Author Interviews/Profiles › Patricia Nell Warren

In 1974, Patricia Nell Warren made her fiction debut with The Frontrunner. The book raced to international acclaim. With over ten million copies in print in seven languages, the story of gay coach Harlan Brown and Olympic runner Billy Sive has become a publishing legend. It's the rare gay-themed book that sold well to both gay and straight readers.

In a telephone interview from her Los Angeles home in conjunction with the new Triangle Classics edition of The Frontrunner, Warren shed new light on her landmark work and its two sequels (Harlan's Race and Billy's Boy), offering some surprising perspectives on on what's made The Frontrunner so important to both herself and her readers over time.

Jim Gladstone: Over a quarter century after The Frontrunner's original publication, readers are still amazed that a breakthrough debut novel about gay men was written by a woman. So often, first novels draw on autobiographical material. What was the genesis of The Frontrunner?

Patricia Nell Warren: Well, there are many aspects to the story, and the parts that have to do with running are very much drawn from my own life. It's very much a book about people caught up in the politics of amateur athletics as well as a book about gay men.

I was one of the first female marathon runners. In the late 1960s, there was a lot of controversy in the Amateur Athletic Union about women in track. The AAU had a rule that, while men could compete for distances up to 50 miles, women's events were not allowed to be longer than 2.5 miles. Apparently they thought we would just keel over dead if we ran distances like the men did. Part of why I wrote the character of Harlan Brown as a man is that there just weren't any female track coaches at the time.

So, the struggles faced by the gay male athletes in The Frontrunner echo some of the challenges you were facing as a woman athlete?

Oh yes, including the protests at sporting events. In1969, just before Stonewall, I was one of 12 women to crash the Boston Marathon. We just jumped into the race without numbers on and ran. And six of us finished, despite the fact that women weren't officially allowed to even train for marathons. Ultimately, like gay rights—in sports and in society as a whole—the women's issue grew from individual demonstrations into a broader political movement. We ultimately won our rights in the AAU by pointing out that the organization was in violation of Title 7 when it discriminated against women; there was government money at stake for the organizations that ran the competitions.

It must be incredibly hard to be an effective competitor in an environment like that. In the book, Billy is overjoyed when, in the midst of his Olympics controversy, television interviewer Dick Cavett only asks him questions about running.

Billy is very bent on on keeping his focus on the Olympic games in that moment. He's not going to be a sexual being there, he's going to be an athlete. It's hard enough to carry one torch into the Olympics, let alone two. He is adamant about forcing people to speak of him as an athlete. An athlete—any person, really—has the right to focus on his goals and not be thrown off by what other people might want him to be at any moment.

That's interesting. But gay athletes—like Billy—can be great role models for gay youth, and they can help redefine public perception of all gay people. How do you feel about real-life athletes who refuse to come out of the closet?

Look, in politics, when a gay official is supporting anti-gay legislation, that person is asking to be outed. But otherwise, I think outing is really cheating people. It's denying them a chance to forge their own character. It's blunting their opportunity to emerge and become brave on their own terms and in their own time. I was in a heterosexual marriage for years before I was able to come out, and before I was able to write The Frontrunner.

I didn't decide to come out until I was 37-years-old. I probably would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn't made that decision; I probably would have self-destructed. But as hard as that decision was, it was essential to my growth as a person: I can't imagine being denied the opportunity to find my own strength.

The Frontrunner has certainly exhibited a stunning strength of its own. The book seems to have 'come out' at precisely the right time. Do you have a theory about why it caught fire the way it did and became a watershed gay-themed bestseller?

At the time I wrote the book, the idea of the macho gay guy was really new. In the 60s, in openly gay social circles, everybody was really camping it up. The public idea of a gay man in American society was somebody who was very androgynous, very fey. So the idea of a gnarly track coach with a Marine background was very new to most of the public. Part of the interest in the book at the time was that it touched on this whole new wave of imagery for gay men.

Harlan Brown was a really different kind of gay character. He was definitely not interested to Judy Garland records. In fact, in the first sequel, Harlan's Race, you see him listening to B.B. King. He's definitely the sort of guy who's more into blues, jazz, maybe country. Disco music? Forget about it. I've heard over the years from many athletes and military guys who really latched onto the book for that reason, it showed a way of being gay that people had not necessarily ever seen before.

Do you think that's why the book broke out and reached a straight audience, too?

That's a part of it. I've always had a crossover readership and what makes them comfortable with my books—what I hear from them—is that the sticking point with gay fiction is the sex. Some straight people just can't get past descriptions of gay sex at all, and others don't mind the sex at all, but there are a lot of people who said to me: "I was ok with the sex, because you also described their feelings."

