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 that Mary had another reason in mind for the book. Nearly a decade after Bobby’s death, she still carried a burden of guilt for her role in the tragedy. Laying it out in a book for the world to witness would be an act of expiation.
Mary was hard on herself. She seemed to relish telling stories about dumb or thoughtless acts she committed regarding Bobby. She told them with the zeal of a convert. As she said, she was amazed at her stupidity.
But as I got to know her, and the rest of the Griffith family — Mary’s husband, Bob; her son Ed; and Ed’s sisters, Nancy and Joy — I came to realize that this was a story not of brute rejection, but of ignorance. The surviving Griffiths love one another with an intensity that few families can match. It became clear to me they had loved Bobby with that same magnitude, and he them.
Most gay suicides occur among youngsters who were disowned by their families — cast out and cut off. One of the ironies of this story is that the Griffiths acted from love. What they lacked was information and comprehension, and any knowledge of how to go about getting them. What they relied upon was the limited vocabulary of response they had available to them. It was as if they lived in a sealed bubble, unable to grasp the consequences of their actions. The events unfolded as they did with a tragic inevitability.
Through his diaries and his family, friends, and coworkers, I came to know Bobby as well as it is possible to know someone who is no longer living. He was a tender soul from the beginning, vulnerable to slights, eager to please, shy. At the same time he had a vibrant life force, reflected in his open, smiling map-of-America face. He took pleasure in nature, in things artistic, in comic hyperbole, and most tellingly in his writing, which for someone so young had elements of eloquence and promise.
The contortion of that promise, that life, which I traced exhaustively, was all the more painful in the context of what should have been a supportive and loving environment. The internal family psychosis that often clicks in when homosexuality is a factor is one of the cautionary themes of this book.
As I dug deeper, another subtext asserted itself. What I was discovering was more than the story of Mary’s overcoming prejudice; it was also the story of her liberation as a thinking, adult woman, at age fifty. Mary had grown up with a deep-seated insecurity, clinging to the approval from her husband, her mother, and her church. The awful impact of Bobby’s death undermined all of her old assumptions. She had to start over. In re-creating herself, she not only found justification for Bobby’s life (and death) but learned to value herself.
In working with Mary and developing the story, I came to think of the scene from The Miracle Worker in which the young Helen Keller has a furious temper tantrum, spilling a water pitcher at the supper table. Her teacher, Annie, ignoring the pleas of Helen’s parents, drags her roughly to the courtyard and forces her to refill the pitcher from the pump, at the same time repeating over and over the hand signal for water in Helen’s palm.
Suddenly, after months of drilling and helpless noncomprehension, Helen gets it. Water! That’s how you say water! Things have words attached to them, and words are the way out of the tunnel. Helen is spontaneously transformed — a seeing, hearing, talking butterfly soaring from the chrysalis. It is a moment of supreme grace.
That moment, the triumph of the human spirit, lives for me in this story. It is not merely about gays, or religion, or suicide, although it is about all of those things. It is about family, about redemption. But, in the end, it is about a victory of the human spirit that transcended tragedy. That, I realized, is what I always wanted to write about.
Leroy Aarons
ONE The Plunge
AUGUST 27, 1983
PORTLAND, OREGON
Bobby Griffith left the Family Zoo lounge about midnight and walked northwest through downtown Portland, past office buildings and lofts that still bore the ornate imprint of another century. It was a warm but cloudy western night in late August 1983. Blond, green eyed, six feet tall, and muscular, he wore a light plaid shirt and green fatigue pants, and walked with a deliberate, loping gait. To a passerby he would have looked like any other young man on his way home after a night out.
He headed up a hill and onto a plateau through which sliced Interstate 405, the main north-south artery. From this vantage point one could see most of the city, aligned on either side of the Willamette River. Lights flickered in the foreground, yielding to patches of darkened residential neighborhoods where most of Portland slept. The steady roar of freeway traffic played counterpoint to the still night.
Bobby approached the Everett Street overpass. Once on the bridge he could see the 405 traffic rush by, then disappear beneath the concrete span. The fragrance of diesel and petroleum hung in the air.
What was he thinking? Perhaps he voiced the silent wish, often repeated in his journals, to lift off, set sail to the heavens, forever drifting. Perhaps the familiar dark depression engulfed him, strangling hope.
“My life is over as far as I’m concerned,” he wrote in his diary exactly one month before. “I hate living on this earth…. I think God must get a certain amount of self-satisfaction watching people deal with the obstacles he throws in their path…. I hate God for this and for my shitty existence.”