Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [21]
Meanwhile, across the bay, gays in San Francisco seemed undaunted by the rising forces of opposition. In November 1977 they flexed their political muscle to elect Harvey Milk to the city’s board of supervisors, the first openly gay elected public official in a major city. The next June, 375,000 people marched in the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the nation’s largest turnout for any cause since the antiwar movement. And the following November, California voters defeated by two to one an initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools.
Three weeks later, gays were jolted into reality. Harvey Milk was shot dead in his office by Dan White, a deranged ex-city supervisor who hated gays. The city’s liberal mayor, George Moscone, had fallen minutes earlier to White’s bullets. Six months later a jury gave White a mere six years in prison.
Bobby undoubtedly picked up these contradictory signals and processed them in the crucible of his adolescent fears and yearnings. Puberty brought him face to face with the reality that the cravings he was experiencing now had a label, a label abhorred by his family, his church, his school, and much of his nation. Being gay, it seemed, could be lethal.
With the benefit of hindsight, Mary, Joy, and the others remember a sudden change in Bobby at adolescence—a draining of spirit, the suggestion of melancholy. In retrospect, the direct link to sexuality is clear. At the time, however, it registered as the weltschmerz of a young adolescent. The onset of adolescent acne, which would plague him to the end of his life, also took its toll on his psyche.
Bobby yielded a clue to his inner storm in an essay written for a high school English class. He wrote about a recurring dream of childhood, an exhilarating flying dream that wafted him above the trees—free, alive, and happy:
As I got older, around junior high age, the dreams ceased and I missed them. The last flying dream I had was what I think might have been a sort of warning. The dream begins outside my window, but I find myself anxious. As I fly I’m afraid. There are telephone lines, and antennae and electrical wires. How painful it would be to run into one. This causes me to be very paranoid. I wonder why I can’t be happy and free like before….
During the early years of my life (up to about 11 or 12), I was in fact happy and free. I liked who I was. I knew I was very individual and maybe even a little different in the eyes of my friends. But that didn’t stop me from being ME…. But as I grew up and became more and more conscious of others and what they wanted, I think I maybe began to see the differences between myself and those around me. I had felt rejection before, but when you’re younger for some reason it doesn’t hurt quite as much. Now I was older and really felt a stronger need for acceptance. So, unconsciously, and slowly, I began to lose touch with who I really was. That’s where the paranoid flying dream may play a part.
The teacher, obviously moved by this confessional essay, remarked in his marginal notes, “Your paper is wonderful…. The change you describe is pretty typical. Pure, loving and young souls soon learn negativity and insecurity by being exposed to the bombings of society.”
The bombings were getting to him. He was fifteen and a half, a sophomore at Las Lomas High School. He was taking antibiotics for his acne. He was engrossed at the time in a drama workshop sponsored by the youth group at the church. Bobby began recording his feelings at the beginning of 1979, in