It was a warm but cloudy western night in late August 1983. Blond, green-eyed, 6 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 from a night out....
“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.”
He must have seen the large tractor trailer approaching him from under the Couch Street overpass and timed the jump. Bobby executed a sudden and effortless back flip and disappeared over the railing. The driver tried to swerve, but there was no time.
Bobby Griffith, 20, was on his way home from the Family Zoo, a gay bar once located at 820 S.W. Oak St., when he decided to take his life by jumping off the Everett Street overpass along Interstate 405. He’d moved to Portland to get away from his conservative Christian family in Walnut Creek, Calif., who were pressuring him to resist his gay urges.
The tragic story unfolds in Leroy Aarons’ 1996 book Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son, which has been made into a five-hankie tearjerker television movie for Lifetime.
The story starts out rather familiar: “I will not risk my family being together in the next life!” shrieks Mary Griffith, played by Sigourney Weaver in a piercing, pinched performance. “I read that homosexuals have sex in public bathrooms and that they recruit children.”
The family drags Bobby to a shrink who pulls out all of the old stereotypes about distant fathers and overbearing mothers. Mary criticizes his attire and his posture, tapes Scripture messages around the house (“I am pure of heart, I am God’s goodness”) and springs surprise dates on him in a misguided attempt to “cure” his problem.
It’s not until Bobby escapes to Portland to live with his liberated cousin Jeanette, who still lives here and works as a law enforcement official, that he is able to be himself. He finds a job as a nurses aide in a convalescent home and starts dating men, which causes his family to fear for his salvation.
“When Bobby was here, it was under control. Then he moves to Portland and someone puts all these ideas into his head,” says Mary, who later sends Bobby a brochure titled “AIDS: The Wrath of God” as his birthday present.
Despite that heavy-handed introduction, Prayers for Bobby blossoms into an incredibly moving story about one woman’s spiritual reawakening. Bobby’s death leads Mary to seek answers from the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church and, eventually, to a leadership role with Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
Variety raves: “Prayers for Bobby revisits ground similar to that which the AIDS-themed An Early Frost broke nearly 25 years ago and — thanks to enduring religious-based bigotry toward gays — still feels fresh and poignant.... This message movie proves powerful without being unduly preachy.”
Now 74, Mary tells Just Out that she agreed to dredge up her painful past in hopes of sending a message to other families facing similar situations. Studies suggest that gay adolescents are three to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.
“It still brings back a lot of memories that I don’t want to think about,” Mary says. “If it helps a parent, then that’s wonderful.”
Reflecting on her religious roots, Mary says she never questioned what she heard from the pulpit at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church.
“I just went along with it because that’s what was in the Bible,” she explains. “Of course, I wasn’t a scholar. There were people in the church who felt that they were, and as I look back, I know that it was really, really misinterpreted.
“Back in the ’70s it was a very dark, scary place for homosexuality. Terrifying, actually. Bobby was afraid about what he was going to become. It was painted like you were just going to turn into these horrible people.”
About a year and half after Bobby’s suicide, Mary says she got up the courage to reconsider her religious beliefs.
“As far as the Bible was concerned, Bobby was not going to go to heaven. He was doomed,” she says. “I just thought, ‘There is something wrong here.’ I had to find answers. That just didn’t make sense.”
Bobby had tried sending pro-gay books to his mother to help her come around, but Mary admits she never read them because the words didn't come from God.
“I just had no idea how misinterpreted the Bible has been in a lot of ways,” she says. “My moment of truth, so to speak, was that God didn’t heal Bobby because there was nothing wrong with him.”
Mary says she hasn’t returned to church since her son’s death. “I like Clarence Darrow’s view that ‘The beginning of doubt is wisdom,’” she laughs.
Prayers for Bobby has received tremendously positive feedback, although of course there are those who continue to condemn her change of heart. Mary mentions a particularly nasty thread on the Web site “Triablogue” that compelled her to weigh in anonymously.
“Begin to think above the waist," she wrote. “That’s where real love is, you know ... where your heart is?”
This comment led to a heated exchange with other bloggers who casually passed judgment on her family without realizing they were communicating with Mary Griffith herself. Her final post was an impassioned plea for peace.
“A horrific injustice was done to a child of God,” she wrote. “This movie will help to right this injustice done not only to Bobby but other gay and lesbian children of God, and hopefully they will not give up on love, as Bobby did.... From birth to death, her son was perfect in God’s sight.... I’m sorry all of you see evil, but that is, after all, ‘your choice.’”
