Chapter 15: Robbie Kirkland

"It's Hard to Be Gay"

Robbie Kirkland
1982-1997

Ask any gay teenager who’s coming to grips with his or her sexual orientation. More than likely, the teen talks about an emotional struggle with inner demons in a Bible-thumping society that has drilled into a youngster’s head that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral. To make matters worse, homophobes point to a preposterous argument that the gay community teems with pedophiles who recruit children into their fold.

To stamp out the stigma of teen homosexuality in the 21st century, many Northeast Ohio high schools and colleges have instituted counseling programs for gay students who are wading through a sea of questions to understand and accept their sexuality. Outside the halls of academia, the Metro Youth Outreach project of the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland is among several after-school programs that provide safe havens for the youngest members of the gay community. Many of these groups are byproducts of Robbie Kirkland’s internal grappling with his homosexuality and the heartbreaking suicide that ended it.

Born February 22, 1982, in University Hospitals on Cleveland’s East Side, David Reid-Robertson “Robbie” Kirkland was the third child and only son of John David Reid-Robertson and Leslie Powell Kirkland. The paternal side of his family was so proud of its Scottish heritage that, by ancestral tradition, it christened its newborn boys with names that honored their grandfathers.

To outsiders, Robbie’s parents seemed like a happy and well-adjusted couple. John -- a native of Tuxedo, New York, near the site of the 1970 Woodstock music festival -- met the Massachusetts-bred Leslie while both were stationed in the Army in Idaho. They married in 1976, the same year they relocated to Cleveland’s West Park neighborhood so that John could attend Case Western Reserve University’s law school. After he passed the bar exam, he joined the FBI’s downtown headquarters as an agent. Meanwhile, Leslie gave birth to Danielle in 1977 and Claudia in 1979.

Six miscarriages followed, before the couples’ marriage started to disintegrate three years later. While Leslie endured a difficult pregnancy with Robbie, John carried on an affair with a woman in his office. The Kirklands separated, and their divorce became final in August of 1982, a mere six months after their son’s birth. Leslie remarried two years later to Kaiser Permanente nephrologist Dr. Peter Sadasivan and moved to Wildwood Lane in Strongsville, where Robbie affectionately referred to his stepfather as “dad.” In 1992, the Sadasivans became parents of their own daughter, Alexandria.

Leslie and her Indian-born husband taught the four children to respect everyone’s race, religion and sexual orientation. She once hired a lesbian couple to hang wallpaper in their home, telling the kids beforehand that it was all right if they saw the women give each other a kiss or a hug. But Robbie picked up mixed signals away from home. In the third grade at Sts. Joseph & John Interparochial School in Strongsville, he discovered that not everybody regarded others with the same level of respect. “Our family loved, supported and accepted him, but could not protect him from the rejection and harassment he experienced at his Catholic schools or his overall perception of how society and religion view homosexuality,” she said. “I could see it. His pants were torn. He had scratches. We would pray that everything would get better.”

One day, Robbie told his mom that he wanted to transfer to another school because of his classmates’ taunts. So she enrolled both him and Claudia in Incarnate Word Academy in Parma Heights, where Danielle was already a student. Between the fourth and eighth grades, Robbie excelled at his schoolwork, bringing home stellar report cards. His classmates even elected him to a seat on the school’s Student Council. Still, a handful of bullies continued to mock him. “Robbie was soft-spoken, gentle, creative and disliked sports,” Leslie remembered. “Robbie made many efforts to fit in with the other boys, such as participating in sports and pretending to have crushes on girls. It wasn’t enough. He was still perceived as gay and encountered teasing and harassment, usually out of the teacher’s view.”

Robbie started to write poetry in 1994, ostensibly to document his confusion over his pubescent sexuality. One piece, "The End of My Life," foretold his master plan:

It nears
I’m dying and no one cares
The pain the pain
THE PAIN!
I scream in pain!
My body shakes in violent spasms
I cry out in pain again!
I scream
My blood pours like a stream
I’m dying and no one cares
I scream in pain one last time
And then it’s over
I am dead and no one cares
Note: A lot of stuff in here is weird like this
I’m not really like that


Robbie found solace during the summers, when he connected with other Catholic-raised kids at Camp Christopher in Bath Township. He swam and canoed on Lake Marian. He designed and created jewelry in arts-and-crafts workshops, often giving his pieces to family and close friends. He also connected with Jenine Coffman, a freshman at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School. In January of 1996, he wrote her a letter in which he proclaimed, “Guess what? I’m happy!” Then, he explained his predicament. “I’ll tell you why people make fun of me,” Robbie wrote. “You see, I talk different. You know I have a slight lisp (s’s come out th’s). And I’m kinda, well, sucky at sports. So people have called me gay. They don’t mean it cuz, if they did, I’d be beat up by now. You see everyone in our school is, like, homophobic (including me).”

