Prayers for Bobby - Update

On Thursday of this past week I did a post about a new TV movie starring Sigorney Weaver that aired tonight on Lifetime based on the true story of Bobby Griffith and his mother, Mary Griffith (pictured at left), an evangelical Christian whose inability to accept her son's homosexuality perhaps helped drive Bobby to commit suicide in 1983. The boyfriend and I watched the movie and it was wonderfully done and extremely powerful. Prayers for Bobby should be mandatory viewing for all parents and pastors. I recommend that readers who missed it tonight watch for it when it is re-broadcast. Moreover, the feelings felt by Bobby in the movie are similar to those many of us have felt during our teen years (and later) as we have tried to reconcile who we are with the hate based message disseminated by so many churches.

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Ultimately, Mary Griffith got the message - but not in time to save her own son - and as the movie shows, she ultimately became a gay rights advocate striving to make sure other LGBT teens and adults do not suffer the shame and fate of her son. Moreover, her message to other parents is to make sure that they do not make the mistakes she made. The Advocate has an article on Mary Griffith that tells more about her activism activities. Here are some highlights from that article:

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Ex-evangelical Christian Mary Griffith overcame the suicide of her son Bobby and became an outspoken advocate for gay rights. . . . . You don’t see a lot of statues commemorating reformed homophobes, but Mary Griffith arguably merits one. An ex-evangelical Christian who, by her own admission, helped shame her gay son, Bobby, into suicide in 1983, she’s spent the rest of her life trying to save other kids from the hurtful lunacy she inflicted on him in the name of God. Her story, known to millions who’ve read Prayers for Bobby -- journalist Leroy Aaron’s unflinching 1995 account -- has inspired a Middle-America-friendly film starring Sigourney Weaver that airs on Lifetime Television January 24.

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“I think the movie comes very close to what happened,” says Griffith, now 74, a disarmingly straightforward woman who’s still atoning for the years she spent “trapped” in robotic bigotry, briskly insisting that Bobby resist Satan the way other moms urge their kids to brush their teeth, while willfully ignoring his collapsing self-esteem.

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“I don’t particularly like to look back. I don’t like who I was,” says Griffith, who still lives in the Walnut Creek, California home in which she raised her three surviving children. “It’s humiliating just to go through the Bible and see the fairy tales I believed. . . . Bobby tried to open her mind by giving her books about homosexuality, Griffith says: “But anything that would uplift Bobby and made me see him as a decent person…was viewed as evil [by her church].” It took his suicide, she says, to make her realize that she’d been using religion to avoid thinking through life’s complexities for herself.

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In a remarkable conversion, this shy and unworldly woman renounced her faith and went on to become the president of an East San Francisco Bay PFLAG chapter, and a nationally known gay activist and speaker, urging other parents to listen to their children, not the Christian Right’s theatrical scare tactics.

Prayers for Bobby

On Saturday night the Lifetime channel will be airing a new made for TV movie starring Sigorney Weaver which sounds like it will be a "must see" movie. As Variety is reporting, in the film Weaver plays Mary Griffith, a deeply conservative and religious woman who begins to question her opposition to homosexuality after the suicide of her gay son. Like many fundamentalist Christian and far right Catholic parents, Griffith will not accept her son's sexual orientation and her attitudes contribute to her son's suicide due to his inability to accept that he's gay. I suspect that the story is more common than we know since so many suicides are covered up by families and officials. Not surprisingly, Daddy Dobson and his fellow hate merchants who ignore all legitimate medical and mental health knowledge on sexual orientation are none too please about the movie. First, here are highlights from Variety:

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Sigourney Weaver is set to topline and co-produce the Lifetime telepic "Prayers for Bobby" . . . based on the 1995 Leroy Aarons book of the same name that recounts the true story of a family's refusal to accept their son's homosexuality. Russell Mulcahy ("Queer as Folk") directs from a script by Katie Ford ("Miss Congeniality").

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In her first telepic role, Weaver will star as Mary Griffith, a devout Christian who winds up becoming an advocate for gay and lesbian youths after her son is driven into a deep depression by his family's disapproval and attempts to "cure" him of his sexual orientation.

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The truth of what too often happens when parents/families will not accept their LGBT children and reject them or put them through bogus "cure" programs has the Christo-fascists whining and the spittle flying. Here are some examples of the dishonest blather coming from Daddy Dobson's Citizen Link (NOTE: the movie is "controversial" only among the Kool-Aid drinker set and also that in my view, Dobson speaks for anyone but God):

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The Lifetime Channel is airing a controversial new movie this weekend in which conservative Christian parents shoulder the blame after their gay-identified son commits suicide. "Prayers for Bobby," based on a true story from the 1970s, stars Sigourney Weaver. Family advocates are concerned the film tells only half of the story, leaving out the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.

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Louisiana mom Terri Brown can identify with the parents in the movie. For 17 years, she has prayed that her son would find freedom from the homosexual identity. “I can understand a mother’s despair," she said, "especially a Christian mother’s despair. Because we know what the Bible says about homosexuality.

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Jeff Johnston, gender analyst at Focus on the Family, said the movie's message runs contrary to God’s. . . . No matter where the movie lands, Johnston said, people can and do change their sexual orientation — he's living proof.

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I'm sure that Terri Brown has inflicted immeasurable pain on her son all because of her own self-centered, falsely self-righteous views. As for, Jeff Johnston, he's yet another sad "ex-gay for pay" - the only kind of ex-gays ones seems to find, the ones being paid to claim they "changed" in return for a pay check. WWJD?