Patricia Nell Warren

Permissions

Thanks go to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California for making available the Patricia Nell Warren Papers, Coll2013-071, and to the Tom of Finland Foundation for the illustrations by Touko Laaksonen. A heavily revised version of my chapter “Patricia Nell Warren” in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies is republished with permission. I am also grateful to Ericka Russell and Mariah A. Knowles for letting me use excerpts from their term papers. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Introduction: The Silence of Fame

“Most gay people who came out during the 70’s and 80’s can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first read this remarkable story [The Front Runner]. Many of them rushed out to purchase running shoes and tank tops, inspired by the book’s athletic theme.”

Tyler St. Mark, Wildcat Press website¹

Several years ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I knew Patricia Nell Warren, to which he replied: “I always thought she was mythic.” And in some ways she is. Virtually nothing has been published on her. In my research, I came across five or six scholarly articles: Mateusz Świetlicki and Justyna Mętrak’s “Growing Up and Memory of the Margins in Patricia Nell Warren’s (Patricia Kilina’s) Billy’s Boy”; Mętrak’s “‘We Make Our Own Familia’—The Transfer of Memory in Patricia Nell Warren’s Billy’s Boy (1997)”; Wendy Weber’s “Queering the Word: Patricia Nell Warren’s Adaptation of Christian Sacraments in The Fancy Dancer”; Trudy Steuernagel’s “Contemporary Homosexual Fiction and the Gay Rights Movement,” which is only half about Warren; Brian Distelberg’s “Mainstream Fiction, Gay Reviewers, and Gay Male Cultural Politics in the 1970s,” which ranges widely beyond Warren; and a remarkable chapter in Maria Rewakowicz’ Literature, Exile, Alterity, from which I will quote. Of course, there are short mentions in gay and lesbian encyclopedias, Patricia’s website (now taken down), and various snippets of information on the web. However, the popular press and academia have remained almost silent on her. Warren has a few academic articles on her CV, such as the ones in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, for which academics duly pointed out her mistakes: “Patricia Nell Warren is a wonderful novelist but her attempt at history leaves much to be desired” (response to “Of Freemasons, Kings, and Constitutions”). One reason may be a confusion of genres. Over and over again, readers react to her fiction as if it were non-fiction. They wrote to her about wanting to “meet” her characters! Another one is that she was not high-minded or experimental, which, needless to say, is one aspect that makes her so popular. Then we have a lesbian writing primarily about gay men, a romantic novelist, a writer without Instagram or Twitter …. Who was this mythic woman?

Patricia Nell Warren wrote nine novels (her first one under the pen name Patricia Kilina), two works of non-fiction, and a scholarly translation of Ukrainian epic poetry. She also composed poetry in Ukrainian (little of which is currently available in English) and contributed regularly to a number of online and print gay and straight magazines (although several are defunct now). In her oeuvre, Warren engages with Ukrainian pride, lesbian desire, her Western upbringing, homosexual athletes, Catholic celibacy, homophobic politics by religious conservatives, Mother Earth, environmental destruction, the threat to Native American heritage, a gay bullfighter in fascist Spain, contemporary issues, and much more.

Her most famous work and New York Times bestseller, The Front Runner (1974), has sold millions of copies worldwide, has been translated into several European and Asian languages, and is slated to become a major motion picture (a project that dates all the way back to 1975, when Paul Newman wanted to make his directing debut with The Front Runner). Outsports.com, the premier website for queer athletes, named the publication of the book the fourth most important moment in its list of 100 Greatest Moments in Gay Sports History (number 1 being Dave Kopay’s coming out, followed by Martina Navratilova’s coming out in 1981 and Billie Jean King’s outing, also in 1981). Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the book in 2004, Warren estimated that she had reached approximately thirty million readers.

Critics, however, have been less kind. If we find any references to The Front Runner, they are non-committal (an acknowledgment that there is such a text, usually in a list of other examples, often in a footnote or endnote) or devastating, such as in one of the earliest books on gay literature, Stephen Adams’ The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction (1980). Despite his seemingly sympathetic title, The Homosexual as Hero, Adams trashes The Front Runner: “Although the subsequent ‘love story’ of Billy and his coach at a small New York college dramatises the sexual politics of being openly and proudly homosexual in that bastion of virility, the sporting world, its radical message is trivialised by mawkish sentimentality, a clichéd, inept style, and a preposterous plot” (27). But what is so preposterous about the plot? That a gay runner wins Olympic gold, that he is killed for his sexual orientation, that two men negotiate a stable relationship in the 1970s? At least Adams’ verdict is comprehensible, which cannot be said for Roger Austen’s Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (1977): “The Front Runner is at heart jock lib, exuding a scent of Absorbine, Jr., and retaining a sense of authenticity as long as the subject is track, but turning into an idealized love story when she sends coach and miler out into the greenwood” (216). Aside from the fact that Billy is not a miler, what does Austen mean by (the scent of) a muscle pain reliever? Later, unlike thousands of readers, he dismisses Warren’s novels from the 1970s as “ersatz works” (222). More balanced, James Levin’s The Gay Novel in America (1991) finds Warren’s twin themes of sport and politics insightful, while Billy and Harlan’s relationship seems too tightly modeled on Christian, monogamous marriage. (Unfortunately, The Fancy Dancer, for Levin, “is just silly romanticism,” while The Beauty Queen has “severe limitations”; 278 and 287.)

Robert Lewis, in a courageous 1978 article “Emotional Intimacy Among Men,” focuses on the (tragic) ending, completely overlooking the incredible emotional intimacy between Billy and Harlan (and lots of other gay characters). While it may be true that in the 1970s, “men come close but do not find permission to give each other affection” (114), Billy and Harlan give each other affection whether permission is granted or not. Byrne Fone, in an otherwise convenient survey of gay literature (1995), laments the normalization of Warren’s “heterosexualized homosexuals” (275). Finally, and this sums up my point well, when in 1999 the Publishing Triangle compiled a list of The 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels, selected by judges including Dorothy Allison, David Bergman, Christopher Bram, Michael Bronski, Samuel Delany, Lillian Faderman, Anthony Heilbut, M. E. Kerr, Jenifer Levin, John Loughery, Jaime Manrique, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith, The Front Runner failed to make the list (the top three were Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, and Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet). After a public outcry (“How can anyone take an organization seriously that would so ignore this incredible, monumental novel?” “Oh my God! Have you lost your collective minds?” “Yikes! What a list!” “Please expand your list to 101,” with a minority comment of “I say good for you. Someone’s finally omitted this title from a ‘best of’ list—and rightly so. I found it poorly written and tedious to read”), a “visitor list” was added, with The Front Runner on top.²