At about the same time, the Sadasivans signed up for Internet service with the provider, America On Line, or AOL. Unfortunately, the couple didn’t make it a practice to monitor Robbie while he was surfing online. He told them he was playing games, instant-messaging friends in teen chat rooms and doing research for his homework. But truthfully, he was logging onto gay websites to meet men, including a Pennsylvania guidance counselor who sent him an XXX-rated video of himself. When his parents received the AOL bill -- the service was charging its users by the hour at the time -- they were floored. They immediately banned Robbie from using the computer. But the punishment didn’t stop him. To talk to other gays, he resorted to calling costly 1-900 telephone numbers designed for adult entertainment.

Nearly two months later, Peter discovered files of gay pornography on the family computer. Robbie denied he was homosexual, when his parents asked him. And before he went to sleep that night, he wrote a suicide note and ingested an entire bottle of Tylenol painkillers, only to wake up and vomit the 30 tablets a few hours later. On February 26, four days after his 14th birthday, he sent Coffman another letter. “The reason why I tried to kill myself was because of stuff that happened that would fill a novel,” he wrote. “I’ll tell you a shortened version: 1. Every day now, I fear for my life. 2. I fear online. 3. Something weird is going on with me and God. I don’t like church masses (but) I still have faith in God. One and two are connected.”

A month passed before “the worst day of my entire life,” Leslie said. On March 29, Robbie ran away from home, hopped on a Greyhound bus and rode to Chicago to meet a man with whom he had been clandestinely meeting in a chat room. The thought of Robbie being forced into a world of child prostitution petrified Leslie. In a bizarre twist of fate 24 hours later, a homeless man directed her son to a policeman, who called her at 3 a.m. to tell her he had found Robbie. John Kirkland drove to the Windy City to bring his only son home. “I was relieved and thankful to God to hear that Robbie was safe,” Leslie said. “We immediately took (him) to a counselor, who, with Robbie’s permission, confirmed our suspicions that he was gay.” The psychiatrist also said that the boy was not happy about his revelation.

Robbie’s parents, stepfather and sisters immediately accepted his disclosure of his sexual orientation. Dealing drugs and robbing innocent people at gunpoint would upset his dad; homosexuality would not. “I told him honestly, ‘Some people are not going to like you because of this, Rob,’” John told "Gay People’s Chronicle" reporter Doreen Cudnik in a 1997 article. “(I said), ‘But I’m not going to have a problem with you over something like this, Rob. If it’s what you are, it’s what you are.’” John also made a commitment to become involved with the support group, Parents & Friends of Gays & Lesbians, or P-FLAG.

Still, Leslie held Robbie at night as he cried himself to sleep. She told him everything would be all right, and he would someday find someone special to love and with whom he could raise kids. But he grew even more despondent about his sexuality. Robbie confided in another Camp Christopher buddy, 14-year-old Rebecca Lange, for whom he made a necklace in an arts-and-crafts class. She picked up on the sadness he concealed with a broad, infectious smile. “He could not live knowing that he was gay in a homophobic society,” Lange recalled. “It was unacceptable and impossible for Robbie to live his life lying to everyone. But he did not feel that it was even thinkable to tell anyone his secret.”

Robbie’s freshmen year at the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland proved even more tumultuous. Attending on a full scholarship, he hoped he could simply blend into the crowd of the all-male student body. But boys started to mock him with names like “faggot” and “queer.” “Over a period of time, the effects of homophobia he encountered at school left him feeling ashamed, isolated and insecure,” Leslie said. “He was not happy to be gay, knowing how much his Catholic schoolmates, society and the Catholic doctrine rejected homosexuality.”

A crush on one of the school’s star football jocks only heightened Robbie’s emotional tug-of-war. He hid his infatuation from all but two classmates. And he confided in Claudia, who was a senior at Magnificat High School in Rocky River by this time. He told her that “it’s hard to be gay at St. Ignatius,” she recalled.

