Prayers for Bobby today: Gay kids committing suicide

By Joan Price | October 1, 2010 |

Gay teens are killing themselves — two 13-year-olds due to bullying (see this terrific blog post by Sue Katz), and a college student whose tryst was videoed and put online. It sickens me that young people just discovering their sexuality feel so vulnerable that it’s easier to die than to live. Those of us who have lived long enough to know ourselves, accept ourselves (including our sexuality — whatever its stripes or colors), and find or create a community that lets us live fully and honestly have a responsibility to pass this along to young people.


That’s how Leroy Aarons felt at age 61, and that’s why I’m repeating the following post from January 2009. I don’t know if you can find the Lifetime movie now, but the book is as valuable now as the day it was written. Please read it, then pass it along to someone who needs it. A life may depend on it.


Here’s what I wrote in January 2009:

At age 61, prizewinning journalist Leroy Aarons discovered the true story of Bobby Griffith, a story so gripping that he devoted himself to retelling this story in novel form.

His book, Prayers for Bobby, has inspired a movie premiering on Lifetime TV, Saturday, January 24, 2009. It is the riveting true story of teenager Bobby Griffith, who back-flipped off a freeway overpass into the path of a tractor trailer at age 20 because he could not accept his homosexuality. Prayers for Bobby chronicles Bobby’s angst at growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian family and an anti-homosexual social and school environment. Aarons gently and lovingly pieces together Bobby’s life, fears, hopes and, finally, hopelessness, with the help of the five year diary he left, his legacy.

Prayers for Bobby (subtitle: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son) is also the story of Mary Griffith, Bobby’s mother, played by Sigourney Weaver in the Lifetime movie. A staunch, one-tracked fundamentalist, Mary was convinced that if she and Bobby just prayed enough, and if Bobby tried hard enough, God would cure him of his homosexuality. She prayed, she nagged Bobby relentlessly, she shamed him, she put Bible quotes on the mirror for him to see when he wakened. Too late, Mary finally realized with a thunderbolt of insight that the reason God had refused to cure Bobby was that there was nothing wrong with him.

What does this have to do with our age group? Plenty. Think about how we had to discover our own sexual and sensual natures despite the mores of our restrictive society in an era that condemned what seemed our most natural feelings and desires. Imagine being trapped in a world that didn’t understand you at a time you couldn’t even understand yourself. And reach out.

If you think you don’t know any closeted gay teenagers, it’s only because they are closeted. Maybe your “Bobby” is your grandson, or your granddaughter’s best friend, or the neighbor kid, or the quiet boy at church. We’ve learned a lot about life and about sexuality in the decades we’ve been living on this earth, and part of it is to accept ourselves and open ourselves to younger folks who might need a role model, a listening ear, and a warm “so good to see you today.”

Please see the movie, and read the book, which goes into much more detail and will haunt you in a beautiful way.

I am proud that I knew Leroy Aarons until his death four years ago, called him my friend Roy, and still enjoy a close friendship with Joshua Boneh, his surviving spouse. Please check out the website that Joshua and Roy’s friends have constructed in Roy’s memory and to celebrate the movie that he always hoped would be made about his book.

(photo of Leroy Aarons and Joshua Boneh)

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Olive Kitteridge

By Joan Price | September 10, 2010 |

I loved reading Olive Kitteridge, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book is a masterful anthology of short stories, linked together so that they become a novel. Characters from one story reappear in another at a different time of life, and as we learn more about Olive, her husband Henry, their son Christopher, and other people who weave through their lives, we piece together a patchwork of lives, dreams, pivotal moments, and regrets. The book is deeply engrossing, insightful, and often disturbing.

I’m always looking for literary fiction with strong older characters for whom sexuality is an accepted part of their emotional lives. Their sexual feelings or activities don’t have to be blatent, just acknowledged (by the author if not by the character) as normal and expected. Olive Kitteridge delivers, especially in the final story, “River,” where Strout narrates the feelings of the now widowed, 74-year-old Olive who is about to go to bed with a new man:

Oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones… [I]f love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it… But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese presssed together, such holes they brought to this union–what pieces life took out of you. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude–and regret.

I loved Olive Kitteridge so much that as soon as I’d finished, I wanted to start reading it again, now that I knew more about the characters. I also wrote a fan email to the author, Elizabeth Strout, which she graciously answered. (As an author, I know what a solitary endeavor it is to write books, and I always appreciate hearing from readers, so I hoped Ms. Strout felt the same.)

