Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [92]
This prospect attracted a broad band of interests, including the religious right, which depicted the plan as an insidious effort to intrude the “homosexual agenda” into public schools.
Mary, one in a long list of speakers, would have three minutes, She worked for days to condense her story and then practiced her work silently in front of the microwave while making dinner. She finished polishing her speech the day before the hearing and waited impatiently for Joy to come home so she could read it aloud. As she read it to Joy, and reached the passage about Bobby’s suicide and the silence of the schools, she began to weep.
“What if this happens tomorrow?” Mary asked, sniffling.
“Go ahead and cry, Mom,” said Joy. “Don’t worry about it.”
Joy drove Mary to Sacramento. The large hearing room was a noisy, crowded arena of disparate interests: the gay and gay-friendly; the fundamentalist opposition; and the panel of educators, most of them Republican appointees.
The Reverend Lou Sheldon was there, a surprisingly innocuous-looking squat man spreading his gospel in a high-pitched voice. He held a. mini-press conference in the hallway, citing statistics that he claimed explained “the driving need for the homosexual community to convince people of their sexual legitimacy and to recruit young people into the lifestyle.”
Mary waited her turn, listening to the testimony and bristling at the rhetoric of the Christian right. One witness—a young missionary barely out of his teens—spent his three minutes citing a survey that purported to quantify the percentage breakdown of perverse sexual acts performed by gay people: “…and 45 percent engage in anal fisting….”
When he finished, Mary could not restrain herself. With Joy trailing behind, Mary rose from her seat and accosted the young man. “Thanks very much,” Mary said, with obvious sarcasm. The young man recognized her.
“Look, I didn’t write this stuff,” he said. “It’s a legitimate study.”
“You need to think twice before you preach your politics,” Mary shot back. A small crowd was gathering. “My son and most gay and lesbian people live respectable lives. You have desecrated my son’s memory.”
“I wasn’t talking about your son.”
Mary said, “My son is gay. But you could have dug up the same hateful things to say about heterosexuals.”
The young man was getting uncomfortable. “I wasn’t talking about all gay people.”
Mary started to leave, then stopped, turned around, and fixed upon him the sternest stare she could muster. “You have a lot to learn about your Lord,” she said, and walked away.
Her heart was pumping hard. She was not good at confrontation, especially in public. But Mary was mad, and the adrenaline flowed. It carried her through lunch (coincidentally, she sat at a table adjacent to Sheldon’s) and back into the hearing room to claim her three minutes. She had to make this count, she thought, for Bobby and all the children who suffer because they are different.
She traced Bobby’s early history. “Alone, frightened, ashamed, Bobby could not turn to his parents, brother, sister, scout leader, friends, Sunday school teacher, or pastor. Without hope for the future, he dropped to his death over a freeway overpass. Today Bobby’s grammar school, junior high, and high school still remain silent, giving consent to the ignorance, discrimination, and homophobia that destroyed his life.”
Too agitated to cry, Mary leaned forward, her voice gaining intensity. “This silence has deprived our children of an equal education…that provides knowledge vital to their health and welfare. To remain silent is blatantly to give consent to suicide statistics, consent to the mental, emotional, and physical abuse suffered not only by my son but countless [others]….”
In closing, she took on the