At the end of the 1996 high-school football season in November, Robbie rummaged through his mother’s personal papers for her checking account and driver’s license numbers so he could sign up as a member of the Prodigy computer service without her knowledge. A few days before Christmas, she discovered the truth. On December 30, she and Robbie’s therapist convinced the boy to attend his first meeting of Presence and Respect for Youth in Sexual Minority, or PRYSM, at the LGBT Center. The doctor also advised Leslie to treat her son like a naughty toddler and padlock the family’s computer room so he couldn’t gain access to the Internet.

Robbie was also seeing a gay psychiatrist, who could serve as a role model for the troubled boy. He also wrote a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft to help stabilize the fragility of Robbie’s sadness. The drug’s effects would take about a month to kick in, he advised. But it was too late. The boy who liked to read books and write poetry was composing the last chapter of his life that ended at the dawn of 1997.

Robbie and his older sisters, who were all nearing the end of a holiday break from school, were spending an unseasonably balmy New Year’s Day at their father’s century-old home on Maile Avenue in Lakewood with plans to sleep there overnight. Early the next morning on Thursday, January 2, Claudia dashed off to gymnastics practice at Magnificat. Danielle, meantime, caught a few extra zzz’s in a second-floor bedroom before her mother arrived later in the day to take the children on a downtown shopping spree at Tower City Center. Before she left the house, Claudia shouted a quick good-bye to a half-asleep Robbie.

At 10:30 a.m., John, whose bedroom was located in a finished basement, showered in an adjacent bathroom. At the same time, Robbie tiptoed into his dad’s bedroom, rifled through drawers and found a key to a gun cabinet. He opened the door, grabbed a pistol and a handful of bullets, locked the cabinet and returned the key to its hiding place.

Sometime during the next hour, armed with the loaded gun, Robbie sneaked through Claudia’s bedroom to a set of steps that led to an attic whose thick insulation made it virtually soundproof. A bullet to the head seemed an easier option to escape his anguish than to face the bullies at school or, worse yet, the fight for acceptance in a predominantly heterosexual world. He pulled the trigger; the suffering stopped. He would have gone to his first PRYSM meeting just two days later. “I regret that I prohibited Robbie from the one place (the Internet) that he did not have to be closeted, where people accepted him for who he was and shared his pain and struggle,” Leslie said. “The thought that he might have died without us ever having the chance to reassure him of our love, support and acceptance of his homosexuality would have been even harder for me to live with.”

Leslie didn’t find out the horrifying news until a couple of hours later. After she and Alexandria drove from Strongsville to pick up her other children for the shopping trip, her car broke down in the parking lot of a Lakewood gas station. She called John to meet her while she waited for a AAA truck to tow away her car. When he pulled into the lot, with a cop car behind him, an ashen-faced John told her that a horrified Danielle had found Robbie’s lifeless body on a mattress in the attic, with parts of his brain splattered on the floor and walls. Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth Balraj determined the time of death at 4:32 p.m., the same time when his body was wheeled into her office.

On January 5, the day of Robbie’s wake, Leslie met several gay men who had befriended Robbie in Internet chat rooms and on websites. They told her he was a funny and entertaining teenager with a flair for creative writing beyond his young years. “(Robbie) shared how unhappy he was to be gay and difficulties he faced as a closeted gay youth at school,” Leslie said. “It is truly amazing that people online accepted him and tried to help him. Even though we didn't know about Robbie's deep pain at the time, at least he found acceptance and support online.”

St. Ignatius’ pastor, the Reverend James Lewis, also approached Leslie to offer his condolences. She told him that “other Robbies” were enrolled at the school, where teachers needed to reassure them that straight students should be kind to classmates with different sexual orientations. For those kids who already treated gays with respect, she said they should be applauded “for doing God’s work.”

Leslie then walked up to the Reverend F. Christopher Esmurdoc, an associate pastor of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Strongsville, where the Sadasivans regularly attended Sunday mass. She asked him to allot time during his eulogy to tell mourners to accept the LGBT community. He ignored her request. (In scandalous irony, Esmurdoc left the priesthood several months later, after he admitted to a gay affair with an older pastor from Borromeo Seminary in Wickliffe. He later was hired as a social worker at the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.) “I was hurt and in shock,” Leslie said. “There were students from St. Ignatius, Magnificat, all these schools to hear the message. He had this wonderful opportunity, and he could have said so much more.”

