New York City police started their now-famous crackdown on the gay bars. The first to be blitzed was the Stonewall. During the next twelve months, they raided and closed the Zoo, the Zodiac and about twenty others, mostly on Barrow Street. It was the watershed in gay history, and—in a way—it was my watershed too.

The night the Stonewall was busted, I was in the neighborhood on business. Someone called my client and told him what was happening, and we got out of bed and ran over there to see, because we hadn't been able to believe our ears.

The street was full of cops and flashing red lights. But what was more amazing, the street was full of hundreds of gays, and they were fighting the cops. For years "they had run,
let
themselves be shoved to the wall, submitted to harassments and arrest, because they felt in their hearts that it was their fate. But the night of the Stonewall, they made the instant visceral decision that they had had enough. They were throwing rocks and bottles, your "powderpuff pansies" were. They were fighting New York's Finest with their bare hands. They were daring the nightsticks to crunch on their bodies.

I watched with growing anger and sorrow. I didn't drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could understand how precious they were to us. I had always believed in law and order, supported the police. But those cops were busting me, busting my entire lifetime of anguish. They were riding over me with their big horses, and shoving me into vans handcuffed.

Then an amazing thing happened. I had a rock in my hand, and I threw it with all the deadly accuracy of a Marine throwing a grenade. Me, Harlan Brown, the pride of the Marines, I threw a rock at the cops. I punched a cop. I completely forgot that I might wind up in jail. I found myself against a wall, being beaten by two big cops. Then I was on the ground in the crush, being kicked and stomped. Somebody rode a horse over me.

Somehow, in the confusion, I managed to get away, bleeding and battered, with three cracked ribs and a broken nose and a few hoofprints on me.

Something cracked in my head that night, and in the heads of the gays. That night saw the coming out of the militant gay. After that they were fighting everybody in" sight, demanding human rights and fairer laws. I was not exactly ready for radical activism. But it had dawned on me that I was now a citizen of a nation where straight Americans did not permit the flag to fly.

So I stuck to my hustling. It might be felt that if I'd really wanted to spare myself the degradation, I could have. Surely I could have found honest work. Or I

could have done what some upright men do: starve first.

The answer was that I didn't see it as degradation. Venal, perhaps. But I was earning my living like everybody else. The Protestant work ethic never shone forth in my life so clearly. Hustling, I could earn far more money than I had at Penn State. My ex-wife never failed to get the biweekly check. I even paid my income taxes down to the last cent. Most prostitutes don't, but I wasn't looking for trouble with the IRS. My earnings were on record through my ex-wife, and I was still patriotic enough to think it was my duty to pay.

In fact, in my pain and anger, I was wallowing in my gayness a little, trying to get to the very bottom of it. There was the period when I liked parading around in macho paraphernalia. But sometimes I'd get a glimpse of myself in a mirror, in that black leather harness with gold studs and chains on it, and a cock-ring on, and that long whip in my hand, flailing hell out of some quivering delighted score, and something inside me would cry out: "This isn't me. I'm really a peaceful man." And I'd long for the simple eroticism of the jock strap.

One of the gay celebrities I met through Steve Goodnight was filmmaker Gil Harkness. His name isn't a household word to most Americans, but to the gays he is an Ingmar Bergman or a John Ford. He made one of the first gay art films,
The Double Cross,
that broke away from the la-de-da pornography of the little nine-to-midnight all-male theaters.
If
you ever catch this sadomasochistic classic (it sometimes makes a second run in uptown art theaters now), note the Roman officer who whips the sexy Jesus. That's me. My anonymity was preserved by a shiny helmet, and a pseudonym appeared in the credits.

Hustling being the job it is, I quickly learned to hoard my feelings for off-hours. There were several men —two my age, the rest younger—that I became fond of. It was with them that I was first able to explore the gentler and more passionate side of my sexuality. But I continued to live alone, and I never fell in love. In fact, I found myself always holding back, as if in wait-

ing for something better to come. None of them was that ghost of Chris.

I kept in shape by running eight miles a day round and round Washington Square or down to Battery Park. Sometimes I did it in the afternoon, after being up all night doing my work. I felt a lonely figure in my gray sweats, striding along past the students, the junkies, the hippies and the derelicts that thronged the square. Sometimes I looked up at the statue of George Washington on top of the triumphal arch and thought, "You bastard, if you only knew where duty, honor and country lead some people."

Sometimes, to treat myself, I took the subway uptown and ran in Central Park, where the struggling trees and grass passed for woods. Or I went all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, whose steep rocky wooded trails are the scene of so many metropolitan-area collegiate and open cross-country races. Always those trails were thronged with runners. I didn't go there often—I felt too alone there. How I longed, sometimes, for the freedom and innocence of those summer runs in the Poconos so long ago.

