Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [20]
Some gays celebrated their newfound sexual freedom and political clout with the intensity and excess of longtime prisoners on a weekend pass. The annual Gay Pride Parade each June presented television images of flaunting, seminude people strutting in bizarre getups and makeup, exulting in the sheer joy of visibility.
For Mary, a few miles and several light years away, the spectacle was frightening. She knew little of homosexuality, but the little she did know had overtones of a decadent and carnal secret ritual, a cabal somehow aligned with the satanic, condemned by her Bible and her church. When a group of mothers marched by the cameras in the pride parade carrying a sign that read, “We love our gay children,” Mary wondered aloud, “How can they do that? How can they support their kids being gay?”
Bobby probably heard that remark. If he didn’t, he certainly heard others. Granny often said of gay people, “They should line ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em.”
Channel 42, the religious station that Mary watched for hours, had its share of horror stories. There was the tale of the young girl tempted by Satan into lesbianism who managed to wrest herself away and return to the family fold. God was helping her to be strong and not backslide into sin.
Then there was a girlfriend of Mary’s brother Charles, who visited the Griffiths for a weekend, and when the weather turned cool one night borrowed a coat from Mary. Later, Joy stumbled on a letter to that same woman that made it clear she had experimented sexually with another woman.
Joy told her mother about it. Mary was horrified. She strode to her closet and ferreted out the coat the woman had worn. She could never bring herself to wear it again. She sent it off to Goodwill.
When Mary’s niece Debbie heard about the incident, she asked her, “Mary, don’t you think you should have more compassion and understanding?” Mary’s answer was simple and direct: “You can’t love God and be a homosexual.”
Across the country the gay movement was stretching the limits in all directions. In San Francisco, George Moscone openly campaigned for the gay votes that helped put him into office as mayor in 1977. Elsewhere, states and municipalities were passing antidiscrimination laws.
In Dade County, Florida, which encompasses Miami, voters in January 1977 approved the first gay civil rights law in the South. Within weeks of the Dade County result, Southern Baptists had organized to overturn it, putting forward as their spokeswoman the lady of the orange juice commercials, the former beauty queen Anita Bryant. The story went national. Bryant appeared on TV screens to declare that gays were out to proselytize America’s children. “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit,” she said. The Ku Klux Klan endorsed her effort, which was called Save Our Children. That organization’s brochures featured headlines about men molesting boys.
In Walnut Creek, Mary watched Anita Bryant with frank admiration. Her own vague fear of homosexuality was being articulated by a powerful and devout Christian, an admired public figure. So, when the Dade County gay rights ordinance was repealed by a vote of two to one in June 1977, Mary naturally approved. Bryant’s victory speech was a declaration of war against homosexuals, who, she said, are “dangerous to the sanctity of the family, dangerous to our children, dangerous to our survival as one nation under God.”
After Bryant’s victory, the gay rights movement went into retreat. Other gay ordinances were overturned. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority emerged on the scene. In Mary’s own church, the pastor vigorously opposed ordination of gays, which had been recommended by a national Presbyterian study group. “Were avowed homosexuals