A Gay Grandson to an Evangelical Empire

The day of reckoning was set in 2002. Randy Roberts Potts stood in the kitchen as everything was waking up. He finally felt a spreading definition, a pulling value as though he had remembered what he needed for the first time in all his 27 years on mortal earth.

“I’m gay. I’m gay. I’m gay,” he realized.

Ten years later, Potts sits in front of an emotional crowd — many of them Oral Roberts University alumni — inside the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center’s Liberty Education Forum to speak about his perspective on faith and sexuality. He shakes his head, smiles a honeydew grin that belies memories big enough to break through stained-glass windows, and then begins sharing them. Potts continues to measure his former self — the closeted grandchild of televangelist Oral Roberts — against the one we see on stage: A proud, openly gay man.

“It was a very slow process,” he told the crowd. “It took a lot of years of therapy and learning to be OK with myself on a lot of levels, not just sexually.”

Now Potts wants to share his story of growing up on the Roberts compound under the banner of evangelical royalty, coming out, and his personal faith journey with audiences throughout the United States. This weekend he served as grand marshal for the AIDS Walk in Oklahoma, returning to the home state of his grandfather’s spiritual kingdom.

Randy’s grandfather, Oral Roberts, remained one of the most well-known and controversial leaders inside the American Pentecostal movement until his death in December 2009.

“I was not close to my grandfather, even though my family lived about 20 yards away on the Roberts compound in Tulsa,” he said.

Oral Roberts pioneered TV evangelism, conducted more than 300 crusades on six continents, and founded Oral Roberts University and the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association —a holy empire that was worth more than half-a-billion-dollars. He would also achieve worldwide notoriety after he claimed that God “would take him home” unless his followers raised $8 million in cash.

“I was 12 years old then, and, in the world I was living in, this wasn’t as unusual as you might expect,” Potts said. “There was a rhyme and reason to everything in God’s world. If you had a question, the Bible always had the answer.”

In 1982, uncle Ronnie — heir to the Oral Roberts throne — committed suicide six months after he came out to Troy Perry, founder of the first gay-friendly congregation in Los Angeles.

“Growing up, I didn’t know my uncle was gay, but I always wanted to be like him,” Potts said. “I feel like my life has mirrored his. Every time my mother mentioned him I noted two things: one, that she had loved him more than she had ever loved anybody else; and two, that the memory of his [gay] path brought more pain to her than any other memory.