During those two years in Manhattan, I even managed to hang onto the shreds of my religion. Other gays felt the same outrage at being shut away from God for performing sexual acts which differed little from those that society sanctioned in holy matrimony. So the little gay churches were springing up in the metropolitan area, with a priest here and a minister there who were brave enough to care.

Every Sunday I went to the small Church of the Beloved Disciple on Fourteenth Street, and I prayed rather desperately. I did not pray to be miraculously changed back into a heterosexual. I prayed for knowledge to know myself and accept myself totally. Being gay, I now realized, was not merely a question of sex— it was a state of mind. Society had told me I was a disease, but I was now convinced that I had come to homosexuality by natural inclination. I prayed for someone to love, and I prayed for a less venal way to make my living. The Gospel of St. John was comforting—he loved the Lord and laid his head on His breast.

I could not believe that Jesus had less compassion for gays than for the thieves that He was so gentle with.

I also thought a lot about the hatred and intolerance that we were subjected to. I had lived on the butter-rich crest of America, on the star-spangled crest of the wave. I had been intolerant myself, though I had called it by other names, such as "tough-minded," "upright" and "clean-living." I had thought these were the qualities that made America great. For the first time in my life, I had been made a butt of these virtues. They had been poured over my bare body like acid.

Sometimes I wondered if that peculiar American hatred of homosexuality isn't a result of its being so rooted, so silent and unacknowledged, yet so pervasive, in our history. In school we are taught the Victorian proprieties of this history. Yet much of that early history is men alone with each other out on the reaches of the continent. Strong young men with all the urges, like my athletes horsing around in the shower rooms. Explorers, scouts, mountain men, trappers, Indian fighters, cowboys, prospectors, trailblazers. Men with their women left hundreds of miles behind, or men with no women at all.

They came to the frontier with that Western puritan-ism in their consciences, and there they were broken by sexual need, and forced to deny this puritanism and reach out to each other. Once need was satisfied, who knows how many male loves grew up there in the Kentucky wilderness, or out on the plains, or in the dry-baked desert canyons?

They were the vanguards of Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, yet a glance at their circumstances and you know that many of them were gay. Sometimes I think that we reached from sea to shining sea over these young macho bodies in their buckskins and corduroys and khakis. There was no gay ghetto then—nowhere to take shelter if you were forced to come out. In those days, the penalties for being found out were far more crushing than they are even now.

In their fear and helpless guilt, they denied what they had felt, repressed it, called it by other names, such as having a partner or a sidekick. When they got to town,

they wore out the whores, and they brought their docile perfumed wives out to the frontier as fast as they could. And we have gone on denying it to this day.

While I don't want to overdramatize the thought processes of that period in New York, the whole experience did radically change my view of American society. Steve Goodnight made me realize how uneducated I was, and I started reading a lot. For the first time in my life, I was reading something besides
Track & Field News
with enthusiasm.

Most of all, I came to hate violence. While I was being violent myself; it was only because I was angry. I wondered how I could ever have thirsted to go to Korea and kill gooks. I even started to wonder about Vietnam.

The thing that really depressed me the most was being away from track. When the big indoor meets came to Madison Square Garden, I yearned to go, but I didn't. My only touch with events was the sports magazines, and a few people I still saw. Bruce Cayton from the
Post
sometimes took me to lunch. Aldo Fran-coni was another, a Long Island coach and local AAU official who was a crusty liberal.

All anybody in the outside world knew about me was that I was a very respectable masseur, and sometimes appeared in men's fashion ads. Bruce and Aldo had their suspicions, but never mentioned them.

I didn't cry. Tears were not in my education.

If Joe Prescott had not come along with his incredible offer to go to Prescott, I suppose I would still be there in Manhattan. Sooner or later, my growing anger at the gay sufferings would have led me—unwillingly but inevitably—to violent gay activism. Possibly I would have ended up in jail. Who knows? In recent years a number of godfearing men have ended up in jail. Look at the Berrigans.

So when Joe got in touch with me, it was—I assumed—God's answer to my prayer.

Joe was busy building Prescott. He had lost his athletic director. He wanted a high-quality replacement, but had been unable to pry the kind of man he wanted away from the big schools. He had remembered my

case. Joe also loved to rescue people. He applied his Yankee thrift to people as well as money. "Waste people not, want people not," he used to say. His faculty was full of brilliant castoffs: ex-alcoholics, ex-convicts, ex-junkies, handicapped Vietnam veterans.