#bobby20posts

He was seen as unhappy, but no one knew the dark, subterranean depths of his self-loathing and depression. He wore a mask for much of the world, a mask that showed a shy, uncommunicative boy with a wonderful smile and agreeable disposition. Hidden beneath was not just the pathology of self-hatred and fear related to his homosexuality, but the funny, intelligent, and articulate person that Bobby was and might have lived to be.

[After a vacation back at Walnut Creek,] Joy took Bobby to the airport. 'Will you be coming back?' she asked on the way. 'I mean, to stay?' 'I don't know,' he murmured. 'I want to stick it out at least till December, to show that I gave it a real try.' At the airport, she walked him to the gate and, feeling vaguely troubled, gave him a hug. She would not see Bobby again.

He couldn't imagine it [sex] as the expression of loving intimacy, despite the fact that he was exposed daily to Jeanette and Tina's partnership. He told Jeanette he had never had sex with anyone he cared deeply about. 'What is it like to have sex with someone you love?' he once asked.

He agonized over his physical appearance. (...) he detested the barnaclelike acne that dug noticeable ridges into his face. Bobby tried to adhere to a health-food diet and devoted hours each week to a bathroom ritual of applying creams, lotions, and antibiotics. (His preoccupation with facial makeover prompted his lesbian friends at CalFrame to begin calling him Cher.) Nothing seemed to work. Like gayness, zits seemed to cling to him with perverse tenacity.

During one of his trips to San Francisco, Bobby saw a familiar face on the subway train. Blaine Andrews was a boy about his age whom he had noticed with admiration a year earlier [...] Bobby found Blaine to be 'a perfect little doll. On the outside he's a boy but on the inside he's very grown up [...]' To Blaine, Bobby was a turn-on. He especially loved his smile, which he found enormous, sweet, almost impish, an 'I know something you don't know' smile.

[Working at California Frame Company,] Bobby soon discovered to his delight that there were several lesbians among the thirteen or so assembly-line workers. Once they had come out to one another, Bobby and the women formed a tight little clique, chatting in code [...] Their secret phrase for 'gay' was 'on a bike'. When a good-looking man came through, Alice (...) would ask in an audible stage whisper, 'Hey, Bobby, is he on a bike?' Bobby would reply, 'I don't know, but I'd love to find out!'

'You can change if you really want to', they say. 'Don't underestimate the Lord's power.' God damnit, how in the hell do any of them know? What gives them the right to tell me I'm going to burn in eternal hellfire and damnation? They account my 'deviation' to an inherent sinful nature. Well, then, if God gave it to me, I'm gonna keep it! They think I'm so blind and stupid, well they're the ones who are wrong.