Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [89]
As Andy’s condition also worsened, Andy’s family in Kansas City begged the couple to move home to the Midwest, where they would have the benefit of a support network. (Rob was still estranged from his own family.) The decision made, Rob announced it with regret at a BANGLE meeting. Mary was distraught. She had come to love Rob.
Moreover, she knew that he was the engine that drove the effort in the schools, which was all-important to her. She would recall later, “Rob was the number-one sharpshooter, a one-man show.”
In the fall, Mary, Betty Lambert, Andy, and Rob gathered for a farewell lunch in an Oakland restaurant. They tried to keep it light. Mary teased Rob and Andy about whether they were going by airline to Kansas (actually Missouri) or simply clicking their heels together three times.
Rob joked with Mary about her growing celebrity. “The only face I see more of on the tube these days is Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
Mary returned, “Yeah, but I didn’t have to punch a cop to get on.”
“Mary, I hope you keep going,” Rob said, now serious. “It’s needed. And no one else can do it the way you can.”
“I don’t know how I’ll manage without you, Rob,” she said. She looked across at him, so thin, and restrained a sob. Both believed that when Rob left in a few weeks they would never see each other again.
Outside, in the parking lot, Rob lifted the latch on the trunk of his car and pulled something out. He unrolled a canvas, and Mary saw with a start that it was the English garden landscape she loved.
“I want you to have this,” he said, “as a remembrance.”
Mary, speechless, murmured a thank you, and they hugged for a long time. A few weeks later, Rob and Andy were gone. Mary matted and framed the landscape and hung it over the mantel in the living room.
As luck would have it, Rob’s health improved in Missouri, and they saw each other three times over the next few years when Rob visited the West Coast. In Missouri, Rob continued his activism even as the virus finally began to catch up with him and Andy. He organized a books-in-school project that erupted in controversy when irate parents in some Missouri school districts held book burnings. Nonetheless, a number of districts persisted, and students in forty-two high schools now can read about gays and lesbians in a selection of educator-approved books in school libraries. (Rob’s partner, Andy, died in 1994.)
With Rob many miles away, Joe and Con assumed leadership of Contra Costa BANGLE and, with Mary, undertook the book project Rob had started before he left. Mary was instrumental in getting a seed grant from United Way to purchase the books. With cooperation from most of the districts, such volumes as Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World, Positively Gay, Beyond Acceptance, and Fried Green Tomatoes found their way to schools throughout the county.
But, once there, most of the books mysteriously disappeared—lost, misplaced, or dropped into trash containers. When the story of the disappearing books hit the local media, BANGLE was able to replace them, with assurances from schools that they would make it into the libraries. (There would be no book-burning parties in progressive California.)
Mary was especially gratified when she learned that Bobby’s alma mater, Las Lomas High School, had placed the books in its library. It was more than ten years after Bobby had dropped out, mortified by his secret and feeling like an alien. Now, a decade late, there was at least a modicum of progress, she told herself.
Although her schedule remained busy, ranging widely from local community work to the responsibilities of her broader national role, she worried that the problem was far greater than the resources available to tackle it. She happily accepted the Community Service Award of the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights, a group of lesbian and gay physicians, and, later, national P-FLAG’s annual Humanitarian Award. But she constantly looked for ways to amplify her voice, or generate other voices.
In that respect, Mary worked