Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [87]
Finally, she was ready to meet Jim’s young man. They met at a restaurant in San Francisco, with her husband and son. To her delight, Jim’s boyfriend arrived with a bouquet of flowers for her. They got on beautifully.
The rest was easy. Jenny and her son grew closer than before. The crisis was over, but mother, father, and son remained active in the chapter. The more Jenny learned, the more angry she became at the injustice she saw in society’s rejection of gay people. Jenny felt that those who had been helped must be prepared to help others. Obviously, many others felt this way, too: attendance at chapter meetings on the first Tuesday of every month in the Griffith living room swelled to more than twenty people, spilling over into the kitchen.
In June 1990, Diablo Valley P-FLAG and BANGLE announced the winners of the first Bobby Griffith Memorial Scholarships to a fanfare of press attention. The public had donated enough money (nearly six thousand dollars) to endow four five-hundred-dollar scholarships. Winners included a nongay girl at Antioch High School, and the first gay person honored, eighteen-year-old Daniel Paul Layer, from Castro Valley High School in neighboring Alameda County.
Daniel Layer knew he was gay from an early age. The product of a broken marriage, he had lived with each of his parents at different periods of his life. It was not until junior high school in the agricultural backwater town of Tracy, California (between San Francisco and Sacramento), that Daniel realized he was different in the eyes of others. He was not effeminate, but, like Bobby before him, neither was he given to fighting and roughhousing. Daniel was mercilessly persecuted, called “fag” and “homo” and physically attacked with regularity.
Once in biology lab, classmates threw dissected frogs at him. Another student held his head underwater and almost drowned him in a water-polo match. By the time he moved forty miles west to Castro Valley with his mother, Daniel was determined never to let that happen again. At Castro Valley High he did everything possible to blend in, playing a conformist role, stifling his natural inclinations. He made friends and became popular, but at a great psychic cost. The internal forces working within had no place to vent themselves; other than a schoolmate with whom he’d had a short fling, he had told no one and felt he could tell no one.
At sixteen, after breaking up with the schoolmate, Daniel became depressed. His grades dropped. He could see no hope for college or any kind of a future. He began to plot the most painless and least messy way to do away with himself. One afternoon, with his mother at work, he cleared the house of pets and plants, sealed the windows, extinguished the pilot lights, turned on the gas oven, and put his head inside.
Ten to fifteen minutes later the phone rang. In a dazed state, Daniel withdrew his head from the oven and crawled to the telephone. It was a girlfriend from school, intuitively calling to see how he was. Daniel hung up, turned off the gas, and cried for two hours. He cried at the realization that there were people who cared, that he truly wanted to live, that he had almost taken his own life. Had the call come three minutes later, he figured, it would have been too late.
Two years later, Daniel heard about the Griffith scholarship. By that time he had come out to his mother, and together they researched the history of the Griffiths. In Bobby, Daniel recognized himself, separated only by a fateful three minutes. He wrote in his winning essay, “It makes me physically ill to realize that other gay and lesbian people have gone through, or are going through, what I had to. Some succeed in cutting off a part of themselves by pretending it isn’t there. Others simply cut themselves out of everything they could have had a chance to do with their lives.”
He was astonished to learn he had won. It meant a lot to him, far more