Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [47]
P-FLAG, which today stands for Parents, Family, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, maintains a national office in Washington, D.C., and has a membership of thirty-five thousand. It has evolved from a family support group to a strong lobbying organization for equal rights for gay people. There are now more than three hundred chapters, a huge jump from the forty or so that existed when Mary first got involved in 1985.
Educating herself about the organization, she listened to tale after tale of mothers whose children seemed different when growing up. She heard from the children themselves about how they had felt. She witnessed heart-wrenching scenes in which parents, new to the knowledge, pleaded for help in accepting their kids and no longer blaming themselves.
“I’m learning,” said a mother. “I’ve read every book in the library on the subject. But I can’t escape the terrible feeling that if only I had done something different…. I know it’s not rational. I know Tony is a perfectly happy, well-adjusted young man. I’m beginning to think that I’m the abnormal one.”
Each time, Mary went home and processed what she had seen and heard. She held frequent discussions with Ed, who was beginning to test his own orthodoxy. He had been shaken deeply by his brother’s death. His mother’s explorations took seed in fertile soil. Her new ideas made sense, but when he discussed them with people at church, they were dismissed as manifestations of grief or guilt. A minister theorized that Mary was reinterpreting Scripture as a way of finding peace or diminishing the guilt that comes whenever a family member takes his or her own life.
Ed felt increasingly that the arguments he got at church were legalistic interpretations of the Bible, frequently linked to the ego of the interpreter. On the other hand, he felt that the things his mother was saying had the ring of truth.
Ed’s life was changing. His lifelong hopes of a professional baseball career dissipated after a disastrous tryout with the Lodi Dodgers (a Los Angeles Dodgers farm team). He came to realize that he had had an inflated picture of his athletic ability. It was time for some realism. He finished his police studies at Los Medanos College and went on to intern with the Concord Police Department. He drifted away from Walnut Creek Pres.
For Mary, the exposure to P-FLAG had crystallized a truth she could no longer resist. The repeated testimony of parents and children portrayed gay kids as being different at an early stage of life, maybe from birth.
This triggered a memory of another dream she had had shortly after Bobby’s death, which made little sense at the time. In the dream, Mary heard Bobby laughing happily. “Bobby, is that you?” she asked, incredulous. “Why shouldn’t it be?” his voice replied. She was exhilarated. Bobby alive! When she turned to look, she saw Bobby as an infant, back in the kitchen of their Danville home, as real as life. Her attention focused on the child’s head. He looked beautiful to her, and yet there was something different about his head. It was not deformed, just different. She couldn’t figure it out.
Now, nearly three years later, she finally understood. The dream was saying that Bobby was born with the seed of his sexuality. He was different. Not sinful or evil or sick, just different.
If that was indeed the case, she had, at last, an answer to her question of why God had not healed Bobby. He had not healed Bobby because there was nothing wrong with him.
EIGHT
The Leper
BOBBY, 1981–1983
Joy went to work as an office manager at California Frame Company in Walnut Creek in mid-1981 and soon afterward got Bobby a job assembling frames at $3.50 an hour. He would stay there off and on for eighteen months, even though he found the work dull and repetitive. “It’s not really hard work,” he wrote in his diary, “but it’s so redundant that it exhausts you. My fingernails are darkened from staining the wood. It’s hard to get it all off.”
Partly as a result of the tedious routine, the factory crew were a boisterous lot. They