You probably haven’t had the chance to see Prayers for Bobby unless you were lucky enough to have caught its original US TV showing on Lifetime network in January 2009. It’s not on general release in Asia (it’s either not a commercial proposition or is considered a film with a theme too controversial to show). You might have been able to pick it up at a film festival or in events like the joint celebration of this year’s IDAHO by the British Embassy and the Beijing LGBT group, Queer Comrades. But if you’re not in any of these categories, you’ll just have to go out and buy the DVD when it’s out, which will be soon.
I was among the lucky few in Hong Kong who managed to get a ticket for one of the three shows screened in June and July at Mongkok’s Golden Harvest Cinema by the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association (BGCA), which is using the film to showcase their work with Hong Kong’s LGBT youth and their parents. The BGCA (one of Hong Kong’s oldest NGOs, formed back in 1937) works through youth clubs and schools in a programme called Project Touch to reach out to gay and lesbian young people, offering them companionship and counselling. It also works with their parents, so this film is a perfect vehicle for them.
Sigourney Weaver plays Mary Griffith, now a prominent campaigner for the
US-based group Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG),
who struggles to accept her young son Bobby being gay.
The movie is based on the true story Mary Griffith, now a prominent campaigner for the US NGO, Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Her son, Bobby, was gay and committed suicide in 1983. Their story was featured in 1989 in the San Francisco Examiner, where it was read by Leroy Aarons, a journalist and founder of the US National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He turned it into a book, Prayers for Bobby: a Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son, which came out in 1995 (and is still in print).
I will not spoil the story by giving a full summary of it here, but will give you enough of it to make clear why the BCGA picked it. Mary Griffith is played sensitively and powerfully (and she is, by all accounts, a powerful woman) by Sigourney Weaver, here in one of her finest performances. She dominates her family of all-too-accommodating husband (played by Canadian Henry Czemy) and four children using her evangelical Christian religion and the Bible with which it has armed her to impose an all-American conformity on her home. The slow awakening of her son, Bobby (played by the good-looking twenty-three year old actor Ryan Kelley) to the fact that he is gay shatters the world that Mary has built and tears the family apart. The mother ends up choosing religion over her son and in the process loses him entirely.
The film renders the tragedy at the heart of this tale very clearly. All the protagonists are caught in the trap of trying to live a ‘good’ life, but it is a life that is divorced from the reality of the world and so cannot stand. Mary chooses, she thinks, to try to save her son from eternal damnation by making him straight, something he cannot ever be, and her inevitable repudiation of what he is leads him to die gay and by his own hand, to be damned, in her literalist thinking, and so irrevocably separated from the love of his family. The tragedy is as much hers as it is her son’s. For this part, Sigourney Weaver won a Trevor Life Award from the Trevor Project (that works to prevent teenage gay and lesbian suicides) and deserved it. Unless you’re of the hardest disposition, I’d watch this film with a large box of tissues handy.
The movie is also very clear about the religious issues involved, something which is of great use in a place like Hong Kong, where Christianity, often of a very conservative kind, has a stranglehold over the school system. Mary Griffith’s faith was based on what she believed was a literal interpretation of the Bible; this was the one she had been taught, and though she knew most of the Bible word for word, she had not been brought to see the inconsistencies within its pages, texts, for instance, that ‘abominate’ shell fish in the same breath as same-sex practices, or which throw equally lethal stones at issues long ago ignored like adultery as they do at men sleeping with men. Christian fundamentalists will never admit that the bits of the Bible they adhere to are actually a ‘lifestyle choice’ yet they can be prepared to adhere so rigidly to the texts they choose that they destroy the love that is supposed to be at the heart of their faith. Mary Griffith was brought to see this in the most horrible way, and in this lay her tragedy.
Viewers who often bridle (like this one) at Hollywood’s usual dollops of sentiment may find parts of this film, particularly its end, a little too sappy, and those of us trapped in the tawdriness of Hong Kong’s gay bar and disco venues may look a little agog at the film’s reconstruction of the early 1980s gay disco scene in Portland, Oregon (in the film a place filled only with the amazingly beautiful bodies dancing to amazingly arousing music amidst swirls of light and clouds of mist; if only it were that way here, one gasps!). These are small criticisms, though, of a fine film, one that is worth watching not just for its message but for its superlative acting and riveting story.
Go out and buy that DVD!
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Its the kind of movie one can watch with their straight parents and get a real and thoughtful conversation going about religion and gay life.
