Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner's Coming Out
Filed by: Patricia Nell Warren
October 12, 2008 4:00 PM
http://www.bilerico.com/2008/10/loneliness_of_a_long_distance_runners_co.php (http://www.bilerico.com/2008/10/loneliness_of_a_long_distance_runners_co.php)
Like many of my generation, I spent many years in a heterosexual marriage, hoping that the lonely inner knowing of a different sexuality would somehow just go away. But it didn't. And the thought of coming out was scary even after reading about the Stonewall riots in the 7/28 New York Times in 1969, just a few weeks after my 33rd birthday. Hey, those Greenwich Village homos might have enough guts to throw rocks at the cops...but there was no way I'd do anything like that.
So the road to courage took a by-way through feminism...finding my guts as a woman. I had started long-distance running, when the sport became popular across America. Just two months before Stonewall, I was one of 12 women to crash the Boston Marathon and run the race without numbers, to protest AAU rules that prohibited women from racing farther than 2 1/2 miles. I came in 4th. Now that took guts, right?