Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [1]
Included in the Examiner package was a confessional piece by Mary Griffith in which she told of the religious fanaticism and fear of gays that had led her to wage a relentless campaign to get her son to overcome his homosexuality. She had been too committed to her deep-rooted beliefs to notice that her rejection of Bobby was contributing to the self-hatred that ultimately culminated in his death.
The death of her son brought into question Mary Griffith’s most basic beliefs. “Looking back,” she wrote, “I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child’s conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, and self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth.”
The story went on to document Mary’s belated change of heart, her rejection of her religious doctrine, and the beginning of her crusade to help save the lives of other gay and lesbian children. Now she could say, “What a travesty of God’s love, for children to grow up believing themselves to be evil, with only a slight inclination toward goodness, convinced that they will remain undeserving of God’s love from birth to death.”
This extraordinary conversion touched me as deeply as the tale of Bobby’s tragic death. This woman of limited education was able to cut through a lifetime of conditioning, risk rejection by her religious peers, and embrace society’s outcasts. How did she accomplish that? I wondered. What enabled her to transcend her background and perform what could only be described as acts of courage?
Like a lot of other gays and lesbians, I had my own history of rejection and self-hatred. Fortunately, I never contemplated suicide. It never entered my head as an option. My self-loathing took me in other directions—directions not quite as final, but certainly damaging, painful, and self-defeating.
I survived and, indeed, over many years, made peace with myself. But the Griffith story gripped my heart at a moment when I was taking a major new turn in my own development.
At the time the article appeared, I was the executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, a successful senior journalist whose gayness was known to his staff. I had come out to them, and to my family and friends, several years earlier, after a lifetime of subterfuge and lying to protect my personal and professional “image.” I was comfortable being out as a gay man but, as a journalist, had no intention of ever being involved as a gay activist, beyond going to gay pride parades as an observer.
In the spring of 1989 the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the professional association of the newspaper industry, decided for the first time ever to survey gay and lesbian journalists on their attitudes toward workplace conditions and news coverage of gay issues. ASNE’s executive director, Lee Stinnett, asked me if I would coordinate the study.
I agreed with some trepidation, sensing that being the author of such a national study would somehow change my life. And it did. In April 1990 I presented the results of the survey to hundreds of peer editors, and in the course of my presentation outed myself to a national audience. I remember vividly that, when I said, “As an editor and a gay man, I am proud of ASNE for doing this survey,” a second sentence ran in my mind as a subtext: “Here I am, world, all of me, at last!”
Stories ran in the major newspapers and magazines: “News Executive Comes Out as Gay.” I became a magnet for the aspirations of hundreds of gay and lesbian journalists, most of them closeted, urging me to form a support organization. I did so, creating in the summer of 1990 the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, a pretty pretentious name for a group with six members. But the moment was right. Within months, hundreds of mainstream journalists from all over the country had joined. The gay story