One of the things I noticed about so many of the books about gay men in the 70s was that the erotic side was there, but not the emotions. The emotions that are common among all kinds of people. There are lots of gay books that to straight people are like a visit to another planet. Picking up a book that's said to be 'a gay book' is like standing outside a very scary doorway for lots of straight people. But if you give them feelings they can connect to, you can sometimes bring them through the door.

I think even gay people who first read The Frontrunner10,or 20, or 25 years ago might be surprised at what they find on rereading it now. Some of the ideas in the book feel extremely au courant.

Oh, I think that's certainly true, including another thing that seemed to help straight readers appreciate the book back when it came out: Harlan is a family man. He's really in a lot of pain because his sons are with his ex-wife and he can't see them. And, as a counterpoint, you see the affection between Billy and his father, who is a proud gay activist lawyer. And, of course, there's also Betsy, who has a child through artificial insemination in the book

Ironically, there were plenty of gay readers at the time who didn't like these aspects of the novel at all. I remember gay men and lesbians coming up to me at the time and saying "Ms. Warren, I really loved the book, except for parts about the families." To lots of people at the time, part of being gay was not having to think about being attached to a family. Of course, things are very different now.

It seems so odd that public perception of The Frontrunner seems to focus almost entirely on the romantic relationship between Billy and Harlan, to the exclusion of these other important themes.

Ah yes. Strange things happen in people's minds. You know, people always ask why I write about men instead of women. Well, page-for-page, in all of my work, I think I've written at least as much about women.

But you know, this is part of the magic of books. It's something I'm very much ok with. You see one thing in book, someone else finds something else. And it can change over time, too. But my feeling is that every time a reader is willing to open the book, to step through the door into the world a writer made, they get to see whatever they want in that world. It doesn't bother me at all.

But as an author, isn't there something particular you want readers to find in each of your books?

For me, its all about telling a story, not about illustrating an abstract concept. One of the things that comes up alot when I meet people who don't know many writers is that they seem to think that authors and editors sit down and think about writing a book to reach a specific audience. Well the character of Harlan Brown just swam into my head and I wanted to tell his story. I wanted to find out exactly what his story was.

At the time, I was working at Reader's Digest and there was a big boom in celebrity biographies, so I was reading alot of them for work. And that's the way I wanted The Frontrunner to be, just Harlan, putting the story of his life down on paper. Once I started, I did have some sense that I was on the edge of something very new and potentially shocking for a lot of people, but it started with the story itself.

Oh, I knew it immediately. As soon as the first book was finished, especially with the baby being born. But what happened is very interesting. I knew that I wanted to write the book that picked up on the life of Harland and that little boy when he was close to the same age as Billy in The Frontrunner. In the first book, Billy's son William is born in 1977, so the sequel would need to be set in the early 1990s. I had a contract with William Morrow, but after working on the book for quite some time, I went to my editor and told him that it just wasn't working. I was feeling extremely awkward about trying to predict what the world would be like two decades into the future. When I finally was ready to sit down and write Billy's Boy in 1990, I realized that the world had changed so much that there needed to be another book in between them.

And so, an accidental trilogy was born?

Yes, Harlan's Race ended up being written and published before Billy's Boy, which ultimately came out in 1997, nearly 20 years after I first thought it would. One benefit of having that second book in the interim is that it gave Harlan a chance to mature as a human being. As much of a hero as he is in The Frontrunner, there are alot of things he says about women, and about gay men in the first book that, while, understandable for their time, are really pretty crass.

He does make a few sweeping comments like "To the gay, looking athletic is as important as being well-hung". That felt pretty dated to me when I recently reread The Frontrunner.

Well, yes. But you know, that's the character speaking, not me. And it's the early 1970s. The macho gay thing was very new to him. Over time, and over the next book, I think you can see Harlan's attitudes and his values really evolve. Part of that has to do with how Betsy's character becomes more prominent in the second book. She's not going to take that shit from anybody!

You know, this issue of things feeling 'dated' has been part of the problem in getting a film of The Frontrunner made, too.

How so?

It's been frustrating. There have been options on the book for 20 years, and Paul Newman was set to direct at one point. But for the past 15 years there's been lots of talk about how difficult the story would be to 'update'. Movie people have wondered how we could work AIDS into the story, how we could deal with public attitudes being different today.

But I don't want the story to be 'updated'! To listen to people in the movie business—gay people in particular—you wouldn't think its important to have a past. It seems like they want to make everything be up-to-the-minute like Queer As Folk. I work alot with young gay people, and they really have no idea about gay history. Our culture just bombards them with images of the present. But you can't figure out where you're going if you don't know where you come from.

Well, now I've successfully fought to get the film rights back; I'm involved in producing the film independently. And I'm sticking to my guns. I want The Frontrunner to get the Oliver Stone-type treatment; to capture the feeling of the times it was set in. I think knowing about our history is really important to the sanity of our culture.