Gay Oklahomans like my uncle, son of Oral Roberts, bear the weight of stories the straights refuse to tell. Now I am chasing down – and sharing – his own tale

My uncle, Ronald David Roberts, was the oldest son of Oral Roberts, one of the first televangelists in America. At age 37, Uncle Ronnie was found in a car on the side of a backcountry road, shot dead. He was gay and closeted and, for 10 years now, I have been chasing what few facts remain about the part of his life my family has swept under the rug.

I chase after this private history because I am gay as well and, if I am silent, my family could erase me the way they have tried to erase my uncle.

In the world of my childhood – spent on a Pentecostal compound in Oklahoma – my uncle Ronnie was a hothouse flower: the way he laughed; the way he smiled through his beard; his professorial cardigan; his glasses; his pipe.

I remember him the way you might remember the way the sky was lit on a great day 20 years ago: brightly yet faintly. In my sole memory of him, he was sitting in my grandmother’s den, but to my chagrin he wasn’t smoking. I asked him, “Uncle Ronnie, why aren’t you smoking?” I was only five years old, maybe six. He laughed: “It’s bad enough I walk into your Munna’s house with this beard, kid. I’m not going to smoke in Munna’s house, too.”

That’s all I have: one memory of a man who was dead by the time I was seven.

Last month, I flew to Los Angeles to find what other people who knew him better can still remember. I arrived in Orange County in May with the sky overcast and jacarandas spilling purple flowers onto neighborhood streets. I was visiting Don Pierstorff, a retiree who worked as a teaching assistant with Uncle Ronnie at USC.

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My shoulders leaning on the glass patio table in Don’s foyer, my ears were taking in every hard-to-hear word. Don, 82, had his salivary glands, thyroid glands, and part of his cheeks removed due to an illness.

About their life on campus, he said:

When you’d go over there in the olden days we’d always stop by the 901, a fantastic bar. From there to my house you could walk directly home. Ron wanted to come over one night, of course a lot of guys would then, my place was such a beautiful place, I had a balcony, I had everything. We were shooting the breeze I don’t know how long for. He had a few [beers], started crying about some sailor in Long Beach. When he told me he was gay, I told him “I’m a Democrat: as long as you vote Democrat, I don’t give a shit what you are.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don Pierstorff in May 2016. Photograph: Randy Potts

Those of us left behind by my uncle agree on a few concrete things.

One: the view below – the same street where Matt Dillon was shot in the movie Tex – was one of his last.

Two: he was found dead in a car along the side of a road in Osage County with a .25 caliber gunshot wound to his heart.

We agree he was a brilliant man, fluent in eight languages including Russian, Polish, and Mandarin Chinese. We agree he was prescribed Tussionex for pain and later arraigned in court in February of 1982 for filling multiple prescriptions from too many doctors. He played the flute, beautifully. He served in the military; translated cold war-era Polish code for the NSA. He was the eldest son of one of the world’s first televangelists.

But my family still insists publicly: Ronald David Roberts was not gay.

To muddy the story even more, I have to acknowledge that, for the last five years of his life – between ages 32 and 37 – he presented himself as straight. He married a woman and adopted two children. He moved back to his hometown, living only a few miles away from his televangelist father.

Don turned out to be the first man, in 10 years of looking, who’d agreed to talk to me on the record. I’ve been chasing phantoms, trying to pin down real people who would tell me, in the flesh, stories from my uncle’s first life as a gay man – but no one would.

I’ve often taken out ads on Craigslist in Tulsa and, often, my ads were flagged and removed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Craiglist ad removed from the site. Photograph: Randy Potts

But John Crespin, who spoke with me on the phone in response to a Craigslist ad, told me he went to Circus Disco with my uncle in 1976, said my uncle favored aviator sunglasses. It was all he could remember. John was underage and Uncle Ronnie and his friends snuck him into the club. After yesterday’s attack in Orlando, I hold on to this fact, too: Pulse is a Latin club, like Circus Disco, and my uncle’s presence there feels important because when you are gay, there are so many ways to die.

