Guest blogger Todd Camp is the Artistic Director of Q Cinema, Fort Worth’s Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival.

As a young, newly out 26-year-old journalist, I’ll never forget meeting a charismatic, white-haired gentlemen named Leroy Aarons. His own coming out and his subsequent founding of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association made headlines nationwide.

Roy was a whip smart, grandfatherly (God, he would have hated that adjective) mentoring force in my life who saw me through one of the darkest chapters of my journalism career, when some people with different political views than mine got me successfully removed from editing a newspaper magazine for young people.

I eagerly read his first book, Prayers for Bobby, a heart-wrenching true story of a young boy whose overbearing, intolerant mother made it appear that suicide was his only out. The book became a Lifetime movie premiering this at 8 p.m. on Saturday.
Oscar-nominee Sigourney Weaver stars as Mary Griffith, an unforgiving zealot transformed into a gay rights activist by the passing of her son.

Like most Lifetime fare (they don’t call it “Television for Women . . . and Gay Men” for nothing), it’s a bit melodramatic. But the message is unmistakable and wounding. Anyone not moved during the movie’s gay pride parade finale should probably check themselves for a pulse.

We lost Roy to cancer in 1994, but I’m pretty sure he would have been proud. Q Cinema, Fort Worth’s Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival is honored to offer a commercial-free screening of the film at 8 p.m. Saturday at Moudy, 164S in the Moudy Building on the campus of Texas Christian University. It’s the very room where Q Cinema was born as a film discussion group in the late ’90s. The building is at the corner of University Drive and Cantey.

A word of caution: Bring Kleenex.