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Weaver answers 'Prayers'
Actress to star in Lifetime movie
By Cynthia Littleton (Variety, 18/5/2008)
Sigourney Weaver is set to topline and co-produce the Lifetime telepic "Prayers for Bobby," playing a deeply conservative and religious woman who begins to question her opposition to homosexuality after the suicide of her gay son.
Telepic is 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").
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.
Weaver answers 'Prayers'
Actress to star in Lifetime movie
By Cynthia Littleton (Variety, 18/5/2008)
Sigourney Weaver is set to topline and co-produce the Lifetime telepic "Prayers for Bobby," playing a deeply conservative and religious woman who begins to question her opposition to homosexuality after the suicide of her gay son.
Telepic is 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").
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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"Prayers for Bobby," or the book that was almost about me
by Derik K. Cowan
For those of you who don't know, "Prayers for Bobby" is the story of a young man from a fundementalist background who kills himself, and how his mother comes to grips with her son's gayness and suicide. The mother eventually becomes a national advocate for the rights of gay youth. The end of the book has a short discussion of several programs for gay youth in the USA. The book is extremely good at capturing both the fundamentalist christian voice that leads to the young man's suicide and the importance that a family can play in a life.
I found myself reading this (book) from the other side as what could have happened. I too remember vividly my struggles as a teen in a conservative Baptist church, struggling to find a way to bridge the gap between what I knew to be true--that my homosexuality was integral to me, and what I had always been taught--that homosexuality is one of the worst possible sins I could commit. Fortunately, I was too afraid of losing my image as the perfect Christian boy who taught Sunday School and sang in the Choir to ever talk to anyone about my sexuality or struggles with it. That saved me from having to take on the full brunt of fundamentalist hatred at a point in when I wasn't ready to deal with it.
When my parents found out I was gay, they gave me a choice: either stay with them, see a counsellor, drop out of school, and become straight - or leave. In my personal construction of that story, I like to forget that there was ever a choice there. That way I can forget the tug on my soul to accept what they offerred: a chance to be "normal" and avoid the hatred of the people who had made up my life. There was an instant, actually a rather long instant, in which everything I had been taught to be, pulled me toward my parents and their plans to straighten me out - an instant during which, for the first time in 3 years, I doubted the inherent nature of my sexuality and almost stayed with them. In the end, what pulled me away was not my acceptance of who I was or a return to the belief that I couldn't change my sexuality, but an overwhelming refusal to give up the education I had worked for all of my life. I refused to give up not my sexuality, but my education at Amherst.
On August 3, I will be separated from my parents for a year. I hardly ever hear from them anymore. Finally the Post Office is forwarding my mail to school, and I'm looking into a legal way to relieve my parents of any fiscal responsability which they still bear. I'm going to PFLAG meetings here in Amherst with some hope that they may help me find a way to reach my parents. More importantly I hope I can help others who are struggling with their child's or relative's sexuality, to understand how important their support is. I've always been the sort who can pull through anything, but I know there are a lot of people out there who aren't me and couldn't make it on their own, so I'll do anything to keep even one other young person from having to go through what I have, I'll do anything I can.
But what about if I had stayed home? My father said that if I stayed in the homosexual lifestyle, I was taking the easy way out. If I stayed with them and fought it, I would be showing once how brave I could be in the face of overwhelming obstacles. The thing is, he sincerely believed that. For a while I believed it, too. For most of the month of August, I lived with this Navy guy in his apartment and allowed myself to be used as bait to attract guys for him. I suppose in a lot of ways I didn't have much choice. I had to live somewhere. At the time, I felt that if I was only brave enough, I could go home. I was simply being a coward and running away from my problems, and so I deserved to be treated like a commodity. It took meeting my friend Kurt towards the end of August to realize that I was wrong.
A couple of days ago, I read one of my old posts about a letter I received from my mom that threw me into such a depression, I hid from the world for a day. Judging from the fact that a mere letter from somewhere far away could throw me, I wonder how long I would have lasted if I stayed home and was subjected to that sort of abuse on a daily, personal basis. Oh, I'm sure there would have been that early optimism as we started out on the straightening process, but how long would that have lasted? A couple of weeks, or a month or two at the most? How long before I was sneaking out of the house and running down to the local rest area cruising spot, or secretly calling my gay friends in the area? How long before I was wallowing in an intense self hatred that I hadn't felt in years, and couldn't pretend that the people around me didn't also hate me, or hate my "problem?" How long could I have lasted before running away, or before I killed myself? Would I even be alive today? I don't really think so.
I know my parents take a lot of blame from me for my problems, and I think a great deal of it is true. I still can't believe they would hold their religious beliefs in higher regard than their own flesh and blood. I don't know that I will ever be able to forgive them for this year or the next or however many occur before we are reunited. At the same point, while the religious beliefs of my parents have caused them to be fairly horrible people of late, I have to say that in the end much of the reason I've survived is because of the way they raised me. While ostensibly I was taught about man's sinful, evil nature, God's control of all events, God's wrathful nature, and all sorts of debilitating religious trash, all that was sort of placed on a distant, universalist background. Personally, my parents instilled in me a confidence in myself, in the inherent goodness I held, and in my own self worth. I was continually told to go out and get what I deserved, that anything I wanted and worked for I could achieve, and to value my own judgement. Because of the way my parents raised me, I was able to accept myself as a good person despite the fact that I was something the church said was evil, and from there was able to understand that the church was wrong.
Because my parents instilled in me a sense of self worth and a sense that I could do whatever I wanted that I've had the strength to strike out on my own and survive this past year. Reading "Prayers for Bobby" helped me appreciate this even more, for it seemed as if the overriding force in Bobby's life was not personal self worth but the desire to blend and conform with the group in spite of the self, and that made me get past a lot of self hatred.
At the end of the book, I made a mental list of things I was grateful for, as they've kept me alive:
The fact that I didn't tell anyone in my church about my struggles with my sexuality until they were basically over and I had the strength to stand on my own.
My inherent sense of self worth that told me that even if being gay was a bad thing, I still deserved more than what my parents offered me as an alternative to leaving - finding a way to get through Amherst by myself.
The fact that I found a supportive gay network to turn to when everything else crumbled around my feet.
My survival instinct.
My dad's somewhat skeptical view of the church which kept me from seeing it as a monolith with a monopoly on universal truth.
My view of myself as a basically good person no matter what others may say.
There are many more things that I could say, but I think that's enough for now, especially since this article was about the book and has become increasingly about me. Anyway, if you haven't read it already, I would highly recommend reading this book. I mean, I haven't even gotten into how much the sections about the mother's struggle towards understanding her son affected me. It goes something along the lines of the way I almost start crying at least once in every PFLAG meeting when I see how wonderfully accepting most of the parents are, and how eager the rest are to at least try and understand.
I feel like I'm ending this rather abruptly, but I really don't want to get all teary-eyed right before I go to work, so I'll stop now.
"Prayers for Bobby: a mother's coming to terms with the suicide of her gay son," is by Leroy Aarons.
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