Leading Gay Rights Author Fights On

A burly police sergeant grasps Patricia Nell Warren’s skinny fingers with a beefy hand and shakes them vigorously. “Thanks for writing your book,” he says excitedly. “I read it when I was 21 and it changed my life.”

Smiling, Warren quickly extricates her battered hand. “Oh really?” she asks. “Tell me your story.”

The ritual--which, in this case, took place at a West Hollywood gay-pride event--has been repeated thousands of times since Warren wrote “The Front Runner,” her ground-breaking gay romance novel, 23 years ago.

Since then, “The Front Runner”--the story of the love between a world-class distance runner and his small-college coach who are “outed” on their way to the Montreal Olympics--has sold at an astonishing clip, more than 10 million copies in all. And there are times when it seems as if Warren has heard personally from everyone who’s read it.

“It was ‘The Front Runner,’ ” another man tells her, echoing a common admission, “that inspired me to come out.”

But not all the stories have happy endings. Not long ago Warren received a copy of a suicide note that a former Boston College football player wrote his lover just before shooting himself in the mouth with a hunting rifle.

“Do you remember last Christmas you gave me that book ‘The Front Runner?’ ” the handwritten note reads. “You told me it was your salvation, that it saved your life. . . . I wish it had worked its miracle on me.”

Now, at 61, Warren is hoping to work miracles on a new generation. Last month Wildcat Press, the small publishing company she founded three years ago, released “Billy’s Boy,” a second sequel to “The Front Runner.”

As she greeted an enthusiastic crowd at a book-launching party in West Hollywood, the controversy and frustration that have long dogged Warren seemed an unpleasant memory. In a long career, she’s produced seven novels, four books of poetry and two aborted attempts at filmmaking. Along the way she’s been married, divorced, embraced by the public, rejected by some of her peers and dismissed by the very publishing industry she once took by storm. But through it all, Warren’s work has continued to move emotions while helping push the fight for gay rights.

That’s a course she continues to follow with “Billy’s Boy,” a story told from the front lines of the battle for homosexual rights, the high schools. It follows a 13-year-old boy on a journey of personal discovery in which he deals not only with his own uncertain sexuality, but also with unforgiving peer pressures and prejudices.

It’s stories like those, not the personal tributes or residual checks, that now fuel her writing. They keep her awake at night, keep her pounding away at her keyboard. And when her Los Angeles house is still and no one’s around, these are the stories that cause her to roll up a sleeve and run her fingers over the 2-inch-long scar that crosses her left wrist, a reminder of her own failed suicide some 25 years ago.

“I did my attempt,” she admits. “You do that when you feel there is no other way out.”

*

Wind chimes dance and sing in the breeze. Dressed in a loose-fitting T-shirt, baggy pants and a bandanna tied tightly around her thinning gray hair after her daily gardening chores, Warren walks through the backyard of her simple Los Angeles home, just blocks from the black-glass skyscrapers of Wilshire Boulevard, and drops into a wrought-iron patio chair.

For all she’s written about love and compassion, and for all the passion and emotion she brings to her fictional love scenes, Warren can be cold and formal in person. She’s not much for hugging, even with close friends, and frequently seems uncomfortable in crowds.

“To me, there’s much more to . . . being gay than sex,” she says. “I’m one of those people who really see it as a perspective, a world view. There is a level and depth that’s possible to friendship on both sides of that line.”

For a time, Patricia Tarnawsky--Warren’s married name--was everything the daughter of moderately wealthy, moderately Republican Montana ranchers was supposed to be. A graduate of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, a top Catholic girls’ school, she married less than a week after her 21st birthday and quickly landed a job as a literary editor for Reader’s Digest. Even the name of the town in which she lived--Pleasantville, N.Y.--carried a sense of innocence.

But that world began to change in the late ‘60s. The Vietnam War was causing ruptures in American society and the staff of Reader’s Digest was not immune. Tarnawsky soon sided with a small group that tried to push the magazine to take a critical look at the war. About the same time, she began jogging with friends at lunchtime to lose weight.

“There was something about running that really helped me to connect with myself for the first time and get stronger as a person. And have more courage,” Warren says. And she needed that courage to deal with both a 16-year marriage that was unraveling and her homosexuality, which she could no longer hide.

“I gave it a helluva try. I really did,” she says of her marriage to George O. Tarnawsky, an electrical engineer and writer. The same could be said of her attempts to suppress her homosexuality. “I had known for a long time, but I was trying to fight it. I had gotten married to try to deny it. I felt like I was at the edge of the world, like in those ancient maps with the monsters and all.”

So close to the edge, in fact, she almost fell off. Her suicide attempt, which landed her, covered in blood, in an emergency room, proved to be the last straw for her marriage. As the physical wounds began to heal but the mental ones continued to fester, Warren started planning her escape. The key to that plan was “The Front Runner.”

“This book was going to be the crossing of the divide,” she says.

Writing at her Reader’s Digest desk during breaks and after hours, she completed a first draft in two months. Her publisher, William Morrow, had the manuscript less than a week before offering $7,500 for it, money that allowed Warren to leave her husband and file for divorce. The book quickly made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Within months, Paul Newman optioned it; the script, however, bore little resemblance to the book and Newman dropped the project. The movie rights passed through many hands without a frame of film being shot. Last month, Warren finally regained the film rights following a protracted court battle.

