The Front Runner

around his shoulders. Rapt and terrified, I watched as he raised his body a little and pushed his slacks down to his knees. The long, rose-dark cock was
    swelling between his parted thighs, that thing that society most severely forbade me, and that I wanted most. I had my face buried in his hot neck, running my hand up and down his bare thighs, and he was tenderly rubbing my fly, then unzipping it.
    Finally I had the courage to touch his genitals, and he lifted his hips and pressed them into my hand. He groaned, a barely audible sound that seemed to come up from his pelvis, and slid his hand in along my bare flank. Never till that moment did I realize how many nerve endings there were in that sensitive skin. My own eyes closed, my own mouth opened, and I was ready to give all my hoarded passion and tenderness to this stranger, as he was willing to give it to me.
    About half an hour later, I was in the grimy little lavatory in the theater basement, washing myself and shaking violently. When I went back upstairs, I glanced back in the theater. He was still lying in his seat with his head hanging back, shirt open, exactly as I'd left him. Probably his pants were still down around his ankles. In the light from the screen, a few splashes of my semen glistened on his face.
    I fled out of the theater, blinking in the cruel daylight, and walked shakily down the street. Coming to a bench, I sank down on it. I couldn't stop shaking, and my skin was burning under my clothes. I had hoped for some excitement from the first go at oral sex with a male. What I had not expected was to be so totally and agreeably shattered. For the first time in my life, another human being had made me lose control of myself —and all in silence, without a word spoken. I had always thought of the male's erotic sensations being centered at the groin. But I could still feel the ghosts of his hands and his mouth on my body, touching me about the neck, the nipples, the sides, the flanks, the buttocks —as much of me as he could reach in the seat.
    I looked back at the Loews-Sheridan entrance for a while. He didn't come out. I wanted to go back in there and find out his name and address. But I didn't dare. Like a Spy, I could leave no traces. There would be no seeing him again. But I knew I would never forget him as long as I lived.
    Finally I got up and walked shakily to the subway station at Sheridan Square and Christopher Street. My objective attained, I might as well go back uptown to the Port Authority and catch the next bus south.
    On the bus, roaring along the parkway, I sat motionless in my regular clothes, with sunglasses still on, still shattered. But there was also a gloating manic elation at having tasted what my nature had craved so long. I was surprised to find that I did not feel in the least guilty and soiled. I was sure I was not insane. It might be possible to feel good about being gay—as long as I could keep it hidden from the rest of the world.
    But back at Villanova, amid the cold reality of Ace bandages and stopwatches, my elation vanished. If it could be so good with a pickup, then it must be even better with a man you loved. Yet my own peculiar sexual logic told me that I could love only an athlete. And that was impossible.
    I sneaked off to New York a few more times, and it became obvious that I'd had dumb luck at the Loews-Sheridan. Not until years later did I find anyone quite so satisfying as the kid in the red leather jacket. Maybe it was because of the amyl nitrite, and its being the first time.
    I had a horror of the screaming queens and the TV's (transvestites). Nothing that smelled of women was acceptable. What I wanted was an athletic-looking guy in his late teens or early twenties. And there were plenty of them. If the athlete is at the heart of the straight man's vision, it is at the heart of the gay vision also. For the gay, looking athletic is as important as being well hung.
    The sad thing was, as I usually found when I got their clothes off, that so few of my bed partners were real athletes. You know at a glance when somebody has been working hard: the fined-down look, the big veins. Most of my lovers were lean, but limp—as much a facade as my tough Marine act. So there I was, searching pathetically for the image of my Villanova milers, and of Chris, in the bodies of those soft kids. I'd end up getting it over with fast. Wham, bam, pay them if they were hustlers, back on the street in twenty
    minutes, catch the