Bobby undoubtedly picked up these contradictory signals and processed them in the crucible of his adolescent fears and yearnings. Puberty brought him face to face with the reality that the cravings he was experiencing now had a label, a label abhorred by his family, his church, his school, and much of his nation. Being gay, it seemed, could be lethal.
With the benefit of hindsight, Mary, Joy, and the others remember a sudden change in Bobby at adolescence — a draining of spirit, the suggestion of melancholy. In retrospect, the direct link to sexuality is clear. At the time, however, it registered as the weltschmerz of a young adolescent. The onset of adolescent acne, which would plague him to the end of his life, also took its toll on his psyche.
Bobby yielded a clue to his inner storm in an essay written for a high school English class. He wrote about a recurring dream of childhood, an exhilarating flying dream that wafted him above the trees — free, alive, and happy:
As I got older, around junior high age, the dreams ceased and I missed them. The last flying dream I had was what I think might have been a sort of warning. The dream begins outside my window, but I find myself anxious. As I fly I’m afraid. There are telephone lines, and antennae and electrical wires. How painful it would be to run into one. This causes me to be very paranoid. I wonder why I can’t be happy and free like before….
During the early years of my life (up to about 11 or 12), I was in fact happy and free. I liked who I was. I knew I was very individual and maybe even a little different in the eyes of my friends. But that didn’t stop me from being ME…. But as I grew up and became more and more conscious of others and what they wanted, I think I maybe began to see the differences between myself and those around me. I had felt rejection before, but when you’re younger for some reason it doesn’t hurt quite as much. Now I was older and really felt a stronger need for acceptance. So, unconsciously, and slowly, I began to lose touch with who I really was. That’s where the paranoid flying dream may play a part.
The teacher, obviously moved by this confessional essay, remarked in his marginal notes, “Your paper is wonderful…. The change you describe is pretty typical. Pure, loving and young souls soon learn negativity and insecurity by being exposed to the bombings of society.”
The bombings were getting to him. He was fifteen and a half, a sophomore at Las Lomas High School. He was taking antibiotics for his acne. He was engrossed at the time in a drama workshop sponsored by the youth group at the church. Bobby began recording his feelings at the beginning of 1979, in the midst of an unusually wet and gloomy winter. His first effort, written on a piece of notebook paper on January 29, 1979, was titled “Survival.”
I will survive, because God wants me to. God wants us all to survive. No, God wants us to survive and be happy. There’s a big difference between surviving and surviving being happy. But surviving is the first part. How do we do it? I think that inside each one of us there is a kernal [sic], in this kernal is the power and energy to survive. But when we think that we can no longer survive a decision has to be made: between sinking and swimming. The latter is the best choice now.
By then he had purchased an 8½by-ll-inch spiral notebook and resolved to keep a diary. On January 30, he began it. On February 5, he asked,
What’s next? Who knows what strange evil force lies around the corner, waiting in the shadows? I find that life is a giant challenge, a challenge I will meet.
The entries of the first three months resembled those of any adolescent going through the throes of teenhood: disliking school, struggling with grades, seeing movies like The Outlaw Blues and Dawn of the Dead, going to a weekend Christian camp, constructing the sets for a church skit.
But in the spring of 1979, near his sixteenth birthday, the tone took a drastic turn.
I can’t ever let anyone find out that I’m not straight. It would be so humiliating. My friends would hate me. They might even want to beat me up. And my family? I’ve overheard them. They’ve said they hate gays, and even God hates gays, too. Gays are bad, and God sends bad people to hell. It really scares me when they talk that way because now they are talking about me.
Bobby Griffith’s secret world was about to blow apart.
FIVE A Rope with No Knot
MARY, 1983–1985
In the days and weeks after Bobby’s funeral the members of the Griffith family found themselves behaving like survivors of a great natural disaster. They wandered about in a daze of grief and guilt.
Joy would cry in the car every day on the way to work. Ed decided not to sign up for the fall semester at Hayward State, where he was studying law enforcement; he took to sleeping long hours, sometimes staying in bed for two days at a time. Nancy, just thirteen, was shaken. “Can that happen to me?” she asked. “Could I turn gay?”
“No,” her mother quickly assured her.
And Mary felt as if she had been sucked into a bottomless pit of pain. The loss was at once unacceptable and inevitable. That cruel, unceasing contradiction made her dizzy; it was more than her circuits could absorb.
The night after the funeral, the family, alone at last, gathered around the kitchen table: Bob and Mary, Nancy, Joy, and Ed.
They talked. They reminisced. They came to the remarkable conclusion that while they knew that Bobby was miserable, none of them had ever entertained the notion that he was in danger of taking his life. Mary said she wasn’t surprised when she heard it, and yet she hadn’t anticipated it. The unspoken question was, Why not? If only they had been more aware, more sensitive, maybe they could have prevented it.
Bob got up from the table, his face twisted. Joy followed and found him in his bedroom, hanging his head. Joy put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I hope you know that none of us feel like it was something you should have done, or could have done.” Bob’s eyes were wet. He said, “I just didn’t know Bobby was in so much pain. I wasn’t there when he needed me.”
In the days that followed, first Mary, then Joy read the diaries. Both were stunned by the depth of Bobby’s despair. They got a faint glimmer of Bobby’s fatal contradiction: he knew he could not change what he knew he never could accept. Yet Mary always believed he could change, that God would change him.
When the grief counselors from Walnut Creek Pres came to the house, they found the family in shock. Assistant Pastor Cully Anderson, a compassionate man, felt helpless in the presence of such grief. Suicide is always awkward for a pastor, and when a young life is snatched from its future as in this case…
He and the family sat in uncomfortable silence in the small living room. A picture of a smiling Bobby sat on the buffet, next to which Mary had placed a lighted candle, vowing to keep it lit forever. Finally, Mary haltingly voiced a subject that had been forming in her mind. “There must be other Bobbys out there,” she said. “As far as I know the church had no program to reach out to my son. What about other young gay people who may be thinking about taking their lives?”
“I don’t know,” Anderson replied, weakly. There was no such program at the church. There was nothing more to say.
Mary did not bring up the issue that gnawed at her: the state of Bobby’s mortal soul. She knew the church would have her believe he was safely in heaven. There was no use arguing her personal theology, drawn from Revelation, the section of the New Testament from which fundamentalists derive the prophecy of imminent Armageddon: “And anyone whose name was not in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” Bobby in the lake of fire! Her child! Unthinkable, unbearable! It seemed clear to her that her church was not going to provide the answers she needed.