Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [0]
A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son
Leroy Aarons
To Josh Boneh, who believed
Contents
List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Plunge
2. “What Went Wrong?”
3. Fire and Brimstone
4. The Sissy
5. A Rope with No Knot
6. Coming Out
7. The Healing
8. The Leper
9. The Second Coming Out
10. Portland
11. The Golden Thread
12. On the Road
13. Born Again
Afterword: Gay Youth 1996
Appendix: Help Organizations
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
PHOTOGRAPHS
1. Bobby Griffith at nineteen, at home in Walnut Creek, Christmas 1982.
2. Bobby in Oregon, about three months before he died.
3. Mary Griffith four months after Bobby’s death.
4. The Griffith family, summer 1965, from left, Bobby, Mary, Joy, Ed, and Bob (Nancy was born later).
5. Bobby at age three in the family’s home in Danville, California.
6. Bobby, Christmas 1982, six weeks before he left for Portland.
7. Bobby at sixteen.
8. Mary, January 1986.
9. Bobby at a Halloween party, 1982.
10. Bobby and Mary pose in front of her Volkswagen convertible (which she never learned to drive), winter 1980.
11. Bobby in Oregon, spring 1983, surveying the scene of the 1980 volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens.
12. Mary marching with fellow P-FLAGer Marcia Garrison in the Gay Freedom Day Parade, San Francisco, June 1994.
13. Mary with the latest Griffith, granddaughter Christina, age three, November 1994.
All photographs printed courtesy of the Griffith family and friends, unless otherwise noted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first acknowledgment is reserved for Mary Griffith, who reached into the darkest corners of her life to make this book possible. My gratitude to her for her cooperation, hard work, and friendship is boundless. I am also indebted to the Griffith family—Bob, Joy, Nancy, and Ed—for their contributions, as well as other family members and friends who were completely candid and helpful.
Thanks to the following for their help in reading various stages of the manuscript and suggesting improvements: Charles Kaiser, Juan Palomo, Belinda Taylor, David Harris, Micha Peled, Beth Smith, and Pat McHenry Sullivan. And, of course, my beloved Josh, who read and encouraged me every step of the way.
Thanks to researchers John Sullivan and Kate Newburger.
My gratitude to my editor, Kevin Bentley, who saw the potential in this story early on, was instrumental in Harper San Francisco’s decision to publish it, and who honcho’d it all the way.
Thanks to Pam Walton for permission to use transcripts of interviews conducted for her important video documentary Gay Youth.
Finally, to Bobby Griffith, whose living spirit permeates this book and much of my life.
INTRODUCTION
I first learned of the Griffith family in a 1989 article in the San Francisco Examiner. The piece, written by staff reporter Lily Eng, was part of a mammoth sixteen-day series on gays and lesbians in America. The Examiner was commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall incident, considered the birth of the gay civil rights movement in America. (The Stonewall Inn was a Greenwich Village bar whose clientele on a warm summer night in 1969 defied a squad of police raiders, repelling them with bricks and debris and attracting hundreds to the scene in a protest that stirred gays and lesbians to action around the nation.)
I was deeply stirred by the story of Bobby Griffith’s suicide, saddened by the waste of this young man’s life. The scalding self-hatred contained in the excerpts from his diary included in the account was indeed painful to behold. My instinct was to grab hold of the boy who was writing these words and shout, “No, Bobby! You’ve got it all wrong. You’re okay. It’s the others who are crazy with hatred and ignorance!”
But, of course, it was too late. Unable to reconcile his gay sexual orientation with his family’s religious and moral beliefs, Bobby had leaped to his death from a freeway bridge in 1983.
Other gay kids were committing suicide. In fact, some statistics