The Front Runner

The book is really cheesy and dated. I doubt it will be made into a film version

Speaking of cheesy and dated, I'd love to see a movie version of Gordon Merrick's The Lord Won't Mind.

I read this as a gayling back in the late 80s and thought it would be a great movie. Read it again last year, and it wouldn’t without a LOT of changes, especially that ending—would never fly today.

Movie tagline: Timothy Bottoms for Paul Newman

“with” not “for”

Unless it’s an endorsement

(which it would be for me!)

A lot of people here rip on books about gay men written by women so I'm not sure why this one gets a free pass. It's not well-written and the gays characters aren't believable

I read The Front Runner in a Gay Lit class I took in College back around 2005. I do think it's something of a forgotten gay classic and even when I read it 15 or so years ago, a lot of it's themes (like gay marriage) were shockingly relevant. That being said, there is no way Hollywood would have done justice to the novel in the 70s: I mean there is zero chance they would have show the romance or marriage as explicit as in the novel. And now, the novel is too forgotten and to outdated to do anything with other than treat it as a historical piece of gay fiction.

[quote]r6 the gays characters aren't believable.

In what way aren’t they believable?

[quote]It's not well-written and the gays characters aren't believable.

But, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it, R6.

For years I pictured Thomas Jane as the coach.

Might be too late now.

Someone should film the coach character back in his hustler days now and then use the same actor ten or so years from now as the the character when he’s coach when they film the rest of the movie.

Any thoughts on who could be filmed as the coach (can’t remember his name, it has been so long since I read it) in his younger hustler years, now?

I knew Patricia Nell Warren a bit and she was still hoping to get a film version going in the late '90s-early '00s. Back then I thought Billy Crudup would have been perfect as Billy Sive.

R6 You have to put the novel in context of the era it was written in. The book was written to counter that narrative that gay men were sexual deviants not capable of real love. The novel was actually the first explicitly gay novel to make the New York Times Bestsellers List. But as you mentioned, the novel was kind of buried because it did face a backlash in subsequent years because it was written by a woman and also it went against the counterculture "sex it up" gay movement of the 70s and the book became overshadowed by other gay fiction of the time like Dancer of the Dace (which I actually really don't like) and Tales of the City. I know Warren wrote a sequel to the book but it was never as successful.

THE LORD WON'T MIND was the first gay novel on the NYT best seller list.