“The Front Runner” has been published in eight languages, becoming a hit in Japan, Australia and much of Western Europe, and nearly 100 gay running clubs have been founded under the Front Runners rubric, including chapters in India and South Africa.

The book’s warm reception--the New York Times called it “the most moving, monumental love story ever written about gay life”--fueled a flurry of activity for Warren, who quickly emerged as an important voice in the flourishing gay literature explosion.

A year after “The Front Runner” appeared, Morrow published “The Fancy Dancer,” about homosexuality among the clergy. Then in 1978, she finished “The Beauty Queen,” a novel about a family drama centered around the emergence of the religious right. Both books received warm receptions and favorable reviews in the gay press but were largely ignored in the mainstream.

Morrow quickly commissioned two other books, but Warren struggled with both before eventually setting them--and everything else--aside to embark on a long project that culminated with “One Is the Sun,” a 554-page paperback whose creation taught her as much about the publishing trade as it did about herself.

“ ‘One Is the Sun’ was an important book in my personal growth,” says Warren, who moved west to research the work. “I had some spiritual and women’s questions that were still not handled after coming out as a gay person.”

But for all the tears that went into writing the book, which tells the real-life saga of Earth Thunder, a woman healer who stood against bias on the Montana frontier in the 1850s, getting the story into bookstores was a problem. Warren says she had “huge fights” with Random House/Ballantine, her new publisher, over everything from editing and the cover design to promotion.

When the book finally came off the press, Warren arranged for her own publicity tour, selling about 15,000 copies of the book on her own. Slightly bitter but unbowed, Warren was back in New York four years later, shopping the manuscript for “Harlan’s Race,” the sequel to “The Front Runner.” That book follows Harlan Brown, coach of the ill-fated front-runner Billy Sive, into the ‘80s as he struggles to deal both with the loss of his lover and the looming AIDS crisis.

But again Warren clashed with editors, who panned the book as being “too dark.” For a writer who had sold her first major novel in a week, having to defend the work proved frustrating. So she used money from her mother’s trust to found Wildcat Press and publish the book herself. Her confidence was quickly rewarded when the novel landed on the Lambda Book Report bestseller list, where it stayed for a year. Nearly 50,000 copies have been printed.

*

Warren has quickly sold out the first press run of “Billy’s Boy,” all 5,000 copies. So, once again, the fundamental question arises: Why, though her work has a long history of popular success, has she never been accorded the critical respect she believes she deserves?

“It’s a paradox,” says Tyler St. Mark, a writer and business partner of Warren. “Patricia’s books brought countless hundreds of thousands of men and women out of the closet. And yet her popularity [among the gay literati] is in the closet. They read her, they just don’t want to admit it publicly.”

Although her writing is far from exceptional--the dialogue is cliched, characters are frequently one-dimensional and the various subplots are often strained--the impact her books have had would seem to overshadow their artistic shortcomings. Indeed, there are any number of books--Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” or “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, say--whose social impact was far more profound than their literary merit.

Warren’s critics in gay literary circles don’t so much attack her as ignore her. Her work, for example, appears in few gay anthologies. And those who do speak rarely do so on the record, yet their complaints are well-known.

Many lesbians, for example, say “The Front Runner” and its sequel, “Harlan’s Race,” bash females.

“My impression of Warren is that she is not a lesbian and she is definitely not a feminist,” says one critic who, typically, asked to remain unnamed.

Some gay men take her to task for writing a male love story, a genre they feel is best left to them. But Warren does have her defenders.

“There’s no question that her books are important,” says Robert Dawidoff, a professor of history at Claremont Graduate University. “Ellen [DeGeneres] has a battle to fight and that’s a battle that Patricia Nell Warren started because she wrote a book that moved people, that centered on gay and lesbian experience and characters and did not buy into the cultural stereotype that gay lives are doomed.

“She’s really in the tradition of . . . female novelists [with] a certain kind of social conscious but [an] emotionally satisfying kind of fiction. At some level, it’s hard to think of a book that has done that particular kind of . . . important thing.”

Dawidoff suggests the slighting of Warren may stem from the cliquishness of gay intellectuals and the sectarian nature of the gay movement in general. “She does not make people feel smart or literary,” he says. “She makes people feel like everybody else. But you have to ask, ‘Who said that the literary is good and the popular is bad?’ You have to ask whether [her critics] would refuse her royalties.”

Despite the rejections, her popularity has never been questioned. Author and activist David Mixner shared the podium with her at a gay-pride celebration in St. Louis last summer and said “the reception that she got was extraordinary. Certainly no one in that audience had any doubt about what she has done for the liberation of the gay and lesbian community.”

Lately Warren has set about trying to liberate the most at-risk segment of the gay and lesbian community: its youth. In addition to her writing, she’s also working on youth-related issues as an appointed, unpaid member of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Gay and Lesbian Education Commission. She has also raised tens of thousands of dollars for district-sponsored events, such as the annual Models of Pride gay/lesbian youth conference at Occidental College.

Although gays have made tremendous progress toward achieving equal rights since “The Front Runner” first appeared, the situation in many schools is as dangerous as it’s ever been,” Warren says.

“I’m concerned that not enough people in the [gay] community are really committed to being politically active,” she says. “And by that I mean just simple things, like turning out to vote. Right here in Los Angeles, I get alarmed by the apathy.

“These kids are the future of the community. So we need to give it that attention. We need to not rest on our laurels right now.”