Robbie Kirkland’s bedroom has barely changed in the 10 years since he last slept there. The twin bunk beds are still made, the mattresses draped with sky blue comforters and piled high with stuffed animals. Hanging above the top bunk, a St. Ignatius High School poster covers the feminine wallpaper — Robbie didn’t mind the hearts left behind when he inherited his sister’s room. The bookshelves at the foot of the beds are crammed with Dean Koontz and Christopher Pike novels, the kind of suspense stories that entertain teenage boys.

If Robbie Kirkland walked into his room after the 10 years he has been gone, he would find his books, toys and even his clothes in the same place he left them. But his room feels empty, like a museum display, because Robbie Kirkland — who would have recently turned 25, perhaps recently graduating from college to become a writer — won’t be coming home.

Ten years ago, on Jan. 1, 1997, Robbie left his stepfather and mother’s house in Strongsville, a Cleveland suburb, to spend the night at his father’s nearby Lakewood house. The next morning, 14-year-old Robbie took his father’s FBI service gun from the locked, old-fashioned breadbox where he stored it. He climbed the stairs to the attic, lay down on a mattress and pointed the gun to his head.

No one heard that gunshot. Not his father, John, who was showering downstairs. Not his sleeping sister Danielle. In fact, no one knew what Robbie had done until two hours later, when Danielle went to look for him. By that time, Robbie was dead.

No one heard that morning gunshot, but to Robbie’s family and friends, to the thousands of people who would learn his story, that lone gunshot and the tragic end to his short life would ring out, sending echoes that transformed the lives of those who could not forget the handsome, promising young man who was in such pain he took his own life.

Storyteller

Leslie Sadasivan’s welcoming face and hospitality disarm listeners as she tells the story of her son’s life and death.

She smiles often, speaking with genuine love for her children and absentmindedly sighing with affection when describing her husband, Peter. But as friendly and upbeat as she appears, she admits to a low-level depression that has shadowed her life since Robbie committed suicide.

“It’s hard to live through, it really is,” she says. “Life is such an effort since he died.”

In the moment, when she tells his story, she’s fine. But in the days after an interview or a speech, the grief returns. Still, she accepts as many opportunities as possible to talk about Robbie.

“The truth is, I don’t want to stop honoring his memory,” she says.

Funniest person in the room

Robbie Kirkland was a happy, blond-haired child who loved to play with LEGOs and Cabbage Patch dolls. He read mysteries and fantasies. Although his parents had divorced when he was just 6 months old, both his parents, stepfather and three sisters cherished him.

“He was loving, very sweet,” Leslie says. “A little shy, sensitive. Very funny. He had the best sense of humor.”

Everyone who describes Robbie mentions his humor — dry and witty, the funniest person in the room. And everyone also mentions his sensitivity.

He was 7 years old the first time his parents took him to therapy to help him deal with teasing at school, Leslie says. But through the years, he came home with a bloody nose or torn clothes on several occasions.

His sister Claudia, who was three years older, would see kids picking on Robbie on the bus to and from their grade school, Incarnate Word Academy.

“He did have a lisp, which I remember him being teased about,” she says. “He didn’t like sports and wasn’t very good at them — things that made him different. I think that’s what most kids are teased about.”

Gym days were the worst, Leslie says. Robbie would feel sick in the morning, and then be better when gym class was over.

“There were clues, and we just didn’t get them,” she says. “In seventh grade, the clues were more apparent.”

That was when a boy punched Robbie in the locker room, and another boy pushed him and called him names.

“I picked him up, and he was crying in the car,” Leslie says. “But I remember thinking that there was more to this.”

That missing element was the secret Robbie had been harboring — he was gay.

“Throughout all of his life, he made efforts to fit in,” Leslie says. “Pretending to like girls, trying sports.”

Everything started to come out in eighth grade. For Christmas, Leslie and her husband Peter bought a computer, which thrilled Robbie. They signed up for an online service, and Robbie spent hours in the spare bedroom, surfing the Web and chatting with people he met there.

