The Front Runner

Synopsis

Harlan Brown is the athletic director at the fictitious Prescott College, a progressive, experiential, private liberal arts college in New York. A closeted ex-marine, Harlan has left a prestigious coaching position at Pennsylvania State University following false accusations of sexual misconduct from a male student. Fearing exposure, Harlan has buried himself at the obscure college, and given up his dream of coaching Olympic athletes.

As the novel opens in 1974, three star runners — Vince Matti, Jacques LaFont, and Billy Sive — have been expelled from the elite track program at the University of Oregon because they are gay, and wish to transfer to Prescott to train with Brown. Though wary after his experience at Penn State, Harlan agrees to train the athletes, but quickly finds himself falling in love with Billy. Though they manage to suppress their attraction for a few anguished months, the two soon become lovers. When the runners graduate and take teaching positions at Prescott, Billy and Harlan move in together, and later wed in a commitment ceremony.

Throughout the novel, Harlan’s past is revealed in the form of flashbacks. Though attracted only to men all of his life, Harlan marries a girl he impregnated while in college, living a wholly straight life with only occasional furtive, traumatic excursions into the gay underground of pre-Stonewall New York City. After the incident at Penn State, his marriage ends and he is unable to find employment as a coach, and ultimately begins work as a high-priced hustler in Greenwich Village. When Joe Prescott, the founder and president of Prescott College, offers Harlan a position as the college’s athletic director, he enthusiastically accepts. Returning to the closet, Harlan devotes himself entirely to coaching.

Harlan’s coming out, and Harlan and Billy’s coming out as a couple, proves difficult in the intensely homophobic world of amateur sports. Overcoming practically insurmountable opposition and hostility, Billy is able to qualify to race in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. He wins the gold medal in the 10,000 meter race, and is within meters of winning the 5000 meter race, when he is shot and killed by an anti-gay radical.

Though devastated by Billy’s death, Harlan reflects that he spent his entire life wishing that he could one day let himself love someone openly, and was able to find happiness, however briefly, with Billy. Using samples he and Billy had stored in a sperm bank, Billy’s close lesbian friend Betsy Heden bears Billy’s child, who she and Harlan raise together.

In an epilogue set in 1978, Harlan has returned to compete in amateur sports as an athlete, competing in and winning the Amateur Athletic Union masters championship at Madison Square Garden.

Reception

The Front Runner was a critical and commercial success upon its release, becoming the first book of contemporary gay fiction to reach the New York Times Best Seller List. In their review, The New York Times called the novel "the most moving, monumental love story ever written about gay life." To date, The Front Runner has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into at least nine languages, including Japanese, German, French, Danish, Swedish Dutch, and Italian; it was the best-selling gay novel published in Spain, and the first gay novel ever published in Latvia.

Film adaptation

Soon after its publication, The Front Runner became a subject of interest for adaptation as a motion picture. The subsequent decades saw a series of producers and directors involved in adapting the film; most notably Paul Newman, as well as Frank Perry, Arthur Allan Seidelman, and Jeremy Larner. None of these efforts resulted in a motion picture.

In 2002, Patricia Nell Warren recovered film rights to the novel, and announced plans to produce a film with her business partner Tyler St. Mark. Warren and St. Mark’s partnership was dissolved in 2013, and full ownership of rights transferred solely to Warren.

Sequels

Harlan’s Race, a direct sequel to The Front Runner, was released in 1994, followed by Billy’s Boy in 1997. In 2013, Warren stated that she was writing a fourth and final novel in the series.

International Frontrunners

The Front Runner inspired the creation of an LGBT running club in San Francisco soon after its publication in 1974. The organization quickly grew to include approximately 100 affiliated clubs throughout the world.