Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [35]
Her visit was a glorious interlude for both of them. They exchanged back rubs, took long walks, ate quiche, watched television, and talked, talked, talked. Jeanette had empathy for her unmolded, coltish cousin, appreciated his artistic bent, and understood his adolescent angst.
During the visit, Jeanette witnessed an intense discussion about her cousin’s homosexuality that took place in the Griffith living room. She and Bobby were on the couch, with the rest of the family ranged around the room, her Uncle Bob watching in silence. Mary stood in the center like a teacher, her hand gesturing. “This is what the Bible says,” she exhorted, launching into a recitation of Scripture.
“You won’t bend, will you?” Bobby said wearily.
“Bobby, I can’t erase these words from the Bible,” Mary said.
Jeanette, who was questioning her own sexuality at the time, thought, “A family is supposed to be about love, and they’re crucifying Bobby with their words.” A person’s sexuality didn’t seem to her worth all the tension and rejection. She could feel an invisible wall between them and Bobby. The more he struggled, the more they would fight him. It seemed especially strange because, of all her aunts and uncles, the Griffiths were in every respect the most loving, the most giving. This was the one issue that tore everyone apart.
In May 1980, a year after coming out to Ed, Bobby—having lived through a year of intense effort, of stops and starts—made his only diary entry for 1980. Eerily prophetic, it introduced the theme of the next three years.
May 16. I write this in hopes that one day, many years from now, I will be able to go back and remember what my life was like when I was a young and confused adolescent desperately trying to understand myself and the world I live in. At the rate I’m going right now, though, I seriously wonder if I’ll live to be very old, that is if I will live past being a teenager.
Another reason I write this is so that long after I die, others may have a chance to read about me and see what my life as a young person was like….
Except for the aspirin incident, Bobby would not attempt to act on his prophecy for three years. But the entry makes clear that suicide was an escape option he considered throughout his adolescence. That he did not exercise it for such a long period strongly suggests that having the option gave him permission to keep fighting against his homosexuality. And fight it he did, using his diary as a kind of safety valve, dumping his fury, despair, hate, hopes, and dreams into it with unselfconscious eloquence, profanity, and violence.
The real Bobby lived in his diaries, although even there he exercised some reserve, afraid that his family was snooping. (And they were. Mary, desperate to know what he was thinking, if he was moving in the right direction, would peek in from time to time, especially as communication between them diminished. Joy, worried about him, also took a few furtive looks.)
Bobby’s gayness was a family obsession. But life did go on. Joy, herself an adolescent, was caught up in a four-year unrequited crush on a neighborhood boy named George. Her own journal of that period is overflowing with breathless references to sightings, snippets of conversation, anonymous gift offerings, tailing the boy in her white 1971 GMC truck so she could arrange “chance” meetings. Joy’s girlfriends as well as her brothers and sister were enlisted in this harmless and apparently fruitless conspiracy. To celebrate George’s twenty-first birthday, Joy and Bobby blew up twenty-one helium balloons and tied them to an oak tree, planning to photograph it and fashion a customized birthday card. Unfortunately, they later discovered they had inserted the roll of film backward. It made for great adolescent drama, but George’s seeming indifference (aside from his polite attentions to her at a very few social meetings) was a source of pain and frustration for Joy.
She was