“Back then, I don’t think there was all this information about watching children and the dangers,” Leslie says. “He found so many sites there that did help him. Gay sites where he could be out.”

A few weeks later, around Robbie’s February birthday, Peter found gay pornography on the computer.

“That was probably where everything changed, and all the information became more available,” Leslie says. “We asked him, of course, if he was gay.”

Robbie denied it, crying as he told a tale that someone was blackmailing him, and he was forced to save the files on the computer.

Leslie was concerned, she says, because Robbie was acting unlike the boy she knew. But still, she had no idea how troubled he was. Days later, he wrote a short suicide note, which he signed, “Robbie Kirkland, the boy who told himself put on a smile, shut up and pretend you’re happy.” Then he swallowed dozens of Tylenol pills.

The secret

In the night, Robbie vomited up the pills, and the suicide attempt remained a secret for weeks. But the crisis intensified in March, when Robbie suddenly vanished.

He had continued surfing the Internet, and one morning he took off for Chicago on a Greyhound bus to meet a man. Once his parents realized he was gone, Robbie’s father, John, used his FBI connections to search for him. At 1 a.m. the next day, Chicago police called, saying Robbie had turned himself in.

But Maria, the family’s housekeeper, found the clue that something much worse was going on. While searching Robbie’s room, she discovered the earlier suicide note in which he again denied being gay. Armed with the information, Leslie and John took Robbie to a therapist the morning John brought him back from Chicago.

“I told him that if my son is gay, I wanted him to know that I didn’t want him to change my son,” she says. “If he couldn’t support him, I would find a different counselor.”

In Robbie’s young life, he had met gay and lesbian people before, including Leslie’s friend David Kushing. But it was clear that being gay wasn’t OK to Robbie — it seemed to shatter his dreams of being a father and having a family.

His friend Becky Sardo remembers a day at summer camp, the year before he began high school, when Robbie told offensive gay jokes to a group of campers.

“I think he was trying to feel us out to see how we would react,” she says, “and we blatantly failed the test.”

Leslie tried to provide Robbie with support. She got literature from Kushing and offered to take him to a gay youth group.

“He just wasn’t ready to go,” she says.

Now that his secret was out and he was in counseling, the immediate crisis seemed over. But high school was approaching, and Robbie was determined to go to a good school. He had ambitions of becoming a writer and decided St. Ignatius High School, an all-boys Catholic school on the west side of Cleveland, was the right choice.

St. Ignatius, Leslie says, offered Robbie a fresh start after the torment of his grade school.

“He thought that because it was so large, he could go unnoticed,” she says.

But his sisters were concerned.

“We went to an all-girls high school, and we knew guys at Ignatius,” Claudia says. “There were a small percentage of guys at that school who were open-minded.” The rest, she says, had a “heightened sense of masculinity.”

Spiraling down

That fall, St. Ignatius turned out to be a poor choice for Robbie Kirkland — the teasing continued.

“He definitely changed physically,” Claudia says. “He lost so much weight, his skin looked horrible. He was stressed out all the time.”

Becky, his friend from camp, stayed in touch through letters and phone calls.

“He didn’t really say much about his school life,” she says. “I know that he didn’t have a lot of good, close friends, and I know he had a hard time.”

One of Robbie’s friends from St. Ignatius, Matt, who asked that his last name not be revealed because of his occupation, never witnessed direct harassment.

“I know that geometry class was pretty difficult for him,” he says. “I wasn’t in that class with him, but I heard a lot of stories that there was a lot of harassment going on there.”

Leslie found out later that one boy in the class would poke Robbie in the back of the head repeatedly, calling him “faggot.”

“‘Faggot’ would come out,” Matt says. “It was pretty common there.”

Leslie says she believes the all-boy environment and Catholic school education weighed on Robbie.

“It teaches that gays are sinful. I think that they use that to justify it: ‘Well, he’s going to hell. We can be mean to him, we can pick on him, we can call him names,’” she says. “But for Robbie, I think that he internalized that.”

