Title: Billy's Boy Author: Patricia Nell Warren Published by: Wildcat Press, 1997 ISBN: 0-9641099-4-8 [hardcover, 307 pages]
In 1974, The Front Runner was published, and became the most popular gay love story of all time. The bittersweet saga of Coach Harlan Brown and his Olympics-bound lover, Billy Sive, has inspired millions of people worldwide for well over two decades.
Twenty years later, Wildcat Press published the long-awaited sequel, Harlan's Race -- Coach Brown's turbulent account of life after Billy, which introduced us to John William, the son born secretly in The Front Runner story.
Readers have waited anxiously for this third novel in the Front Runner series. Billy's Boy is told from the son's point of view.
John William is one of those bright loner California kids who know where they are going from kindergarten on. He lives the life of a normal middle-class kid who gets good grades, loves astronomy, and dreams of exploring the stars in the NASA space program. He adores his mother, but longs for the father he never knew -- whose life and death have always remained a complete mystery to him.
All that changes at age 12, when he has a disturbing dream that seems to reveal unsuspected facts about his father. The shattering dream will pit him against his lesbian mother, who is determined to keep the past a secret. It will transform him from a happy kid to a restless adolescent who is driven to reach beyond the stars and the limits of earthly life, to touch his father's spirit.
Along the way, the boy next door becomes his best friend and star buddy -- till suddenly their friendship is threatened by the boy's parents, who sense that the bond goes beyond accepted limits.
Ultimately, John William has hard questions for his mother, for his best buddy, for a girl who becomes a close friend, for family members he discovers through his search -- and for himself.
Billy's Boy is not your typical "adult novel about teenagers." Patricia Nell Warren's new novel is a thought-provoking, controversial, heart-rending expose' about American youth of the millennium -- wrought from her first-hand experience as a commissioner of education and volunteer teacher of high-school dropouts in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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