Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [81]
She was media-wise enough to know that press attention could amplify this message a millionfold.
“I can handle it,” she assured Rob.
They decided to announce the scholarship in June, launch a fund-raising campaign over the following months to finance it, and award the first scholarships at the end of the 1990 school year. Rob composed a letter of appeal that stressed just how often “the existence of gay and lesbian youth is denied by educators and parents…. We want to say to these forgotten youth, ‘You are not alone. There are adults who care.’”
Independently and almost simultaneously, a San Francisco Examiner reporter was zeroing in on this Walnut Creek housewife who apparently had an amazing story to tell.
Lily Eng was a recently hired freshman reporter at the Examiner assigned to a huge team preparing one of the most ambitious projects in the newspaper’s history. The year 1989 was to be the twentieth anniversary of the dawning of the modern gay civil rights movement outside a nondescript Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall Inn. The Examiner, fabled as the flagship paper that launched the career of tycoon William Randolph Hearst, would commemorate Stonewall by producing a sixteen-day series encompassing every aspect of gay and lesbian life in the country. More than sixty staff members were working on the four-month project, to be titled “Gay in America,” whose appearance would coincide with Gay Pride Month in June. Eng was assigned to interview young people. While digging for sources, she spoke with Rob Birle, who told her about Mary’s speech before the Concord City Council.
“What made Mary so passionate about the issue?” Eng asked.
“Her gay son killed himself,” Rob answered. Eng’s reporter antennae jumped to full alert. She and photographer Liz Mangelsdorf sped to Walnut Creek to interview Mary. What started as a short interview destined for a sidebar ended up lasting three hours. Mary entrusted the reporter with some of Bobby’s diaries. Eng and Mangelsdorf left knowing they had something special.
Back at the office the decision was quickly made to upgrade the story and allow it to stand alone on two full pages in the Sunday edition of June 18, a week before the official Stonewall celebration. (The Sunday edition shares circulation with the city’s powerful other daily newspaper, the Chronicle, with a combined readership of close to 1 million.)
That Sunday, readers opened their newspapers to the headline “Bobby’s Legacy: After Her Son’s Death, Mary Griffith Learns to Understand His Gayness and Vows to Help Other Young People.”
Just below was a large blowup of a sad-eyed Mary beside a portrait of her son. In addition to the story and diary excerpts, the paper gave Mary a platform from which to make a powerful statement to gay youngsters:
To all the Bobbys and Janes out there, I say these words to you as I would to my own precious children: Please don’t give up hope on life or yourselves. You are very special to me and I am working very hard to make this life a better and safer place for you to live in.
I firmly believe—though I did not back then—that my son Bobby’s suicide is the end result of homophobia and ignorance within most Protestant and Catholic churches, and consequently within society, our public schools, our own family.
What a travesty of God’s love for children to grow up believing themselves to be evil, with only a slight inclination toward goodness…. Is it any wonder our young people give up on love, as Bobby did, and the hope of ever receiving the validation they