Throughout the fall, Leslie says she couldn’t understand why Robbie was so miserable — why he couldn’t just “snap out of it.”

One day, Robbie’s therapist tried to explain: “You can’t understand what it’s like. He’s not comfortable being gay. He can’t find peace.” With those words, Leslie began to realize Robbie’s misery.

Back at home after the therapy session, Leslie found her son in his room. “I told Robbie I was sorry,” she says. “I apologized to him from my heart, and it was very emotional, and we hugged.

“It was probably one of my best memories, that somehow we connected, and he knew that I really got it: ‘OK, I love you, and I can’t understand your pain because I’m not you and I’m not gay.’”

Remember me

The puzzle pieces that would have revealed the depth of Robbie’s angst were there, in retrospect.

The earlier suicide attempt was one sign. “The counselor was reassuring us throughout therapy that he was not suicidal,” Leslie says.

But in fall 1996, he secretly wrote a series of poems in his notebooks, with titles including “Fade Out,” “Lie” and “Lost.”

“I think that I could kill,” he wrote, “but I don’t know if I will.”

His friends weren’t sure if they should take his ideas seriously.

“He used to talk about suicide a ton,” Matt says. “I just thought he was really interested in that stuff. Being a 15-year-old, I didn’t connect it.”

Claudia worried, too.

“He wasn’t the person that I knew as my brother,” Claudia says. “He was more withdrawn, more serious.”

Despite everyone’s concerns, no one foresaw what was to come.

In December 1996, Robbie began taking
antidepressants, and his behavior during the holidays was promising. Leslie says he spent more time with the family.

He also had a conversation with his mother, asking whether she thought there was a God and heaven.

“He was a very spiritual boy,” Leslie says. “I know he was very much when he was younger. But as he was older I think he questioned a lot. Had he not believed in God he wouldn’t have killed himself. He really felt he was going to a better place."

Sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Leslie believes, Robbie wrote a two-page letter in one of his notebooks. In bold letters across the top of a page, he scribbled, “Suicide note.” Then he listed numerous people in his life. To some he simply said, “You were cool.” To Matt, he wrote, “Thanx U are also a best friend.”

But Robbie also included the people who had tormented him. “Fuck you,” he wrote to one. “Rot in hell,” he wrote to another. He included instructions of where to scatter his ashes. “I hope I can find the peace I couldn’t find in life in death,” he wrote. And then he signed, “Remember me. Robbie Kirkland.”

The note remained hidden in his mother’s home when Robbie went to his father’s house New Year’s Day. The morning of Jan. 2, Leslie drove to pick up Robbie and his sisters, but her car broke down on the way. She called John to pick her up, and when he arrived, he was accompanied by a policeman.

“I saw both faces, especially the policeman,” Leslie says. “I can still see him. He had this painful, horrific look on his face.” She thought Robbie had run away again.

She remembers the rest as a haze. At John’s house, police swarmed the residence to ensure Robbie hadn’t been murdered, and he was brought down in a body bag.

“I didn’t want to see him dead,” she says. “And even though I’m a nurse, I didn’t want to see him all like that in the attic.”

That night, the police arrived at the Strongsville home. They hadn’t found a suicide note at John’s and asked to search Robbie’s room. With that two-page note, the pieces began coming together.

Going public

Robbie Kirkland’s death could have been one family’s quiet tragedy if not for the grief that threatened to swallow Leslie. She asked the priest to mention during the funeral that Robbie was gay, but he refused. She asked to speak at St. Ignatius, but the administration declined.

“I think that because of the resistance I got, it just inspired me more,” Leslie says. “That I had to do more.”

Eleanor Mallet, a columnist for The Plain Dealer, was one who listened. She wrote a column about Robbie’s death, which led to a front-page feature story. Other papers followed, and Leslie began finding an audience.

“Going public, I had to make a decision of how much to share about his story, because he’s dead, but still, I know that he would not want everyone to know, especially about the things he did, like going against our will,” Leslie says. “And the other concern for me was that they might not get the right perception of him. The gentle, sweet boy that he was.

