Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [88]
Mary and Joy attended Daniel’s high school graduation ceremony and watched the lanky, slender eighteen-year-old proudly mount the podium to receive his diploma and the Bobby Griffith Memorial Scholarship. It was a moment of mixed emotions: to be witnessing the triumph of one gay young man emerge from the tragedy of another. Mary wondered if Bobby was watching. She decided he was.
At a reception afterward, Daniel grasped Mary in an embrace. “Thank you,” he said. “You and Bobby have been an inspiration to me.”
“You’re the inspiration,” Mary said. “And I want you to sign my program!”
Daniel wrote, “From you I can learn strength and courage. Even if it’s only to survive.”
A week later, Daniel had his fifteen minutes of national fame. Newsweek magazine had interviewed him months earlier for what he thought was to be a small story in a special edition on teens. The magazine came out in late June with a two-page spread and a gigantic photo of Daniel, as the symbol of America’s gay teenagers. Days earlier, he had called his Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents and with a fear-choked voice told them he was gay and warned them about the article. They wept and told him, “We’ll pray for you.” He was surprised that it went as easily as it did.
Daniel went on to junior college, working part-time. By 1994, at age twenty-two, he was living in San Francisco, nearing an associate degree, and applying to Berkeley and Stanford, where he planned to begin studies leading to an international business career, with advanced degrees in business and philosophy.
“Life is incredible,” he said recently. “Through all the pain, the one thing I’ve gained has been an appreciation for life. There’s no way I’d change anything that happened. I feel I have the opportunity to do anything in this world.”
As 1991 approached, Mary, Joe, and Con began noticing a disturbing change in Rob Birle. He was losing weight. He tired more easily. In a kind of conspiracy of silence, nobody talked about it, even when Rob announced he was giving up the chairmanship of BANGLE on doctor’s orders.
Rob was a man of prodigious energy and vision. He was action oriented, an idea person. Even after retiring as BANGLE chairman, he remained driven, spearheading a program to donate books on gay life to Contra Costa’s twenty-three high schools, helping form a new coalition of gay activist groups in the county, and continuing to pursue his personal career as an artist.
What he knew, and others were beginning to suspect, was that he had full-blown AIDS. He had been HIV-positive at least since 1985. (He had taken the test the first weekend it became available.)
Tragically, his partner, Andy, was also ill.
While trying desperately to cut back on nonessentials, Rob was determined to work to his last breath to assert the right of gay youth to be protected in school. Ironically, as his work became more widely known, he himself was harassed at Antioch High School. One day he found the word faggot scrawled three feet high on his classroom blackboard. On other occasions, students would hurl epithets in his face in the parking lot. Exhausted, and stressed by the hazing, he resigned his post.
He and Andy took a studio loft in Emeryville, a town that sits between Oakland and Berkeley. There Rob could concentrate on the chalk and watercolor landscapes that typified his style. The works adorned the walls of the loft and were much admired by visitors, including Mary, who particularly liked his colorful depiction of an English garden.
In the summer of 1991, Rob developed an AIDS, side effect that caused him to lose twenty-five pounds rapidly. It no longer made sense for him to be silent, and Rob began disclosing details of his illness to Mary and other friends. Allergic reactions to medication further