I didn't know much about this movie, and didn't realize, when watching, that it was based on a true story. But I found it beautifully directed, and amazingly acted--particularly by Sigourney Weaver in the role of the pious, intolerant Mother. And while I'm a fifty-six year old man who has moved through levels of acceptance of my own homosexuality, watching a movie like this reminds me of the questioning gay teenager I was growing up in the late fifties/early sixties in the Southern Baptist church, and in a church I loved--Angier Avenue Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. One of the most powerful lines in the movie is when Sigourney Weaver's character confesses to an Metropolitan Community Church minister that she finally understood why God had not healed her son of his homosexuality--because there was no reason to.
I spent the summer of '78 (the summer before I moved to New York City) with my family in Durham. I substituted for area church musicians, and I ended up playing one Sunday at Temple Baptist Church. There was a beautiful Yamaha grand piano there. I asked the minister of the church if I might play an inspirational and classical concert there towards the end of the summer--a sort of goodbye present to my family and friends, and he said that would be fine. I felt some affinity with that minister, and I didn't know why. Because he was the minister of a Southern Baptist Church, I decided to meet with him one day. I asked him if he thought that gay people go to hell when they die. In the Southern Baptist Church, the "heaven/hell" issue is a pretty pithy one, and you wanna know where you're likely to end up. He answered "No, he did not think that gay people are likely to end up in hell." I was pretty relieved to hear that, but somehow, even before I asked him, I knew that would be his answer. I told him that he was the first minister whose counsel I had sought out, and I had done so because I sensed he had had some life experience that had made him different from other ministers I'd known--less condemning, more compassionate. He told me that his wife, during the course of their life together got a little lost and went into a coma for no apparent medical reason. She eventually came out of her coma, and that experience of almost losing her had changed him forever. I knew that he worshipped a more inclusive, more loving (than vengeful) God. I was glad to have crossed his path and to have had this discussion with him. His humanity touched me. In some quiet place in my heart, even then--at twenty-five years old, I knew that he was right about gay people not going to hell because they were gay.
I moved to New York City for three reasons:
1) to get lost in the sea of gay men that I had heard were there (I was not disappointed on that account);
2) to be able to work in music and theatre in the richest pool of talent in the world;
3) to prove to myself that my talent was competitive, and that I could hold my own in the richest pool of talent in the world.
I knew that I had to "come out" about my sexuality in a more significant way than I had before. I had to actually embrace it, celebrate it, rejoice in it, and especially--not to apologize for it. I went into therapy. Now, in New York, therapy's a way of life. In the south, it was not a favorite topic of conversation. I was fortunate to find an amazing therapist (from South Carolina originally, and an ordained Methodist minister), and off we went! At some point, when I was ready, he told me about the Metropolitan Community Church--a Christian church with a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered people. I got the address (at that time they were meeting on Sunday evening at a borrowed sanctuary on W. 4th Street in Greenwich Village). I don't know if it was the welcoming way of that particular church, or how emotionally and spiritually ripe for the picking I was, or a combination of the two, but when I walked into that service that Sunday night--a church where not only all of whom I was was welcome,it was celebrated, I started crying and couldn't stop for the entire service. I couldn't sing a hymn. I couldn't do anything but weep, and exhale. It's like I had been holding my breath my entire spiritual life.
That was the beginning of a long and beautiful journey of peeling back layers to discover who in the world I might be. I'm happy to say, that, though there've been some slugfests between God and me since then, I continue to be awed at the miracles that go on daily, usually the result of humankind.
In 1996, when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was going to be displayed in full in Washington, DC, for the last time for a long time to come, I decided to go and see it. In addition to the Quilt, there was a large tent where the names of those who had died from AIDS were being constantly recited. People would line up to read a single page of names from a large notebook, and oftentimes—at the end of the page—the reader would add the name of someone dear to him or her who had also died from the disease. I noticed one woman who looked out of place in the line. She was short, and older than most of the others there, and dressed like the women at my home church in North Carolina. It had been an emotional morning for me looking at the Quilt, so I decided to pause there for a moment and listen to the names being read. The older woman finally made her way to the front of the line, and I listened as she read. At the end of her page, she added, “And for my beloved grandson, Tim, who I miss every single day.” Her voice choked a little as she said that. I watched as she walked out of the tent, and made her way to her car as humbly as she’d likely come. She got in her car and drove home, I imagined. I also imagined, too, that, without anyone else in her family or circle of friends knowing it, she had found out about the weekend and had decided to come all by herself—regardless of how out of her realm of experience this trip to the Quilt had to be. And yet, her love for her grandson was so great that she felt she had to come and declare that love in front of others like him. I was moved by the courage it had taken for her to travel so far outside of her comfort zone to bear witness to her feelings for her beloved grandson. She gets it, I thought. She gets the big picture.
And so does Mary Griffith, upon whose real life story "Prayers for Bobby" is based.
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