Prayers for Bobby: A Mother's Coming to Terms With the Suicide of Her Gay Son

226 Pages·1995·1.28 MB·English

by  Leroy Aarons

Prayers for Bobby
A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son
Leroy Aarons

To Josh Boneh, who believed
Contents
List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Plunge
2. “What Went Wrong?”
3. Fire and Brimstone
4. The Sissy
5. A Rope with No Knot
6. Coming Out
7. The Healing
8. The Leper
9. The Second Coming Out
10. Portland
11. The Golden Thread
12. On the Road
13. Born Again
Afterword: Gay Youth 1996
Appendix: Help Organizations
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
PHOTOGRAPHS
1. Bobby Griffith at nineteen, at home in Walnut Creek, Christmas 1982.
2. Bobby in Oregon, about three months before he died.
3. Mary Griffith four months after Bobby’s death.
4. The Griffith family, summer 1965, from left, Bobby, Mary, Joy, Ed, and Bob
(Nancy was born later).
5. Bobby at age three in the family’s home in Danville, California.
6. Bobby, Christmas 1982, six weeks before he left for Portland.
7. Bobby at sixteen.
8. Mary, January 1986.
9. Bobby at a Halloween party, 1982.
10. Bobby and Mary pose in front of her Volkswagen convertible (which she
never learned to drive), winter 1980.
11. Bobby in Oregon, spring 1983, surveying the scene of the 1980 volcanic
eruption of Mount St. Helens.
12. Mary marching with fellow PFLAGer Marcia Garrison in the Gay Freedom
Day Parade, San Francisco, June 1994.
13. Mary with the latest Griffith, granddaughter Christina, age three, November
1994.
All photographs printed courtesy of the Griffith family and friends, unless
otherwise noted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first acknowledgment is reserved for Mary Griffith, who reached into the
darkest corners of her life to make this book possible. My gratitude to her for her
cooperation, hard work, and friendship is boundless. I am also indebted to the
Griffith family—Bob, Joy, Nancy, and Ed—for their contributions, as well as
other family members and friends who were completely candid and helpful.
Thanks to the following for their help in reading various stages of the
manuscript and suggesting improvements: Charles Kaiser, Juan Palomo, Belinda
Taylor, David Harris, Micha Peled, Beth Smith, and Pat McHenry Sullivan. And,
of course, my beloved Josh, who read and encouraged me every step of the way.
Thanks to researchers John Sullivan and Kate Newburger.
My gratitude to my editor, Kevin Bentley, who saw the potential in this story
early on, was instrumental in Harper San Francisco’s decision to publish it, and
who honcho’d it all the way.
Thanks to Pam Walton for permission to use transcripts of interviews
conducted for her important video documentary Gay Youth.
Finally, to Bobby Griffith, whose living spirit permeates this book and much
of my life.
INTRODUCTION
I first learned of the Griffith family in a 1989 article in the San Francisco
Examiner. The piece, written by staff reporter Lily Eng, was part of a mammoth
sixteen-day series on gays and lesbians in America. The Examiner was
commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall incident, considered
the birth of the gay civil rights movement in America. (The Stonewall Inn was a
Greenwich Village bar whose clientele on a warm summer night in 1969 defied a
squad of police raiders, repelling them with bricks and debris and attracting
hundreds to the scene in a protest that stirred gays and lesbians to action around
the nation.)
I was deeply stirred by the story of Bobby Griffith’s suicide, saddened by the
waste of this young man’s life. The scalding self-hatred contained in the excerpts
from his diary included in the account was indeed painful to behold. My instinct
was to grab hold of the boy who was writing these words and shout, “No,
Bobby! You’ve got it all wrong. You’re okay. It’s the others who are crazy with
hatred and ignorance!”
But, of course, it was too late. Unable to reconcile his gay sexual orientation
with his family’s religious and moral beliefs, Bobby had leaped to his death from
a freeway bridge in 1983.
Other gay kids were committing suicide. In fact, some statistics maintained
that gay teen suicide was approaching an epidemic level. What made the Griffith
story unique was not only the daily record contained in Bobby’s diaries over four
years, but the companion tale of his mother, Mary, a blue-collar suburban
housewife.
Included in the Examiner package was a confessional piece by Mary Griffith
in which she told of the religious fanaticism and fear of gays that had led her to
wage a relentless campaign to get her son to overcome his homosexuality. She
had been too committed to her deep-rooted beliefs to notice that her rejection of
Bobby was contributing to the self-hatred that ultimately culminated in his death.
The death of her son brought into question Mary Griffith’s most basic beliefs.
“Looking back,” she wrote, “I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in
an innocent child’s conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, and self,
leaving little if any feeling of personal worth.”
The story went on to document Mary’s belated change of heart, her rejection
