Steve Gerben

The first question that I wanted to ask is: Can you tell us a little bit more about  your childhood? When were you born, and where were you born? What was your childhood like?

 I was born in New York in Astoria and when I when we I was about just three or four years old, we moved out to Long Island. Great Neck.  I grew up there. I got married. I had two children. And when I. was 30 I started to come out and eventually I met my partner, my husband, Bob in 1978. 

Did you meet at Front Runners?

No, this was before Front Runners. Front Runners wasn’t founded yet. It was October ’79. We just had our 43rd anniversary this year

Congratulations!

So I moved in with him, back into the City. And I ran into Michael know Michael Cooper, you know, who was our newsletter editor for a number of years. I used to see him running occasionally and we stopped to talk, and talked about the club that he’d just joined. This was January of 1979 and you know, I thought well, I'll give it a try. So I went to Saturday fun run and it was great and I joined on spot,  and that was how it all began. 

How old were you at that time? 

Thirty-eight.

What was it like for you to come out in your 30s, and move into your partner’s apartment in New York? What was the mood like at that time?

Well, we’re talking about the 70’s obviously, so things were much more secretive. People weren’t out, generally. I always thought I would be married for the rest of my life and just have this little you know side life. But you know over time I was becoming less happy with being married and not being gay. And when I met Rob, that’s what kind of did it, and I realized that this was going to be my future. Fortunately my ex-wife, after the initial shock, was very supportive.

Can you tell us a little bit about the time since you joined, and Malcolm’s involvement, and how you became President?

I joined the club, Malcolm was the president, he was also the editor actually of New York running news.  And he’d put an ad into the magazine to see about any interest in having a gay running club. And that’s how the club started. The original one from this club in San Francisco had been up in one for a few years at that point. We were the second. And we had a fun run every Saturday. At that time we used to go back, after the run, to someone’s apartment, after getting something to eat. But, anyway, eventually Malcolm started getting busy. He’d travel a lot and wasn’t always around, so things started to fall apart. So a few of us got together including Guy and Foster to see what we could do until Malcolm got back to keep the club up and running.

He did come back and then asked me if I’d be interested in running for president because he couldn’t do it anymore because of work issues. So I said well,  I’ve never done anything like this and I have to think about it. So I discussed it with Bob. We thought,  well it's only a small group, we only ever maybe 20 30 people. And we didn’t have many activities. It can’t be too much work.

There was a little concern about, you know, being the face of the club because I wasn’t out yet. My wife knew, but the rest of my family didn’t. But I said, “all right! I’ll do it.” And that was it. I ran for president and was selected. No one else ran.

But there must have been something inside of you which just responded to that call of leadership, right? I mean, what were the characteristics that that you thought you had that you could apply in the context of this club?

I didn’t know if I did, frankly. As I said, I’d never done anything like that. I was never a leader type. I was always kind of shy and way back and school. I was never going to raise my hand in class, you know. If the club was a lot larger I may not have done it. But I thought, “well, you know, I’ll give it a shot.” It couldn’t have gone much more downhill than where it was at that point. If I ruin it I ruin it. But it obviously brought something out in me because I put together a plan of what I thought I wanted to the direction the club to go in, and I was started expanding the runs, we added Wednesday night run, we moved the runs to just Central Park, previously they were kind of all over the place in the city.

And we found a restaurant because it got too large to go back to someone's apartment. We started to grow members in the 1981.

We started having more activities, as the club grew, and that that several we went out to Bob and I went out to San Francisco and the FrontRunners there were putting on their race, and we went there and we did the race, and I was so impressed with it. 

I said I don’t know how we're gonna do it, but we're gonna put on a race next year and that's how we started the plan.

How did you make all these decisions? I mean, this is I think there's actually quite amazing for someone who is always been super shy, all of a sudden assumes leadership, and not only that— he also like he advances the the club's agenda, he adds structure, he thinks ahead, he puts on races. Did you do this by yourself? Was someone else involved or how did that decision making take place?

Well we had our officers. This was before we were incorporated and had an official board of directors. We had the president, and we added the women's right vice president which I thought, at the beginning, was a good idea because the woman were always so under-representative.

I have always believed in doing things by consensus. We had our monthly business meetings which were open to all the members, we encouraged them to come we after the new Wednesday night run.