Read The Front Runner for Free Online Page A

free-lance copyreader and editor, but it paid pitifully little—four or five dollars an hour, and even this market was tightening up due to the recession. Coaching had taught me how to give rubdowns, so I tried to set myself up as a licensed masseur. My ad, a typical one, ran in the Village Voice and other papers: "Rubdowns by Chris, athletic masseur." (I didn't want to use my real name.) But New York was full of masseurs who went out at all hours of the day and night to rub down sleepless middle-aged ladies. The customers came in slowly.
    So I tried some modeling. My ad read: "Handsome ex-Marine, athlete, miler's build, 6' 1", 155 pounds, 25-inch waist, 42-inch chest." I did get some calls, but it wasn't totaling more than the $200 a week I had to send my ex-wife.
    There were just a few weeks to make up my mind what I was going to do, and I did it.
    In a bar one evening, I had met a personable gay named Steve Goodnight, a struggling serious writer who kept himself alive by doing pornographic books. Steve and I became friends, not lovers. Through him I met a number of other gays in a kind of inner artistic circle and hidden high society. To these people I revealed my true identity, and found that the Penn State dismissal made me something of a martyr/celebrity in a small way.
    So it happened one night that a well-to-do and lascivious gay acquainted with this circle thought I should
    go to bed with him, and I was needing money and I said, "I think that's going to cost you $200." That was how I became a hustler. I was a very expensive, very exclusive hustler. None of your twenty-five-dollar sodomies in hotel rooms, none of your selling your meat on the street. I couldn't risk it. Nobody got to me except through a blind of telephone calls. I usually charged $200-250, and sometimes went higher. I was worth every penny of it, and pretty soon had more business than I could handle, but I didn't have to exert myself. At $200 a trick, twice a week was enough to satisfy the divorce court and to pay my living expenses.
    They tell you a hustler's career is over at thirty, when his youth starts to fade. I started mine at thirty-four, and found that there was a small but solid market for meat like mine. My numbers didn't want faunlike boys. They wanted a hard, angry, bitter, mature beauty. Sometimes they wanted a whipping too. I am not a sadist at heart, but I was angry enough to pass for one —I gave a damn good whipping for $200. It was clear profit, because I wasn't working for a pimp.
    There was something about the harshness of hustling that reminded me I was surviving, that the straights would not crush me. There was something of raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the way I said, "Eight inches." It was, in a way, my first gesture of gay pride.
    One of the reasons I stayed off the street was that it was more dangerous than ever now, and I wasn't looking to go to jail. On June 28, 1969, just after I arrived in the city, the New York City police started their now-famous crackdown on the gay bars. The first to be blitzed was the Stonewall. During the next twelve months, they raided and closed the Zoo, the Zodiac and about twenty others, mostly on Barrow Street. It was the watershed in gay history, and—in a way—it was my watershed too.
    The night the Stonewall was busted, I was in the neighborhood on business. Someone called my client and told him what was happening, and we got out of bed and ran over there to see, because we hadn't been able to believe our ears.
    The street was full of cops and flashing red lights. But what was more amazing, the street was full of hundreds of gays, and they were fighting the cops. For years "they had run, let themselves be shoved to the wall, submitted to harassments and arrest, because they felt in their hearts that it was their fate. But the night of the Stonewall, they made the instant visceral decision that they had had enough. They were throwing rocks and bottles, your "powderpuff pansies" were.