Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [74]
“Bobby believed, as his family did, the erroneous theory still being taught today that parents, environment, friends, relatives are the cause of a child becoming a homosexual person…. We believed with all our hearts that God would cure Bobby. I have since learned there is no cure for homosexuality any more than there is a cure for heterosexuality.
“Our gay and lesbian youth should find love and acceptance in this world. Hopefully, when you leave this class today, you will take with you knowledge about the diversities of human sexuality, and…a broader understanding of people.”
Mary relished this chance to engage youngsters and teachers directly. The students seemed genuinely curious and without hostility. They asked basic questions about gay lifestyles and practices, the experience of coming out, and gay stereotypes they had seen on television. She of course assumed that among the 120 who attended, several were gay or lesbian. The experience strengthened her growing conviction that the schools held the key to reforming homophobic attitudes and creating support for young people growing up gay.
It was June 1987, and the chapter was laying plans to march in the annual gay pride parade in San Francisco at the end of the month. Mary wrestled with the difficult decision of whether to participate. She would feel like an imposter, she told herself, marching with all those people who had had the courage to accept their children. “If I had been one of them, Bobby would be alive today. What’s the point now?” she asked herself.
But she also listened to the other parents relate how good their kids felt about their involvement in the parade. “We’re representing the parents who can’t be there or won’t be there,” Jackie Costa told her.
Mary talked it over with Bob and her children. They were of mixed minds. Ed did not like the idea of his mother exposing herself to unpredictable counterdemonstrators. Then Mary got a bright idea. She would have buttons made up with Bobby’s photo on them. That way, he would be marching with her, at least symbolically. She decided to go.
On Sunday morning, June 28, Mary, Betty Lambert, Jackie Costa, and two other P-FLAG mothers, Gail Solt and Lydia Madson, boarded the rapid-transit train for the twenty-five-minute journey through Oakland and under the bay to San Francisco. Each of them wore a pin bearing a photo of Bobby’s smiling face. The air was festive. At each stop parade-goers clambered aboard. Soon every car was filled to overflowing with chattering men and women. People hailed friends or made new friends on the spot. Most wore typical Sunday-outing garb—shorts, T-shirt, and cap—albeit more colorful than average, and in some cases downright creative.
They tumbled out onto Market Street, which was already teeming with people, many toting the rainbow-striped gay signature flags. Mary was amused to see men in women’s drag, clicking along in high heels. They made their way through the crowd to the P-FLAG staging area. Mary was stunned to see how large the P-FLAG delegation was. It seemed to stretch for blocks, a thousand or more people.
She remembered with a sense of irony how a decade earlier she had watched with distaste as television cameras showed parents parading publicly with their gay and lesbian children. Now she felt a surge of frustration at the thought of how many like herself should be here today and were not. Times sure had changed.
Indeed they had—for everyone. Gay Pride 1987 carried the imprint of the plague that had reached full bore in the gay community. For every brightly bedecked float there was a contingent with a mission related to AIDS: the Shanti project, Project Open Hand, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The recently formed group ACT-UP demanded more money for research and prevention. Everywhere, signs condemned the Reagan administration’s indifference. (The president had mentioned AIDS for the first time in seven years in a speech a month earlier.)