I was thrilled to learn that two of the stories from this book would be performed at Z Space in San Francisco as part of the Word for Word series, and I rushed to see it on opening night. The script was not an adaptation but a staged, dramatic performance of the stories verbatim (hence the name, “Word for Word”). 
The actors were strong, especially Patricia Silver as Olive, and the staging innovative. I applaud Word for Word for choosing stories that portrayed Olive and Henry (and then Olive and Jack) in the later parts of their lives, rather than the younger characters earlier in the book. I especially applaud W4W for choosing “River,” the story I quoted above.

If you’re in the San Francisco area, I hope you’ll catch this play, now playing through September 26, 2010, then read the book.

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Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s by Barry Petersen, reviewed

By Joan Price | August 23, 2010 |

Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s by Emmy Award-winning CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen is a stunning, wrenching, valuable book about loving and living with a spouse with Alzheimer’s Disease. Petersen writes from his heart, his gut, his personal truth as a loving husband who watches his wife disappear and is powerless to change the course of her disease.

Jan and Barry had an intellectually and sensually vibrant marriage. “We were blessed with being two people who couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” he writes. “Our lovemaking was sometimes slow and easy and sometimes quick and instant, as I sought for her release that left her satisfied and the more hungry for me, and me for her.” Although this is not a book about sex, Barry doesn’t flinch from sharing that part of their relationship when it was strong, and the heartwrenching loss of their sexual closeness–along with every other part of their closeness–as the disease progresses. 
Petersen shares with us his panic and his great grief (“I learned how a man can fall to the floor because he is weeping so hard”), and also his admirable attempts to keep Jan safe and happy, to the best of his ability — sacrificing his own health and quality of life until… no, I need to let you discover that part on your own. Although I itch to write about the ending of this book, the tears still wet on my face from reading it, I’ll hold back to let you take his journey with him, step by step, memory by memory.

View the trailer here. And please read the book, whether or not you have a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease. Barry and Jan never expected that this disease would invade and obliterate their marriage–but as we age, it’s likely that it will happen to us or to someone we love, and we should know what Barry learned the hard way. Highest recommendations.

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Fast Girls: Erotica for Women

By Joan Price | August 18, 2010 |

Fast Girls: Erotica for Women, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, from Cleis Press, is an anthology about women (not girls, though many are young) who zestily pursue their sexual desires and fantasies, flaunting social norms and going after thrills and sensations with bravado. Whether or not we see ourselves in these women (and mostly I don’t, personally), we can get a vicarious thrill by reading how they go after whatever turns them on: pretend or real whoring, sex with strangers, danger, pain, bondage, submission, domination, you name it.

Yes, but this is a blog about sex and aging. Is anyone in this anthology over 50? Yes — one character — 51-year-old Shirin seduces a much younger classical pianist (who can resist those fingers?) in “Waitng for Beethoven” by Susie Hara. Many other characters could be any age, so if you like imagining them 50+, as I do, you can get away with it.

One writer that I know of– D.L. King–is over 50. Her story “Let’s Dance” is about a woman who seduces an “adorable” young dancing man (we love our dancing men!) from the “vanilla club” dance floor into a cab to her photo studio/home equipped with pulleys and restraints, and introduces him to his fantasy (“Cute Boy was a total bondage slut”) and hers. Though D.L.King doesn’t make a big deal about the narrator’s age, you know she’s older. If dom/sub stories turn you on and you’d like to read a story by King expressly about a man’s 65th birthday gift (think a lifesize crate), read “The Gift” online. Check out her blog, too, for more about King’s books.

I asked D.L. King her views about age and erotica:

My dominant female characters are often my age and their submissive males are usually quite a bit younger, but that isn’t to say I haven’t written the obverse, too. I don’t always do it, but sometimes it’s fun to play with age.

I think erotica is a great way to get the juices flowing. After a while, people tend to lose interest in the same old sex. Erotica’s a great way to explore other options and spice up a relationship. If you read a story that really turns you on, bring it to your partner and see if he or she would like to try it on for size. Erotica can also help to stimulate your own fantasies. Anything that helps you to enjoy your sexuality more can only be a good thing!

I love to do readings and meet readers. Most of the readers who turn up for those events are young. I think many of my contemporaries don’t attend those kinds of events. I wish more would. After all, we’re the original free love generation.

I also asked the editor, Rachel Kramer Bussel, a prolific erotica writer herself, if she thinks that characters who are over 50 will become more common in erotica. She replied:

 

I hope so! I like to see a range of characters, though the ones that cross my desk when I’m editing an anthology tend to skew younger. I’d definitely welcome older characters and in general themes I haven’t seen before or as often in my anthologies. I’m editing two new anthologies now, Obsessed and Women in Lust and if there are older authors or those who simply want to add a little more variety, I encourage you to submit your work.

Let me know if this blog post results in your story being included in one of Rachel’s anthologies, will you?

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