Patricia Nell Warren, author of ‘The Front Runner,’ dies at 82.

She was great in The Fountainhead.

Very sorry to hear it. And also sorry to see it get so little attention. I know it's fashionable to mock The Front Runner now, but it's an important book, and was meaningful to many people.

I briefly corresponded with Warren in the early aughts in a business capacity, and she was truly a gracious and kind person.

I'm surprised she was still alive.

She was still trying to get a movie made even a few years ago.

Why are we shunning The Advocate?

I don’t get that it’s fashionable to mock TFR nowadays R2 - thought instead it had been pretty much forgotten about -

But in its time it was a huge cultural event - the first gay novel to havevhuge mainstream success - ten million sold to date - and translated into lots of languages.

It has to have been a part of the huge shift of change in attitudes to gay people in that era. So much changed - and it was one of the things that helped the change along. And don’t forget her other books too!

Little things helped give the population at large a clue that being GLBT wasn’t as uncommon or as deviant as formerly thought. Like that one episode of Mary Tyler Moore where Chloris Leachman’s character has a brother who turns out to be gay. Billy Crystal’s character in Soap. Stuff like that helped normalise us with a less sophisticated public outside big urban areas - and The Front Runner was also part of that - all agents of change....

R4 We are not shunning The Advocate. The Advocate is shunning us.

It was an awful book.

I know I read it sometime in the '70s. I didn't think it was a bad book, but like so many things I've read, I only barely remember it. It was about a boy named Billy, right?

It wasn't an awful book to one horny zitty teenager who grew up in a very small rural community during the 1970s.

She still had a lovely head of hair.

Lee, Karl, and now .......Patricia?

Will this book ever be made into a movie?

[quote]I don’t get that it’s fashionable to mock TFR nowadays

You must have missed the assorted mentions it's gotten on DL over the years, then. Yes, it always has a few defenders, but it gets trashed pretty routinely as poorly written, soapy, dated, etc. whenever it gets brought up.

But I agree with you that deserves its due as a cultural milestone. Warren was not an artful writer, but she had a gift for memorable characters. To tell a story about gay men who were presented as people of worth, who deserved to find and keep love and were not neutered or comic relief - with the hope that both gays and straights would read it - was a quietly revolutionary act. It mattered.

[quote]It wasn't an awful book to one horny zitty teenager who grew up in a very small rural community during the 1970s.

In the mid 1970s, when I was 17 and deeply closeted, I worked a couple of evenings a week re-shelving books at the local library, In those pre-computer days, books were checked out manually, by one of the elderly and very stern librarians. We who worked there had the privilege of borrowing books for as long as we wanted, unless there was a hold on it. We just had to put the book card in a special file box kept on the head librarian's desk, I was convinced the old biddy regularly pored over those cards to see just what sort of subversive filth her staff was reading.

One day I was resheving books and the young man on the cover of THE FRONT RUNNER caught my eye. I stood, enraptured in the stacks, reading it for as long as I dared and then slipped the book back onto the cart and nonchalantly wheeled the cart through the library and into the back room (trying to hide my stubborn teenage boner as I went). I hid the book under a stack of magazines, and when everyone was out of the break room, I removed the book cover off of one of my textbooks, put it on TFR, Then, heart pounding, I shoved the disguised book under a bunch of half-finished homework in the bottom of my book bag.

When we all left for the evening, we had to open our bags for inspection and my heart stood still as one of those ancient librarians poked around in my book bag for smuggled goods (looking back, I'm sure she wasn't really checking, just going through the motions, but back then I was sure she was doing an Army-grade inspection of my textbooks and three-ring binder). Having been raised a proper young man, I usually made sure all of those women were safely in their cars before I got on my bike, but that night I tore out of these as if being chased by a pack of rabid dogs, lest someone ask me what I was studying or ask to see what books I was reading.

Once I got home, I immediately went to my room, and after loudly announcing I had homework to do, positively devoured that book. It took me a day or two to finish it, and, in the meantime, I hid it carefully behind the other books on a high shelf. I remember the horrible realization as to how I was going to sneak it back INTO the library, so I got up extra early one morning and biked over to the library to drop it in the night drop. Of course, since it had never been properly checked out, I'm sure the morning crew just figured someone had taken just taken it (no guard at the door in those days), but when I got to work that afternoon I was half-expecting the Chief of Police to be there, waiting to arrest me and I'd be exposed on the front page of the local paper as a book thief AND a raging homosexual.

Lol! r14 - fabulous! You weren’t the only one! I’d started working part time in a bookstore. Saw the cover on the paperback edition of TFR - and knew I had to read it! But I couldn’t be seen to be actually buying it - so had to smuggle It out in my backpack and slip payment for it into the cash register - this was way before computerised stock control - so it wasn’t hard.

So many horny teenagers must’ve had a similar experience - and yeah - the writing is pretty much fanfic level! - but the thrill of knowing IM NOT THE ONLY ONE! - and thinking wow! - even horny jock types can feel like this! - was invaluable.

I remember a couple of years later picking up a copy of White’s A Boy’s Own Story - same method! - and being really disappointed. I was still pretty young - and it was all a bit high falutin’ and ponderous and full of self doubt - and self loathing - and frankly - just not enough cock! I know - philistine. But e with such anticipation - and was so bored. Sigh. .

I loved the paperback cover! All my hot daddy fantasies brought to the fore...

A few months ago I got all excited when I saw a poster for the film The Front Runner with Hugh Jackman in period hair and thought, wow they finally made a movie of the book and what an inspired casting for the lead! Atlas, it was about Gary Hart instead and I was bummed that it wasn’t finally coming true.

There was always talk when I was young that Paul Newman was going to be in the movie, but it never came to be. So who would you cast for the two male leads if the film was finally green lit today? I would choose Brad Pitt and Froy and be there opening day in the front row.

By the way an ongoing fantasy of mine was that I would marry a man who got elected president and be by his side on inaugaration day. In a split second turn of events I would lean in and be the subject of a assasin’s bullet meant for him and be a gay martyr. It defiantly came from this book and Harvey Milk.

Keanu Reeves and KJ Appa

[QUOTE]Keanu Reeves and KJ Apa*

Way sadder about this than Karl Lagerfield and Lee whatever her last name was.

A definite loss.