of her religious doctrine, and the beginning of her crusade to help save the lives
of other gay and lesbian children. Now she could say, “What a travesty of God’s
love, for children to grow up believing themselves to be evil, with only a slight
inclination toward goodness, convinced that they will remain undeserving of
God’s love from birth to death.”
This extraordinary conversion touched me as deeply as the tale of Bobby’s
tragic death. This woman of limited education was able to cut through a lifetime
of conditioning, risk rejection by her religious peers, and embrace society’s
outcasts. How did she accomplish that? I wondered. What enabled her to
transcend her background and perform what could only be described as acts of
courage?
Like a lot of other gays and lesbians, I had my own history of rejection and
self-hatred. Fortunately, I never contemplated suicide. It never entered my head
as an option. My self-loathing took me in other directions—directions not quite
as final, but certainly damaging, painful, and self-defeating.
I survived and, indeed, over many years, made peace with myself. But the
Griffith story gripped my heart at a moment when I was taking a major new turn
in my own development.
At the time the article appeared, I was the executive editor of the Oakland
Tribune, a successful senior journalist whose gayness was known to his staff. I
had come out to them, and to my family and friends, several years earlier, after a
lifetime of subterfuge and lying to protect my personal and professional
“image.” I was comfortable being out as a gay man but, as a journalist, had no
intention of ever being involved as a gay activist, beyond going to gay pride
parades as an observer.
In the spring of 1989 the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the
professional association of the newspaper industry, decided for the first time ever
to survey gay and lesbian journalists on their attitudes toward workplace
conditions and news coverage of gay issues. ASNE’s executive director, Lee
Stinnett, asked me if I would coordinate the study.
I agreed with some trepidation, sensing that being the author of such a
national study would somehow change my life. And it did. In April 1990 I
presented the results of the survey to hundreds of peer editors, and in the course
of my presentation outed myself to a national audience. I remember vividly that,
when I said, “As an editor and a gay man, I am proud of ASNE for doing this
survey,” a second sentence ran in my mind as a subtext: “Here I am, world, all of
me, at last!”
Stories ran in the major newspapers and magazines: “News Executive Comes
Out as Gay.” I became a magnet for the aspirations of hundreds of gay and
lesbian journalists, most of them closeted, urging me to form a support
organization. I did so, creating in the summer of 1990 the National Lesbian and
Gay Journalists Association, a pretty pretentious name for a group with six
members. But the moment was right. Within months, hundreds of mainstream
journalists from all over the country had joined. The gay story was catching the
public wave, and with it came the willingness of gay and lesbian journalists to
stand up and be heard. NLGJA thrived, capturing the attention of mainstream
news organizations and ultimately affecting how gays are portrayed in the
national and local press.
I felt a new and heightened sense of integration, a coming together of my
professional and personal lives beyond anything I’d experienced. I could still be
a journalist, yet also be for something without giving up my professional
integrity. I could influence change on behalf of my fellow gays, yet remain
consistent with the tenets of good journalism.
Meanwhile, the Tribune had run into severe economic trouble. I made the
momentous decision to leave newspapers after thirty-three years and devote my
time to NLGJA and to my lifelong dream of being a “serious” writer.
But a writer needs a subject. In mid-1991, the Advocate, a national gay
newsmagazine, ran an item on Mary Griffith. Josh Boneh, my life partner, saw it
and said, “Why not write about her? It’s a great story. It fits the direction you’re
going in. And she lives right here in Walnut Creek [a town a few miles from
Oakland].”
Of course! Josh’s reminder brought back the story with all its emotional
charge. I scrambled for my saved copy of the Examiner article, phoned Lily Eng
to get the Griffith telephone number, and soon was on my way to Walnut Creek.
Mary and I hit it off. Though she was initially shy, I immediately sensed
strength and determination. She had wanted to write a book, but hadn’t gotten
anywhere with it herself. I asked what she hoped such a book would accomplish.
“I’d like to give kids enough courage to continue their lives,” she said, “until
they come to that point where they are able to accept factual information about
their sexual identity.”
Mary spoke calmly, but with a current of urgency. She also wanted to reach
parents, teachers, the churches—all of the targets she already had in her sights
regionally. A book could accomplish that on a national level.
We began a series of detailed interviews over many months. It became clear