Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [85]
SALLY JESSE: Mary, talk to the parents.
MARY: Our gay and lesbian children need to have their self-esteem and self-worth restored. I believe in order for this to happen parents need to be open-minded. They need to be open to the special information that’s available. Your child needs to know that he’s an equal, lovable, and valuable person. Not only the parents, but the school administrators [her voice breaks], President Bush and Mrs. Bush and members of Congress and our religious leaders—let them not be, as I was, an unwitting accomplice to an innocent person’s death.
SALLY JESSE: Where is Bobby now?
MARY: I believe Bobby’s in a time and place that he can be himself. He can be accepted….
SALLY JESSE: Will God accept him?
MARY: Oh, yes.
Television brought Mary wide exposure to a new audience—straight people who might never before have seen close-up the very human tragedy of gay suicide but who could identify with the horror of losing a child, any child. Mary evoked a powerful, universal empathy. On-screen images of studio audiences weeping each time she told her story persuaded the gay youth movement that it had a powerful asset in Mary Griffith.
P-FLAG framed a major national direct-mail appeal around Mary and Bobby in late 1990. It included a four-page solicitation letter in Mary’s name and a mail-back insert with Bobby’s photo prominently displayed, with the legend: “Dear Mary, In memory of Bobby and the other gay and lesbian youth lost to suicide, I’m making this gift.”
Reacting to suppression of the report on gay youth suicide, P-FLAG also launched a national awareness campaign called Respect All Youth and invited Mary to address the press conference kicking off the effort in Orange County (Dannemeyer-Sheldon country). Respect All Youth would be a nationwide education program providing informational materials and training counselors to fight gay youth suicide.
Wearing her button with Bobby’s portrait, Mary spoke to a crush of reporters and photographers at the Hyatt Regency in Anaheim. “I am here today because I have learned in the most painful way possible that ignorance, hatred, bigotry, and prejudice lead to violence and tragedy…. And I have learned that love, honesty, support, and acceptance…lead to health, wholeness, and self-esteem for our children.”
When not racing off to television appearances and press conferences, Mary continued making the rounds of school districts with Rob and overseeing her P-FLAG chapter, which was growing as a result of her developing public persona. School districts were slowly responding: two of them agreed to receive literature and video materials, and another pledged to update its sex-education curriculum. But at least three districts still refused to meet with her and Rob.
Through Rob, Mary discovered two people who would become her mainstays in P-FLAG.
Joe Torp and Con Smith were retired schoolteachers who had been a couple since 1952. In every respect but gender, they lived the prototypical suburban existence in a handsome tract home with swimming pool in Concord.
For several decades, Joe and Con had lived closeted lives as schoolteachers. After retiring, they felt free to get involved, and were attracted to Rob’s BANGLE organization. Soon they offered their home as a meeting site and began running the organization’s phone tree and coordinating its newsletter mailings.
Through BANGLE they met Mary. Joe, now in his seventies, is soft-spoken and professorial, in contrast to his more whimsical partner. (Con Smith died in late 1994.) Joe was drawn to P-FLAG because of an incident that occurred during his teaching years at Antioch High in Contra Costa County. It involved a star student, lettered in three different sports and president of his senior class, who developed a crush on one of the male teachers. The boy went to the teacher and blurted out his passion. But the teacher, fearful for his job, refused to discuss the situation or counsel him. Some time later, the young man drove his car into a eucalyptus tree