Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [79]
Though Mary and Rob could not know it at the time, their efforts coincided with the first stirrings of a new national debate over sex education and, more specifically, over the focus on gay and lesbian youth. It would escalate over the next several years to one of the most contentious fights in the struggle between gay rights advocates and the religious right.
Already, Contra Costa BANGLE’s modest campaign was drawing fire from the local chapter of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), a southern California-based antigay group headed by an Orange County minister named Lou Sheldon. The national organization was at the moment going after larger game—namely, Project 10 in Los Angeles.
The brainchild of a science teacher, Virginia Uribe, Project 10 was inspired by the example of an effeminate student who had been harassed mercilessly and finally forced out of Uribe’s school, Fairfax High. Uribe began Project 10 modestly in 1984 at Fairfax. Unique in the country, it caught on and enjoyed such success that it soon expanded to include teacher training and counseling services throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District. (It would become the prototype of efforts in other California districts.) In effect, what Project 10 did was precisely what Rob and Mary were seeking: it provided an in-school place where youngsters who were gay or thought they might be gay could go for counseling, referral, and reassurance.
Sheldon, who tirelessly and zealously pursued any project that threatened to “promote” homosexuality, now was lobbying for legislation that would cut off all aid to the Los Angeles school district unless it scuttled Project 10. “We’ve fired the first round in a total involvement effort which brings us in open warfare with the gay and lesbian community’s agenda for the country,” he told his supporters in a fund-raising letter. “And California is the beachhead. We must stop it here before it spreads throughout the nation like cancer.”
Project 10, he argued, drew teenagers into homosexuality—“one of the most pernicious evils of our society.” With Sheldon’s urging, a sympathetic legislator filed a bill in the state legislature that would outlaw the “advocacy” of homosexuality in public education.
The bill was a direct threat not only to Project 10 but to BANGLE’s hopes of introducing a modicum of reform in Contra Costa schools. In response, Rob organized a demonstration. He, Mary, and one hundred other Bay Area activists picketed loudly one rainy evening in November 1988 outside a Walnut Creek church where the local TVC was meeting. The event made all the local papers.
“This is a warning,” Rob told a reporter. “This is an indication that we’re not going to sit by idly while we’re being attacked.” (As it turned out, the bill got nowhere.)
They carried candles and shouted slogans. This was Mary’s first full-fledged demonstration, and for a moment she had to marvel at how far she’d come. Here she was toting a sign, standing in the rain outside the Evangelical Free Church, and shouting “Shame!” at a group of people whom four years earlier she would have considered ideological brethren.
On the home front, her family tracked Mary’s activities with somewhat bemused support. Generally, they approved. Joy, Nancy, Ed, and Bob had come a long way from the earlier days, although they were left in the wake of Mary’s high-velocity changes. Whatever their previous attitudes or doubts, they had been converted by the corroding pain of loss. This should not happen to a family. And if homophobia caused it, then homophobia must be opposed. And if Mary was prepared to take the lead on this, they were happy to have her represent the rest of them. They cheered her on. Thank God, thought Nancy, ironically; at least Mom was not spouting Bible verses anymore. They would drive her to events, even attend award dinners on occasion, but