Good times, on the race course and off, are the essence of Front Runners New York, a club representing hundreds of gay and lesbian runners in the nation’s biggest city.
Yet that’s only part of its story.
Over three decades, the club has served as a comfort zone and support group for many of its members as they coped with personal challenges. It embraces a public-service mission forged in the 1980s when many members and their friends died from AIDS.
“No one knew what it was, how it was transmitted”there was a lot of fear out there,” recalled Steve Gerben, who began a four-year stint as club president in 1981 just before the first AIDS cases in the U.S. were reported.
Front Runners New York had about 35 members when Gerben took the helm. It held its first Pride Run in 1982, attracting about 400 entrants.
On June 25, the scene in Central Park will be very different for the 30th Pride Run. A record field of more than 5,000 was expected for the 5-mile race, with entertainment, a raffle and an after-party on tap.
Proceeds from the event will go to the It Gets Better Project, launched last year in response to some highly publicized suicides by gay teenagers. Several club members appeared in a video for the national project, which seeks to convey messages of hope to counter the despair of bullied or rejected teens.
Front Runners’ current president, Megan Jenkins, said the choice of beneficiary was fitting because many club members “ran the Pride Run as their first step out of the closet.”
The New York club was founded in 1979, the second-oldest”after San Francisco”of what is now an international network of Front Runners clubs. There are about 70 clubs in the U.S., and more than 40 abroad, mostly in Western Europe, but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Uruguay.
The name adopted by the San Francisco club founders came from a groundbreaking 1974 novel by Patricia Nell Warren titled The Front Runner”a gay love story about a track coach’s relationship with an Olympics-bound distance runner.
