The Griffith youngsters and their parents spent much of their time within the extended family circle. The Griffith-Harrison family constellation was rather insular. Ophelia and Alvin were always at the ready to rescue one of the children involved in a messy divorce, an illness, or financial straits.
The Griffiths knew little about outreach — how to navigate institutions outside their narrow universe. They had little need to. Bob’s profession and its powerful union met their modest needs. Their suburban lives were relatively sheltered. Although Bob liked to read, dabbling in Hemingway and even Faulkner, the Griffiths retained an unworldliness that would work against them when real crisis struck.
In his prepuberty days Bobby would have been described as a happy, free spirit. He organized carnivals in his backyard for the neighborhood kids. He loved animals and longed for a pet raccoon. He liked to write, and won a prize for an essay he did on John Muir. He was shy, yet loved to laugh and had a mildly mischievous streak.
Bobby wanted and needed to feel accepted. The family unit, a tightly bound circle of love and protection, was the universe in which he defined himself. He rarely acted out, flared with anger, or did anything that would draw anger in return. He was so good that his mother once told him, “Bobby, I wish I had fifty more little boys like you.” Privately, she worried that her son was fading into the woodwork, so good as to be almost invisible, ignored.
If he felt different from the others, Bobby never showed it. “When I was little, I never gave a second thought to playing house, or playing dolls or wearing my mother’s jewelry,” he reminisced in his diary. Yet, he records, “when I was young I was always very sensitive, and it didn’t take much to make me cry.”
He waxed nostalgic about the good old days: “What a good time in my life that was. I was really a beautiful little boy then, right before high school. [In] 9th grade all my troubles began.”
Before the “troubles” surfaced, some warning signs appeared. At age thirteen, Bobby became fascinated with the television fitness guru Jack LaLanne, whose syndicated show enjoyed wide success in the early stages of the health boom. Bobby would rise early and sit at the tube for a couple of hours watching the muscular LaLanne go through his routines, then catch reruns after school. Mary noticed that Bobby merely watched, never joined in the routines. It annoyed her. “Bobby,” she asked once, “why don’t you ever do the exercises?” Bobby reacted with rare anger and walked out of the room.
Homosexuality was much in the news at the time. The gay liberation movement had begun in 1969 and surged in the 1970s with a blatant and vocal flourish. San Francisco, a mere fifteen miles from Rudgear Road, was its heartland. The Castro district, a run-down neighborhood off Market Street, blossomed as gay and lesbian America’s Main Street for the thousands of homosexuals who were flocking to the tolerant city from all across the country.
Some gays celebrated their newfound sexual freedom and political clout with the intensity and excess of longtime prisoners on a weekend pass. The annual Gay Pride Parade each June presented television images of flaunting, seminude people strutting in bizarre getups and makeup, exulting in the sheer joy of visibility.
For Mary, a few miles and several light years away, the spectacle was frightening. She knew little of homosexuality, but the little she did know had overtones of a decadent and carnal secret ritual, a cabal somehow aligned with the satanic, condemned by her Bible and her church. When a group of mothers marched by the cameras in the pride parade carrying a sign that read, “We love our gay children,” Mary wondered aloud, “How can they do that? How can they support their kids being gay?”
Bobby probably heard that remark. If he didn’t, he certainly heard others. Granny often said of gay people, “They should line ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em.”
Channel 42, the religious station that Mary watched for hours, had its share of horror stories. There was the tale of the young girl tempted by Satan into lesbianism who managed to wrest herself away and return to the family fold. God was helping her to be strong and not backslide into sin.
Then there was a girlfriend of Mary’s brother Charles, who visited the Griffiths for a weekend, and when the weather turned cool one night borrowed a coat from Mary. Later, Joy stumbled on a letter to that same woman that made it clear she had experimented sexually with another woman.
Joy told her mother about it. Mary was horrified. She strode to her closet and ferreted out the coat the woman had worn. She could never bring herself to wear it again. She sent it off to Goodwill.
When Mary’s niece Debbie heard about the incident, she asked her, “Mary, don’t you think you should have more compassion and understanding?” Mary’s answer was simple and direct: “You can’t love God and be a homosexual.”
Across the country the gay movement was stretching the limits in all directions. In San Francisco, George Moscone openly campaigned for the gay votes that helped put him into office as mayor in 1977. Elsewhere, states and municipalities were passing antidiscrimination laws.
In Dade County, Florida, which encompasses Miami, voters in January 1977 approved the first gay civil rights law in the South. Within weeks of the Dade County result, Southern Baptists had organized to overturn it, putting forward as their spokeswoman the lady of the orange juice commercials, the former beauty queen Anita Bryant. The story went national. Bryant appeared on TV screens to declare that gays were out to proselytize America’s children. “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit,” she said. The Ku Klux Klan endorsed her effort, which was called Save Our Children. That organization’s brochures featured headlines about men molesting boys.
In Walnut Creek, Mary watched Anita Bryant with frank admiration. Her own vague fear of homosexuality was being articulated by a powerful and devout Christian, an admired public figure. So, when the Dade County gay rights ordinance was repealed by a vote of two to one in June 1977, Mary naturally approved. Bryant’s victory speech was a declaration of war against homosexuals, who, she said, are “dangerous to the sanctity of the family, dangerous to our children, dangerous to our survival as one nation under God.”
After Bryant’s victory, the gay rights movement went into retreat. Other gay ordinances were overturned. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority emerged on the scene. In Mary’s own church, the pastor vigorously opposed ordination of gays, which had been recommended by a national Presbyterian study group. “Were avowed homosexuals to be ordained,” he wrote in Walnut Creek Presbyterian’s church bulletin, “they would have a role-modeling effect upon those under them, and this would not be good…. This is an explosive issue — but my confidence is in a great God who can disarm the bomb before it has a chance to go off…. Our enemy, the Devil, never sleeps.” His confidence was rewarded when the national church overturned the study group’s majority report and rejected its recommendation. (The ordination debate has continued into the mid-1990s.)
Meanwhile, across the bay, gays in San Francisco seemed undaunted by the rising forces of opposition. In November 1977 they flexed their political muscle to elect Harvey Milk to the city’s board of supervisors, the first openly gay elected public official in a major city. The next June, 375,000 people marched in the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the nation’s largest turnout for any cause since the antiwar movement. And the following November, California voters defeated by two to one an initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools.
Three weeks later, gays were jolted into reality. Harvey Milk was shot dead in his office by Dan White, a deranged ex-city supervisor who hated gays. The city’s liberal mayor, George Moscone, had fallen minutes earlier to White’s bullets. Six months later a jury gave White a mere six years in prison.