Leslie eventually offered to speak in front of the student body at St. Ignatius about her son’s distress before his death. Principal Richard Clark politely declined, saying he’d rather organize a mass that prayed for suicide victims. Though disappointed, Leslie said she didn’t feel bitter about the school’s rejection of her proposition. “I’m not a public person, but I would read on a loudspeaker, if it would help one boy out there,” she told The Chronicle after Robbie’s funeral. “Me and his sisters and his father and his other father all feel that there are all these other Robbies in the world. Not just the Robbies, but the people that treat the Robbies badly. If we can help them in any way, then we feel called by God to do it. I’m not an articulate person; I‘m just a mom who loved her son.”

Nearly nine months after Robbie’s burial, Leslie stood on the shores of Lake Marian with a Ziploc bag containing two sets of her son’s hair locks in her hands. One set -- the finer, lighter hair -- was clipped off his head when he was born. The undertaker had cut the coarser, darker second bundle of hair at the funeral home. Being a devout Catholic, she couldn’t bring herself to carry out Robbie’s wishes in his suicide note to be cremated and his ashes scattered at the summer camp he treasured. Tossing his hair into the lake seemed like a better alternative. She also created the website, Robbiekirkland.com, to tell Internet surfers about his story. “I am sure that Robbie is touched that his story is on the medium which he so loved,” she said. “Now, others like him might read it and see hope, knowing that they are not alone in their struggle and try to get help instead of giving up on life like Robbie did.”

Support and social groups for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered teens have cropped up throughout Northeast Ohio since Robbie’s suicide. One of the most active, Metro Youth Outreach for 14 to 24 years olds, offers a meeting place in the lower level of the LGBT Center at 6600 Detroit Ave., where teens and young adults can network with each other. Its staff members answer questions on a 24-hour help line. They conduct cooking, poetry and art classes. They even travel to hospitals in the program’s mobile clinic to administer testing for AIDS and the HIV virus and to hand out food, clothing and hygiene kits.

Through April of 2007, when she gave a speech at the Beaumont School for Girls in Cleveland Heights, Leslie lectured on LGBT issues to gay-straight student alliances on college and high-school campuses. She marched and spoke at gay-pride rallies in Cleveland, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. She became an active member of both P-FLAG and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN. She agreed to tell her son’s story in several published articles in "Ladies’ Home Journal," the "Plain Dealer" and gay-oriented newspapers in Miami and Philadelphia. And after eight years of rebuffing her, St. Ignatius’ administrators finally allowed her to speak at a “Day of Silence” student assembly in 2005. “Two of Robbie’s best friends who had graduated from Ignatius also spoke about him and homophobia,” Leslie remembered. “I felt Robbie’s presence. It was very surreal and bittersweet.”

Other family members also helped to raise awareness in Robbie’s memory. Claudia eventually earned a master’s degree in social work, became a child therapist because of her brother’s tribulations, and volunteered at a suicide hotline in Seattle. But Leslie curtailed her campaign for LGBT rights after the Beaumont lecture because of Alexandria. “My activism became embarrassing for her, and she was in the closet about (it) and having a gay brother who killed himself -- a double, social stigma for an adolescent girl,” Leslie said. “The homophobia at her Catholic grade school -- the same grade school that Robbie attended -- and Catholic high school forced her to go into the closet.”

In the midst of her hiatus as an activist, Leslie applauded from the sidelines as the gay community became more visible in mainstream society. Voters in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and Lakewood elected gay candidates to public offices. Cleveland City Council overwhelmingly adopted a registry for gay domestic partnerships. A delegation of sports freaks successfully wooed the organizers of the worldwide Gay Games to stage the quadrennial athletic extravaganza in Cleveland in 2014. “I think Robbie would be thrilled by the progress that has been made,” Leslie said. “All of this is positive and a big improvement from (the time of his death). However, he would be disappointed that there is still so much homophobia in schools and in the world. There is still much to be done.”

Leslie continues to maintain the website that’s devoted to her son, sharing her experiences with online surfers. She’s made Robbie’s poetry available to readers. She’s rerun many of the newspaper articles that chronicled the aftermath of his suicide. And she’s provided links to resources that could further educate gay children and their families. “Through the years, many teens and adults have told me what a difference Robbie’s story made to their lives,” she said. “Robbie was my angel, and God helped me to do the impossible: To tell his story and to help others just like him.”

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Robbie Kirkland was buried in Section E, Lot 114, Grave D of Strongsville Cemetery on Pearl Road (State Route 42) three quarters of a mile north of Royalton Road (State Route 82) in Strongsville. He was 14 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser