"Front Runner" of My Life Leading to Self-Discovery, Love and Activism

I was born in another time. The end of the boomer generation, 1964.

My upbringing was unspectacular in rural Denmark, I attended a regular public school.

Towards the end of elementary school, I had a wonderful sports teacher who was as handsome as a god and red-haired. He noticed me and my glances and calmly talked to me about how it was perfectly fine to find men attractive. He played a part in helping me start to find myself in the chaos of hormones and puberty that I was going through.

After graduating, I moved out and went on to study in a larger city.

Soon after, I experienced my first adventures in love and practicing relationships.

I also joined a book club that had excellent offers for students. Once a month, we received a letter showcasing the month's offer. I bought several books and read them eagerly, but it still felt like something was missing in what I was reading.

The connection to my own situation was never clear, and I never found a role model or a way to draw parallels to my life.

That changed in 1985. The month's offer was "The Front Runner," a novel based on real characters written by Patricia Nell-Warren. "The book is a suspense novel, a sports novel, and a love story – about love between men," read the introduction from the book club.

My heart stopped for a moment.

I loved suspense novels, I cared about my own sports, and I sought knowledge about how other men navigated loving men in a heterosexually dominated world.

I had to own the book.

When I hold the book in my hands today, I can see my own little ex-libris in the book's cover. I always drew the same mark, noting my ownership with my name, the year and month I bought it, and the price.

Back then, it was December, my birthday month, when I was about to turn 21. I splurged on my tight student budget and spent 48 kroner on this book.

The excitement was palpable, and the days were long until the package finally arrived in the mail.

I still remember receiving it and starting to read. I couldn’t stop; I was instantly captivated from the start.

It was almost like reading about my own life.

Granted, I wasn’t at the top level in sports, nor did I live in the U.S. and attend a university where sports were supported, as the book described. But the emotions that the young runner Billy and the coach Harlan quickly developed for each other and their attempts to keep things secret hit me deeply. I devoured it all.

I was almost Billy. The intelligent, sporty guy who just wanted to be a whole person.

That the story was spiced up with a desire to have a child, and that Billy managed to find a woman willing to give birth to his child, reassured me even more that life is full of possibilities, and patterns are meant to be broken. Two guys could easily be parents to a child. It also went on my own life’s wish list. However, it later turned out that it never happened, even though I tried.

Billy and Harlan succeeded in their lives. Billy was selected for the Olympics and ran record-breaking races. Everything seemed to be working out despite various obstacles. Until the unthinkable happened – Billy was killed in the middle of a race.

I still remember my panic. How could anyone think to harm an athlete in the midst of a grand performance? Back then, it was known that gay men could get beaten up by stupid macho heterosexuals who found it amusing and practically free to go out and find some gay men to beat up. The authorities didn’t really take the complaints seriously – "they brought it on themselves" was the prevailing attitude, which made it all the more disgusting.

I devoured the rest of the book. It ends beautifully, with Harlan being proud of Billy’s child and being a good father to the boy.

But it moved something inside me. I had to take the book's message with me for the rest of my life.

I started by becoming active in the local chapter of "The 1948 Association." It was an organization fighting for gay and lesbian rights, showing that we were just ordinary people with perhaps a bit more colorful lives than most.

I even ended up as chairman of the local chapter for a period. We reached out to ordinary people, who realized that we weren’t dangerous, and that we deserved to live normal lives in Denmark. The authorities gradually took hate crimes more seriously.

In 1989, Denmark finally passed a law allowing same-sex couples to marry on an equal footing with heterosexuals.

At that point, I felt that many of my goals had been achieved, and that I had done my part for the cause, so I stepped back. Now I had to concentrate on my education and hopefully find the person with whom I could spend my life, just like Billy and Harlan in the novel.

Sometimes I still take the book out and read a section or the entire thing again. The cover clearly shows that it has been well-used, stained, and yellowed. I will never part with the book that changed my life.