Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [46]
Whitsell arranged for Mary and Betty to meet in mid-1985. Betty Lambert was in her mid-sixties, a talkative, knowledgeable widow, short and chubby, with fingers gnarled by arthritis. She had a forty-year-old gay son named Mike who was sick with AIDS. “He was fourteen years old when he came out to us,” she told Mary. “I knew this before then. We as mothers always know, don’t we? I knew there was something different about this very special child. In those days, the sixties, there was no one to talk to about homosexuality. His father didn’t even want to hear about this. Mike finally found me a book, A Family Matter: A Parent’s Guide to Homosexuality.
“He and my sister and I went to see this M.D. He looked at me and said, ‘Yes, your son does have an emotional problem, and should see a psychiatrist.’ Mike went into a fit of rage. What did he need a psychiatrist for?”
Mary felt a wave of envy. Betty’s son was ill with AIDS, but he was alive. “She totally accepts him, in fact seemed proud of him,” she thought. “Where was I for Bobby when I had the chance?”
Betty asked Mary if she wanted to attend a P-FLAG meeting. Mary said yes. They drove to Saint Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco. (“They meet in a church!” Mary marveled to herself.) On the way, Betty told her, “It’s okay to be nervous. You should have seen me my first time. I looked at those stairs and I thought, ‘I can’t!’ I walked out, got in my car, and drove off. Then I turned around and came back. I went up and there were these wonderful people.”
There were more than twenty people at this meeting, parents and offspring. Most of the children were in their teens or twenties. The parents were mostly mothers, with a smaller scattering of fathers. For the first time, Mary found herself among a group of parents who accepted, loved, even honored their gay and lesbian children. She heard family after family tell stories of coming out, the shock of first knowledge, initial rejection, a subsequent compulsion to learn, and, ultimately, reconciliation.
“I finally realized that Sam was the same person after he told me that he was before—a wonderful, talented, loving child,” a parent remarked.
Another said, through tears, “My biggest regret is that she felt she had to hide such an important part of her life from me for so many years. And she was right! I was not ready to hear it.”
A young man in his twenties described in a choked voice the thrill of marching with his family in the gay pride parade. “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would see that day—strutting down Market Street with me and my parents and my lover, holding hands and waving.”
Mary took it all in with a mix of awe, excitement, and regret. These were people with the same life experience as she, people she could talk to. And yet, they still had their children; they had found a way to overcome their fear and hostility and unite with their kids. For her, it was too late.
She told her story, shyly and briefly. “For me there was no doubt. It was an open-and-shut case. I didn’t have to deal with ‘This is the end of my world; I don’t have a son anymore.’ All I had to do was trust in God. He was going to come to Bobby’s rescue. It didn’t work out. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”
The P-FLAG experience opened another door. Soon, with Betty at the wheel of her blue Ford, she and Mary were making the circuit of local P-FLAG gatherings—Oakland, San Jose, the northern California regional meeting in Marin County. Mary read the P-FLAG pamphlets. She learned that the organization had originated in 1972 as a tiny support group created by a New York couple, Jules and Jeanne Manford, who had been outraged when their gay son, Morty, was assaulted by antigay rowdies. Four years later a group formed in Los Angeles under the aegis of Adele and Larry Starr, and soon other cities followed suit. Following the 1979 March on Washington for Gay Rights, twenty-six parents met and later formed a national federation under the present name; it held its first national convention