Over the next few years, I continued to run and compete...and to agitate with the other women runners. Supported by the Road Runners Club of America and a growing number of race directors and officials, we finally made the AAU start changing its policies. But the terrifyingly lonely thing inside me hadn't gone away one bit -- I was still running away from it. And I was meeting a few other runners who seemed to be cases like me. By late 1972 I was at work on a novel about the gay people hidden in sports, to be titled The Front Runner. Writing about fictional people who had guts, I realized that I would have to live up to what my characters stood for.

In the spring of 1973, it all came together explosively. I finished the book, left my marriage, found a publisher. By summer, I was socially out in New York and on Fire Island. All that remained was the scary step of being professionally out at work. That happened over the winter of 1973-74, as my fellow editors at the Reader's Digest became aware that a gay novel forthcoming from William Morrow was written by their own Patricia Nell Warren.

The following spring, when The Front Runner hit the bestseller lists, the New York Post asked me "the question" and I answered it with a "yes." It made me the first person to come out on the staff of that redoubtable conservative magazine.

To my surprise, the Digest didn't fire me. I worked there for another six years, and published two more gay novels, before I finally left the magazine on my own. I realized that the years of loneliness and pain to which I'd subjected myself were largely something I had built up monstrously in my own mind. But I'd had to live through that loneliness in order to get the full measure of what it meant to end it...to run towards freedom at last.

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Patricia Nell Warren also writes at www.patricianellwarren and www.outsports.com.