Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [100]
Similarly, Bobby’s church, Walnut Creek Presbyterian, continues to be inhospitable to any open discussion of same-sex orientation. The church’s enormously ambitious outreach program, which encompasses heterosexual singles, children, youth, the disabled, people of color, and the foreign born, fails to include an approach to gays and lesbians of any age. The pastor in charge of youth programs, Shawn Robinson, rebuffed my requests for an interview. Another pastor, the Reverend Carl Hamilton, suggested I try a “more condoning church,” like Metropolitan Community Church, when I asked (without identifying myself) if gays were included in the singles program he conducts.
And, as Mary Griffith indicated, lacking the life-changing impetus of Bobby’s suicide, she and others in her family might to this day have remained unflinching in their hostility to his way of life.
School, church, family. They remain largely ranged against gay young people like a fortress of enemy figures in a video game. This might seem a contradiction when one takes into consideration the remarkable advances in gay and lesbian civil rights that have taken place over the last decade. The fact is that those advances, while they benefited gay adults, have failed to translate (with some dramatic exceptions) to the protection and nurturing of the most vulnerable segment of the gay community—its youth. Being young and gay for most people still means being invisible, alienated, and largely ignored.
This situation constitutes one of the major unmet social challenges of our era, one glaring manifestation of which is the high rate of HIV infection among young gay males. Another is the frequency of suicide among gay youth. Though the statistics may be subject to political manipulation and debate, what is incontrovertible is that lesbian and gay adolescents are in a very high risk category not only with regard to suicide and HIV, but as victims of a social order that is still capable of punishing sexual difference with medieval-style venality.
The issue of gay youth has received considerable press attention. And grassroots services are springing up throughout the country at an impressive rate. (The latest compilation shows more than two hundred gay-youth-oriented programs nationwide, although one-third are concentrated in California and New York.) Most of these are mom-and-pop entities that scramble for funding. (One of the more advanced programs operates in San Francisco’s public schools, as might be expected. A Bobby Griffith of today fortunate enough to be living twenty miles west of Walnut Creek would find an array of services at his disposal.)
Despite a flurry of interest, the high-profile gay organizations have given scant attention to the concerns of gay youth. Until recently gay youth struggled silently and alone, lacking the political muscle or sophistication to make their concerns heard. Lonely efforts such as the automobile odyssey of Mary Griffith and Rob Birle characterized the movement into the early 1990s. That is changing. In fact, the issue appears to be reaching the critical mass that tends in this country to command attention and response—as well as backlash.
Frances Kunreuther is the executive director of New York City’s Hetrick-Martin Institute, one of the success stories, with a $2.5-million budget and seven projects including the renowned Harvey Milk School for problem gay youth. She relates what the gay youth movement is up against: “The institutions have not changed dramatically—schools, church, families, foster care, psychiatry, communities. And public opinion has not changed that radically. There’s a lot of nonacceptance out there. Most youngsters still feel very isolated. Adults can go to support groups, or move to another town. Young people can’t leave. They need school, relatives, and families to nurture them into adulthood.”
Her predecessor, the institute’s late cofounder, A. Damien Martin, described the situation in 1982 in words still relevant today: “In