Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [76]
Interestingly, she was neither an organizer nor a natural leader. She was ingenuous about how the world works in general and about politics in particular. But she was a fast learner and would move by instinct, often reacting to situations around her, yet ever alert to opportunity and intensely focused on goals. She had the ability to recognize leadership in others and ally herself with them.
Hank Wilson was one of those. He was the kind of person whose inner engine is constantly revving. He had been an advocate all his adult life, mostly for gay causes. In person he conveyed high energy and commitment with an undercurrent of impatience. His alert eyes behind thin-rimmed spectacles seemed to be darting in all directions. As a VISTA volunteer, as a teacher, and most recently as manager of a hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district whose clientele consisted of HIV-positive drifters, Wilson, in his forties, had developed a sophisticated understanding of politics and power.
He helped the legendary Harvey Milk get elected a San Francisco supervisor. He helped voters defeat the Briggs Initiative in 1978, which would have banned gay teachers in California schools. But for the last ten years his special passion had been the cause of gay and lesbian youth. As far back as 1977 he had formed a gay teachers’ coalition in San Francisco with Tom Ammiano, a stand-up comic and activist who went on to become president of the San Francisco School Board and a city supervisor. In those days coming out as a gay teacher, even in San Francisco, took unusual courage. (It still does.)
In the mid-1980s he crashed the first federally sponsored conference on youth suicide and challenged it to confront the issue of gay teen suicide, which, astonishingly, was not on its agenda. The large number of gay suicides among the national teen suicide statistics was still an unspoken reality. (In 1989 the Health and Human Services Department published a study that included the now-famous chapter on gay suicide, suppressed by the Bush administration under pressure from the right.)
Wilson met Mary Griffith in 1987 at a P-FLAG statewide retreat in Mar in County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Mary told her story as part of a discussion group. The presentation electrified Wilson. Here was a woman whose personal tragedy transcended political rhetoric. She was not a radical activist with a predetermined agenda. She was speaking from her own personal experience. Wilson found this far more effective than any politically correct analysis. He thought it had great potential to humanize the issues for which he had been fighting for years.
At another point he heard her speaking again, this time to a state commission. “You could hear a pin drop,” he later recalled. “Everyone was very moved. She touched hearts, not just minds.” An inveterate networker, he hoped to find a way to help channel this asset.
The opportunity came at a dinner sponsored by Gay and Lesbian Awareness and Development, an organization that had grown out of the fight over the proposed Gay Freedom Week in Concord. It attracted most of the local Contra Costa County activists, among them Rob Birle, a young art teacher who was organizing other teachers in the county to pressure schools to include programs for gay students.
Birle and Wilson had gotten to know each other in 1984 when Rob, then a candidate for a teaching credential at San Francisco State University, had the idea of forming a regional organization of gay and lesbian educators. Wilson had already created the local gay teachers’ coalition, and had become a mentor for the younger man. Birle called his organization the Bay Area Network of Gay and Lesbian Educators (BANGLE). It was an audacious concept at the time, because few teachers dared go public and face the career consequences stemming from lurid stereotypes