A movie about his life starred Jared Leto, who one critic suggested is “almost too pretty an actor to play the masculine, cocky runner.” He died tragically in a car accident when he was 24. Prefontaine, who was straight, helped inspire the “running boom” of the 1970s. In 2011, Warren told The Bay Area Reporter that Sive was “inspired in part by distance runner Steve Prefontaine, as well as a few closeted runners that I got to know while being involved in open distance running myself.” “The book touched hearts,” says Zanfardino. The book was a glimpse into the lives of two men who only wanted to love each other and do sports.

Afterwards, he confessed that he never realized how people like him can hurt people.

Shortly before her death, Warren received an email from a straight woman who told her homophobic husband to read the book from beginning to end. In fact, Zanfardino tells the Los Angeles Blade, Warren’s wish came true. I wanted to confront readers with the inner reality of such a man because I know they exist.” Harlan is a crusty gay ex-Marine, a drill-sergeant kind of guy. “When the book was written, as well as today, stereotypes of gay males as limp-wristed liberals is embedded in people’s minds. “One big reason why I wanted to paint the story so broadly, yet so personally, was that I hoped non-gay people would read the book as well as gay people,” Warren wrote. “When Harlan finds himself falling secretly in love with Billy Sive, the conflict only intensifies and almost drives him mad, until he is finally “human” enough to give in and let himself be in love.”Īfter Billy is murdered in a hate crime on live TV, how can Harlan Brown go on? What becomes of him? He knows he’s gay and attracted to men, but he refuses to let himself feel, to let himself be that person he knows he is, because of his repressive Bible-taught family upbringing and military background,” Warren wrote for. “he book’s prose had to be the voice of a conservative ex-Marine veteran who is at war with himself.

When he and gay distance runner Billy Sive, 22, fall in love at a small New England college, the world of sports rears up against Sive representing the US in the Olympic, where he meets with a horrific end. The Front Runner is really about how closeted, masculine, conservative Vietnam Marine veteran Harlan Brown, 39, gave up his own dream of running in the Olympics, of coaching prospective Olympic athletes at a prestigious college, of quelling his own humanity out of fear of being exposed as gay. But while it is often tagged as a “gay love story of Coach Harlan Brown and his Olympic runner Billy Sive” in the 1970s, as publisher William Morrow first framed it, Warren intended it to be broader in scope.

The front runner gay book