Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [33]
Again and again, she drove home the dictum that homosexuals are cast out of God’s kingdom.
When not scribbling verses, she was turning up the volume on the Christian radio station so that Bobby could hear it from his room. She would tiptoe at night into the room he shared with Ed and pray over him while he slept. Once she put her hand on his chest. He awoke and asked, groggily, “Do you think this will heal me?”
Ed, also jogged from sleep, muttered crankily, “Why not?” Bobby just laughed.
Bobby was not noticeably effeminate, but he had a way of flipping his longish hair back from his forehead that annoyed Mary. Once she saw him doing it while primping before the bathroom mirror. Mary said, “You know, Bobby, maybe it would help if you didn’t toss your hair around like that.”
She told him he had to trust God to heal him, and that Satan would try to discourage him. She urged him to be careful of the company he kept, and not to go out with gay people.
She pushed books on him: Tim LaHaye’s What Parents Should Know About Homosexuality, Eugenia Price’s Christian opus, Leave Yourself Alone. LaHaye presented the issue of homosexuality in terms of a massive battle of good and evil. He warned of Satan’s fatal clutch, of how he could take on the guise of “an angel of light” and establish a mental and emotional hold on a child. The book quoted widely from clippings about the excesses of gay people. Like a progressive disease, he warned, homosexuality draws its victim ever deeper into a whirlpool of sin.
Terrified by such a prospect, Bobby battled to ward off Satan. Dutifully, he read, believed, and prayed. He immersed himself in church activities, especially the youth drama group, headed by a warm and sensitive woman named Teri Miller, a progressive Christian and a musician. Miller’s view of God emphasized love and acceptance. She saw righteousness as a gift offered by the grace of God rather than a club to pummel mankind toward salvation.
Bobby was powerfully drawn to Teri Miller, like a weary traveler to a safe haven. He and another teenager, a girl named Terrie Tate, spent long hours, often into the morning, helping build sets for Miller’s miniplays, which were entertainments with subtle moral messages. The Touch of the Master’s Hand, written by Miller, was a parody on the Creation and the Fall, using several pop-culture figures to illustrate the void in mankind when separated from God.
Miller, then in her mid-twenties, saw Bobby as a teenager looking for a place to land. Gangly, with braces on his teeth, usually dressed in overalls, Bobby was a gentle soul with an artistic temperament, not one of your cookie-cutter kids. In a gesture of trust that delighted her, he invited her home to show her the notebooks of poetry he had written. He seemed hungry for affirmation.
But he revealed nothing of his inner anguish, not even to Miller. He could not blurt it out. She saw him as shy, in need of approval, but not dysfunctional or self-destructive. Certainly she never thought of him as gay, and found out only when Terrie Tate called her more than three years later to tell her that Bobby had killed himself.
Terrie Tate was tomboyish, also shy if a bit more openly cynical, the product of a violent home environment. She felt close to Bobby as a fellow lost soul. They met during a Miller production of The Wiz; they both worked on the sets, and Bobby played the chief Munchkin, who presents the scroll to Dorothy.
Bobby’s sensitive melancholy attracted her. They would play touch football or volleyball together, sit around and talk, or go