A great movie and worthwhile for my movie library too :)
A great movie and worthwhile for my movie library too :)
I watched it twice and used two boxes of tissue.
Even though the theme of Christian intolerance of homosexuality is not central to Chinese culture, I still think the movie helps to clarify a bit of the (Western) modern homo situation and offers an angle for non-Christian homos to define their situation, especially for the young.
And just like lagunabro said, "It's the kind of movie one can watch with their straight parents and get a real and thoughtful conversation going about religion and gay life." And one might go from here to talk about family, school, society and gay life with his(her) straight parents.
This movie is definitely one piece of one's repertoire to use in his coming out to more difficult objects.
Maybe that'll be tomorrow's lead story. :)
Gay men are always bombarded with unrealistic images of what they should look like, none of us are perfect. Being gay in itself is a challenge at times.
I haven't seen it but I plan to now.
I wish this were available when I came out to my family at the age of 18. Probably the worst period of my life.
If this movie can help educate but one family, make them realise it is also a blessing to have a gay son/daughter/sibling, then I daresay Bobby wouldn't have died in vain.
I'll get a box of maxi tissues along with the DVD.
i tear at the scene that Bobby committed suicide... infidelity of the gay society causes more pain in his heart, when he innocently decide to believe what he wholeheartedly believe; his first gay love. Double whammy as it is, he choose to leave the world.
May God bless him and give him a place in Heaven. For not condemning him coz he is a homosexual, bless him coz he is innocent to love with his pure heart.
Amen.
well.. the film was really excellent and it truly and genuinely unveiled the truth of unjust and bigoted affairs towards homosexuality since the 1980s.
i think i gotta buy the DVD :)
Thanks Fridae for letting us know about this. I cried watery tears just through the trailer.
It seems, Ignorance = fear
Education = less fear, more liberation.
Just after seeing the trailer I want to change the world.
Peace. B
My very first gay pride memory was San Francisco Pride in 1997 and I remember it was the first time I came across "PFLAG" and I was totally amazed by the idea that parents, friends and family out on the street supporting their gay children/friends. (I wasn't out at that time. )
My mom is not one of those who would sit with me, watch this movie and sob with me. Neither will she ever march on a pride, but she accepted me in her own way. She has never once asked if I ever going to change my mind about being gay. She has never once talk about her regret of not having grandchildren (I am in the only son), neither has she ever, in front of me, envious about my cousins marriages or her friends' children wedding. That's her way of respecting who I am and accepting me. To me, that is good enough. That says a lot of her being an Asian mom.
I have a group of friends who are involved in a support helplines for parents with gay children in Taiwan. I really admire what they do for the community.
I been watching several time...
After all, the powers that be like unhappy outlooks of our lifestyle...
Definitely gonna convert this onto my iTouch.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AllSortsOfStuff91#g/c/904065C6C6D77984
雖然....拍攝的效果。我覺得有點。。。不是很專業。。。。
有些畫面甚至....有點假。
但故事卻令人感動。
特別是主角母親的一番話。
“我的兒子一直與眾不同,从我懷上他時就是。我知道,我能感覺到。現在我終於知道,為什麼上帝没有治癒Bobby,他没有治癒他,因為…他根本没病。”
Hypersensitive or what?
this film also reminded me of the word, 'curable,' found in many books for teenagers to read in 1980's japan. i also tried to believe that gayness was curable and changeable as i grew up. it seems like i lived in ancient time written in a high school history textbook. haha
i'm glad that i survived those hardest time and that i have spent countless happy moments with my family, old and new friends in various countries afterwards.
last but not least, sigourney weaver's acting was so unbelievably real. guys, this is a must-see.
I posted the Youtube link on the website of my group and it's warmly received.
I feel sobs are healthful if they fit the occasion and are not too violent or frequent and Sigourney Weaver and Ryan Kelley have given me one of the best sobs in my life.
And, of course, many thanks for the abundant air given me by Bobby and Mary Griffith. May God and Guan Yin keep us all.
I cried,
I bought the book today.
My mother is a white, christian, racist, snob.
My mother used to phone me & tell me that her & her priest were praying for me, she also used to talk to her doctor about having a gay son & she told me,
being gay isn't my fault, ( like hello ).
The ignorance in this world, still amazes me,
Intend to post my mother the book,
after I read it.
To any of you who have ignorant families,
take heart, be strong, look after yourself.
x
Jason
So many of us have igno
i can see myself in this movie. Cried my lungs out.
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