Even though Bobby has been gone for a quarter-century, Mary continues to campaign for public school counseling programs that are supportive of gay students. The issue hit close to home again recently when her 17-year-old granddaughter came out to the family as they previewed Prayers for Bobby.
“She said, ‘Was Grandma really like that?’” She could never imagine that I could’ve been that way,” Mary says. “I told her, ‘I kind of got a second chance to get things right.’”
* * *
Sigourney Weaver has played plenty of mother figures before: Her Oscar-nominated performance in Aliens as Lt. Ellen Ripley, who serves as a surrogate mother figure to young Newt; her swinging ’70s mom in The Ice Storm; and her pot-smoking suburban housewife in Imaginary Heroes which, like Prayers for Bobby, centers on a son’s suicide.
But how does a Yale-educated intellectual — who studied with gay playwright Christopher Durang, no less — get inside the head of a woman who held such conservative beliefs? As she sees it, Mary Griffith’s mistakes can serve as a cautionary tale for all parents.
Last month The Trevor Project — which operates the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention help line for queer and questioning youth — presented Weaver with The Trevor Life Award, which annually honors people who inspire queer youth through their example, support, volunteerism or occupation. Past recipients include Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell.
Jimmy Radosta: How did this project come to your attention?
Sigourney Weaver: I know how hard and how long the producers struggled to find a home for this. Lifetime took it on, and then everything moved very quickly.
I love what I do, but when you can be part of a project that, to me, tells an important story for families to hear as a parent, I feel so strongly that it’s a terrible tragedy and it could have been prevented. [Weaver and her husband, filmmaker Jim Simpson, have an 18-year-old daughter, Charlotte.]
But there was not enough correct information and enough support for Bobby for his mother and him to understand each other, and they just ran out of time. That just breaks my heart. So if we can help jump-start the process of communication in other families, that would be so wonderful.
JR: Was it challenging for you to connect with a character like this who starts out so close-minded?
SW: You know, I was able to meet Mary, and I felt that she was so incredibly generous — all of the family were. She seems so easygoing when you meet her, and I said, “I'm having trouble putting you together with the person in the beginning of this story who is so single-minded.” She said, “I was very serious.” I mean, I just got it in that one sentence.
That was her journey. I think that all of her family felt they were doing the right thing because they were so concerned about Bobby’s soul. And I think his human life was of secondary importance.
I think they were sincere in that; they were terrified for him and felt that it was a test and that he must fight.
So, no, it wasn’t that hard for me to find my way in because I think, as a parent, we’re all overprotective of our children, we don’t give them enough credit, and even when we think we respect them, sometimes to respect their choices without worrying about where it’s going to lead them — it’s a very challenging thing.
JR: You’ve played real-life characters before, like Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and Queen Isabella I in 1492, but how does the acting process differ when you’re working with the actual person you’re portraying?
SW: I only spent a couple of hours with Mary, only enough to sort of understand the story from her point of view, and so I just had to tell that story really through myself. You know, there wasn’t much time to think about it, which probably was a good thing. We all did so many scenes every day [so] there’s no time to weigh your options; you’re flying by the seat of your pants.
I felt that I had Mary’s blessing to tell her story, and that meant a lot to me. That’s really why I needed to meet her. It was a difficult story for her to share, but as I said, I think the motive is to save other families from making the mistakes that she did.
But at the same time it’s a bigger responsibility to get it right. You can’t do an imitation in most cases; it’s better to try to capture the essence of the person and the situation and bring everything to it.
I was very lucky to have Ryan Kelley playing my son. As soon as I saw his audition tape, I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I knew that he was really going to be present, and I felt that their relationship was sort of the core of the film. You had to feel their affection for each other, and that was part of what went so terribly wrong; she could not give him up to this. She felt she was losing him.
JR: Yeah, in many ways they had a very enviable relationship, watching old movies together, for example. You have to wonder if he had just been born at a later time, how things would’ve gone differently.
SW: When I saw Milk I had the same feeling. Actually, Walnut Creek is one of the settings for that terrible meeting where Harvey goes — that was Bobby’s town.
I met some people from The Trevor Project, and I thought, “You know, if Trevor had existed, maybe Bobby would have called.” He was hard on himself because of these feelings that he was trying to suppress and get rid of.
You’re absolutely right if it had happened later, if he could’ve found one gay person to say, “This is normal, this is natural, give your family time, but you do have to live your life,” then he might have survived long enough for Mary to get it.
Originally published in Just Out, January 23, 2009
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