Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [2]
I felt a new and heightened sense of integration, a coming together of my professional and personal lives beyond anything I’d experienced. I could still be a journalist, yet also be for something without giving up my professional integrity. I could influence change on behalf of my fellow gays, yet remain consistent with the tenets of good journalism.
Meanwhile, the Tribune had run into severe economic trouble. I made the momentous decision to leave newspapers after thirty-three years and devote my time to NLGJA and to my lifelong dream of being a “serious” writer.
But a writer needs a subject. In mid-1991, the Advocate, a national gay newsmagazine, ran an item on Mary Griffith. Josh Boneh, my life partner, saw it and said, “Why not write about her? It’s a great story. It fits the direction you’re going in. And she lives right here in Walnut Creek [a town a few miles from Oakland].”
Of course! Josh’s reminder brought back the story with all its emotional charge. I scrambled for my saved copy of the Examiner article, phoned Lily Eng to get the Griffith telephone number, and soon was on my way to Walnut Creek.
Mary and I hit it off. Though she was initially shy, I immediately sensed strength and determination. She had wanted to write a book, but hadn’t gotten anywhere with it herself. I asked what she hoped such a book would accomplish.
“I’d like to give kids enough courage to continue their lives,” she said, “until they come to that point where they are able to accept factual information about their sexual identity.”
Mary spoke calmly, but with a current of urgency. She also wanted to reach parents, teachers, the churches—all of the targets she already had in her sights regionally. A book could accomplish that on a national level.
We began a series of detailed interviews over many months. It became clear that Mary had another reason in mind for the book. Nearly a decade after Bobby’s death, she still carried a burden of guilt for her role in the tragedy. Laying it out in a book for the world to witness would be an act of expiation.
Mary was hard on herself. She seemed to relish telling stories about dumb or thoughtless acts she committed regarding Bobby. She told them with the zeal of a convert. As she said, she was amazed at her stupidity.
But as I got to know her, and the rest of the Griffith family—Mary’s husband, Bob; her son Ed; and Ed’s sisters, Nancy and Joy—I came to realize that this was a story not of brute rejection, but of ignorance. The surviving Griffiths love one another with an intensity that few families can match. It became clear to me they had loved Bobby with that same magnitude, and he them.
Most gay suicides occur among youngsters who were disowned by their families—cast out and cut off. One of the ironies of this story is that the Griffiths acted from love. What they lacked was information and comprehension, and any knowledge of how to go about getting them. What they relied upon was the limited vocabulary of response they had available to them. It was as if they lived in a sealed bubble, unable to grasp the consequences of their actions. The events unfolded as they did with a tragic inevitability.
Through his diaries and his family, friends, and coworkers, I came to know Bobby as well as it is possible to know someone who is no longer living. He was a tender soul from the beginning, vulnerable to slights, eager to please, shy. At the same time he had a vibrant life force, reflected in his open, smiling map-of-America face. He took pleasure in nature, in things artistic, in comic hyperbole, and most tellingly in his writing, which for someone so young had elements of eloquence and promise.
The contortion of that promise, that life, which I traced exhaustively, was all the more painful in the context of what should have