Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [84]
The administration was heading into an important midterm election year and could not have been eager to alienate the large, wealthy, and powerful voting bloc of the religious right. Within a month HHS secretary Louis Sullivan sent a reassuring and ingratiating reply to Dannemeyer, saying “the views expressed in the [Gibson] paper do not in any way represent my personal beliefs or the policy of this Department.” He hastened to add, “I am strongly committed to advancing traditional family values. Federal policies must strengthen rather than undermine the institution of the family. In my opinion the views expressed in the paper ran contrary to that aim.”
Decoded, the message from Sullivan, one of the few high-ranking blacks in the Bush government and the man answerable for the health of all Americans, was that the definition of traditional family excludes those that happen to include gay or lesbian children. The subtextual message to Dannemeyer and the factions he represented was “not to worry”—this report was not going anywhere. In fact, the government retired it to bureaucratic obscurity, and the two thousand copies of the first and only printing became collector’s items.
But the genie was out of the file cabinet. The press got wind of the controversy with the help of an alliance of gay lobbying organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and national P-FLAG. (Mary Griffith allowed her name to be signed to letters sent to the administration and members of Congress. The letter to Secretary Sullivan in her name urged him “to investigate the true facts concerning homosexuality.”)
The debate moved in October 1989 to the floor of the House of Representatives, where Dannemeyer tried without success to attach a rider to an appropriations bill that would have cut off school districts such as Los Angeles’s for involvement in gay-friendly programs. (The effort did not end: five years later a similar bill, spearheaded by North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, nearly made it through Congress.)
Controversy over gay teen suicide, plus the startling statistics and other details of the Gibson report, circulated in the gay press and gave the topic enough sizzle to penetrate the mainstream media. Soon stories on gay teen suicide were showing up in most of the leading metropolitan newspapers, with reporters playing up local angles in smaller venues.
The daytime talk shows were next to discover the topic. Their needs were different: they had to have live “heads” telling dramatic stories. Program directors turned for help to the well-connected national office of P-FLAG in Washington, D.C., which was continually fielding requests from the national and local media, both electronic and print, for interviews, articles, and talk-show guests. National P-FLAG was just beginning to realize that it had a significant asset in Mary Griffith. The organization began recommending her when inquiries came in.
The opportunity for a national audience for her message excited Mary. When the call came to appear on “The Joan Rivers Show,” she jumped at it. Over the next two years, Mary appeared on “Sally Jesse Raphael,” the “Today” show, “Oprah,” “Maury Povich,” “Ricki Lake,” “The Cristina Show,” and a segment of ABC’s “20/20.” In addition, at least six video projects—including Pam Walton’s extremely affecting forty-five-minute film Gay Youth—revolved around Mary or included major segments on her story.
Mary turned out to be quite telegenic in a nontelevision kind of way. The plainspoken appeal she had in person translated to the small screen. Her craggy, frontier-woman face, punctuated by worry lines around the mouth, communicated honesty and grit. Her voice, deliberate and flat-toned, was reassuringly American. Her words had the authority of a survivor of almost unimaginable tragedy. She told the same story again and again,