“At any rate, I saw the higher good that it could bring by telling his story, so I did.”

The first time Leslie stood before an audience to tell Robbie’s story was at the Cleveland Gay Pride Parade in June 1997, just five months after his death.

“I was a wreck, my hands were shaking,” she says. “It was awful. It was H-E-double-L.”

She looked out into the crowd and saw John, Danielle and Claudia, all of whom were crying.

“I just tried to feel Robbie,” she says. “And of course the emotion of seeing all that, and that poor Robbie wasn’t there, and that he didn’t get the chance to be out as this gay person, that he couldn’t see this future that all these people were living by being out — it was overwhelming.”

That year’s Pride Parade was dedicated to Robbie Kirkland.

Echoes

The only person whose pain ends with a suicide is the victim. Family and friends are left to deal with the repercussions.

Leslie admits she does not have the same happiness she had before Robbie’s death. His family and friends still express regret and sorrow they didn’t see the signs, and some chose to leave the Catholic Church.

But for those touched by Robbie’s short life, his death has had a pronounced good, too. Matt, who had never met a gay person before, says, “I’m really thankful for Robbie Kirkland because he opened my eyes that the homosexual wasn’t this ‘other,’ this menace.” He’s spoken to youth about how language hurts.

Robbie’s sister Claudia became a child therapist and speaks to students about suicide.

Becky Sardo has helped Leslie put together robbiekirkland.com, a Web site that celebrates Robbie’s life and offers young people resources.

The local chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network gives a yearly scholarship in Robbie’s name to help a gay or lesbian youth go to college.

And in 10 years, Leslie has never stopped telling Robbie’s story. She has spoken at conferences and written for Ladies’ Home Journal and XY, a magazine for young gay men. She testified before the Ohio General Assembly, asking legislators to pass a bill protecting gay and lesbian youth from school harassment. And three years ago, St. Ignatius finally invited her to speak at the school’s Day of Silence, a nationwide event organized to protest harassment of gays.

She also responds to each person who e-mails her through Robbie’s Web site looking for support or to say they are touched by its message. “Your son saved my life,” a typical e-mail reads. “I read his story, and I decided to fight. To fight for him, to fight for myself and to fight for those who will come after.”

The basic good

Robbie’s bedroom is not exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. The awards for Leslie’s work keeping his story alive cover a desk and a book shelf. On the wall hangs an embroidered picture of a rainbow with the words, “Remember me, Robbie Kirkland,” a gift from a local drag queen who organized a benefit to support a gay youth program. And in the corner rests a sign from Gay Pride. Leslie was marching in the downtown Cleveland parade when an organizer saw her, handed her the sign and said, “You should have this one.” The sign says: “I love my gay son.”

She says she will always work to ensure something positive comes from Robbie’s death.

“The basic good — the really basic, basic good, if you look as his message,” she says, with tears in her eyes, “he asked us to pray for him, to remember him.

“If you look at all of this, it’s our way of remembering him,” she says. “And not just remembering him as this dead person but as this real, living person that cared about people, that was kind, that was gentle, that was compassionate and that would want to help others, especially those that are like him.”

She worries the message will be lost because Robbie has been gone for so long that young people can’t relate to him. And she questions, sometimes, whether it has been right to have his named attached to so many of the efforts.

“It was never about his story; it was about what his story represented,” she says. “That’s the one thing from the start that was so important to me. It’s not about Robbie Kirkland — it’s about the kids like Robbie.”

Brian Thornton is a graduate student in journalism.
This is his second story for The Burr.
Contact him at bthornt1@kent.edu.

STORY Brian Thornton
PHOTO Stephen Piscura

ABOVE Although it has remained mostly unchanged in the 10 years since his death, there have been a few careful additions to Robbie’s bedroom. While marching in the Cleveland Gay Pride Parade in 1997, an organizer handed this sign to Leslie and said, “You should have this one.”