Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [42]
October 13. Today is “Mommies” birthday. Her cake read, “Happy Birthday Mommie Dearest.” A little joke. Ha ha. [The joke included an image of a hanger inscribed on the cake.]
December 14. I have the worst luck with guys. So far they’ve all been flakes. I shouldn’t complain though, I’m pretty flaky myself. Anyway, there was Jose, who I just couldn’t get all that excited about. And then Enri who I guess is the kind of guy who loves ’em and leaves ’em. He got tired of me after the third “date.” I don’t really care, though, because by our third date I was beginning to see what a jerk he was. God, why can’t I find some cute, sensible boy? That’s all I want.
December 20. It’s almost Christmas. You could have fooled me though. It’s more like Groundhog Day or some other holiday no one could care less about.
January 3, 1982. Sometimes at night, I get all nervous and I can’t sleep. I just feel like my brain is spinning around and around in my stomach. I’m all mixed up as a result, and I can’t identify my feelings. It’s like they’re all here but they’re blindfolded. They bump into each other inside my head and just get more and more mixed up. I wish life were black and white, like old movies. Everything was crisp and in focus. Sometimes I sense that life is very fragile and that at any given moment it could be snuffed out the way a candle is by a sudden draft. I just want someone to protect me.
Often I feel very inadequate…. I hate that feeling. Do you ever feel like you’re some stupid kind of intellectual person who has lost his glasses and is stumbling through life? I guess that’s a pretty odd question. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Tell me how much. I love you.
SEVEN
The Healing
MARY, 1985
Mary knew she had embarked on an open-ended journey. Everything she had ever believed in lay in a jumble, like so many Pick-up Sticks waiting to be reassembled in some new order. She had no idea where she was headed, only that she was going, driven by a need to understand.
She was shaken by the realization that the Bible had nothing to say to confirm her son’s place in God’s creation. All her life she had taken the Bible as God’s own word. Conformance to it brought safety and comfort; deviation brought penalty—a truth as certain as the cycle of days. More than a year after her son’s death it was clear to her that if Bobby’s life and death were to have meaning, she would have to look beyond.
She turned, nervously, to a book Bobby had given her to read, Loving Someone Gay, by a California psychologist named Don Clark. When Bobby offered it she had picked it up briefly and then dropped it like a hot coal. It seemed repulsive, a satanic apologia for a deadly sin.
Now she sat with it. What she read hit home.
Once upon a time, people selected the most beautiful and talented youths of the community and ceremoniously threw them into boiling volcanoes as an offering to appease the angry gods….Some parents are still willing to sacrifice their beautiful gay offspring to appease the god of conformity,…. I feel compassion for the parent who breaks the sacred bond and turns away from the outstretched arms of a son or a daughter….
Some youngsters immerse themselves in religion, devote themselves to being good 24 hours a day and/or have inexplicable emotional breakdowns…. More than a few commit suicide. Having cut deeply into an already injured self-esteem with the hurtful self-confrontation in which ugly labels are self-assigned, a part of the previously valued self is murdered…. The rage turns inward. The misdirected rage provides the energy for the emotionally drained person to finally pull the trigger or tie the noose. Their act of self-murder is a shame that we who represent their society must bear.
To survive, a gay person must see that she or he cannot afford to accept unchallenged any prepackaged set of assumptions even if they were given by such exalted authorities as parents, Church, government