Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [34]
That was a dilemma for Tate, who had yet to resolve her own sexuality (she accepted herself as a lesbian several years later, after a long bout with drugs and alcohol). She could not bring herself to mention the subject to Bobby. At the time, she was quite antigay as well as religious, and Walnut Creek Pres did not encourage that kind of discourse. Only recently she had taken a course in which a youth pastor had expounded on sexual immorality, twinning homosexuality and bestiality as prime examples.
Sexuality was the Presbyterian Church’s—and most churches’—most discomfiting moral problem, more it seemed than abortion, planned parenthood, or racial discrimination. Homosexuality, in particular, sticks in the church’s craw to this day. The United Presbyterian Church, the governing entity, has been haggling over the issue intensely since 1976. The church’s general assembly was petitioned for major reform in 1978 and again fifteen years later, and each time it wrestled unsuccessfully with such questions as the ordination of gays and lesbians, and the full acceptance of gays and lesbians as congregants.
Bobby was probably not aware that, although it rejected the ordination of gays and lesbians in 1978, the assembly did urge its ministries to support civil rights for gays and lesbians, and to initiate courses to explore ways of allowing gays to participate in the life of the church. Being gay was still to be considered a sin, but gays could be encouraged to be celibate or, through prayer, to revert to the natural order of heterosexuality.
At Walnut Creek Pres, at the time run by a conservative minister, these were not considered live issues. When they came up—as in the case of a devoted parishioner who was unsubtly fired as the chair of an event-planning committee when it became known she was lesbian—these matters were dealt with quietly and expeditiously. There was no external demand for reform in this area, as there was for ordination of females. The real agitation for a change in attitudes toward gays and lesbians came in the urban parishes of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Thus there was no motivation for someone like Bobby (or Terrie Tate) to come forward to seek help, nor was there an institutional framework to accommodate their needs. (In 1994 there still existed no overt pastoral mission at Walnut Creek Pres specifically for gays.) On the contrary, to be branded gay in an environment where he dearly wished nothing more than acceptance would have been the ultimate humiliation- for Bobby.
And he knew that the potential for humiliation lurked in every corner of his surroundings. He certainly must have noted, for example, the big story in the local papers in 1980 when a young man almost his own age was dismissed as an assistant scoutmaster in the Berkeley Boy Scouts because he was gay. (The young man sued, and in early 1995 the case was still dragging through the appeals process.)
So he would store his anger and despair, assuming a public facade of bland neutrality, much like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. This is the face his dearest cousin, Jeanette, saw during a visit she made to the Griffiths in February 1980. The daughter of Mary’s older sister, Jean, Jeanette was several years older than Bobby, yet close enough to him in age that the two of them had played together as kids. Jeanette and her sister Debbie had eventually moved