As for the police report of my uncle’s death, it is missing. Told by the sheriff that it couldn’t be found, I sent a FOIA request and have yet to receive a response. Some of the men who have emailed me over the years say they’re too scared to talk on the record, but they won’t say why.

In 2011, I received another response to my Craigslist inquiry. A message from the void, no name or identifying details: the writer said he knew Uncle Ronnie during the last year of his life:

When we were together it didn’t seem like it was just for sexual pleasure with him. It seemed like what he needed most was someone to hold him and make him feel everything was all right. I know at times he got involved in some pretty risky sexual encounters and other risky behavior but I think it was from lack of getting what he really needed. Not much different from what a lot of other scared closeted guys go through. I clearly remember the last time I saw him. He called then came by my house. He seemed very strange acting and quiet. We never did anything sexual that day. We talked briefly and embraced for several minutes. He held me very tightly as if he was holding on for dear life then left just looking me in the eye and saying good by.

I don’t know why but I had the feeling I would never see him again. He did call a couple of times but they were brief conversations. Just a little chit chat. I had the feeling he was trying to go straight again.

It’s easy to imagine this is nothing but rural precinct incompetence and southern reticence to speak openly about controversial topics: when we talk about sex and death here in Tulsa, we use nouns such as “fornication” and “procreation”, phrases such as “to pass on”, “to go home.”

But it’s also easy to imagine that Oklahoma’s most infamous evangelist didn’t want the homosexual history of his oldest son in the news.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One block from his Uncle Ronnie’s last residence: South Peoria in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photograph: Randy Potts

In the late 1980s, my teenage cousin Rachel was lying in a hospital, convinced she was going to die. That was five years after her dad’s death. This is how I remember her description of that time:



I was lying in a hospital bed and all I could think of were all the lies that had brought me there. I was anorexic and weighed next to nothing and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to live anymore – especially without the truth. I called my mother over to me and I told her I had to know: “If I’m going to die, I have to know the truth. Was my father gay?” She argued with me. I can’t remember much of what she said but finally she nodded, saying: “Yes, yes, yes, honey, he was.”

I’ve waited 10 years to tell this story: my cousin, later, asked me not to, saying it’s wrong to write publicly about her father’s orientation.

She told me this story when I was coming out and trying to make my way as a newly divorced single father in Oklahoma. She told me this for a reason: that truth had kept her alive. I think she wanted to share the force of it – the concrete weight of it – at a time when I needed solid ground most. But her mother, my aunt Carol, kept that secret from her daughter for a reason.

Aunt Carol embraced me when I came out, inviting me over for Christmas and Thanksgiving. She used to gaze at me from across the room (I know now, because so many people have told me, that I look like my uncle, that I carry myself the way he did).

Brokeback Mountain came out the same Christmas I did, in 2005, and I sat between my cousin and my aunt watching what was my uncle’s story, what was my story, what was our story, play out onscreen. Leaving the theater that night, we drove home in silence.

Now that I’ve publicly announced my uncle was gay, Aunt Carol is completely silent: no more invitations to Thanksgiving or Christmas. That embrace had conditions; I broke them. Telling the world that her husband was gay meant betraying her; telling the story above – my teenage cousin in the hospital, demanding the truth – is betraying my cousin Rachel, too.

I am not happy, dragging their unwilling names into the light. But stories are ammunition. She spent hers and now I’m spending mine.

When I came out, I didn’t want to know gay history: I wanted to live it for myself. I had lived inside books my whole life – 31 years! – and I wanted to live, at last, in my own flesh. I was a new convert to a new faith: faith in my erection, faith in my sweat glands, faith in my fingers, faith in my feet and where they could take me.

I was a Protestant – a Pentecostal – in my new faith: fuck dogma. Fuck history. I wanted the Spirit: I wanted the seed of him, the shouting gospel of him, and I got it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Phillip Ray de Blieck and Troy Perry in Los Angeles, May 2016. Photograph: Randy Potts

Years later, ready to know from whence I came, I started with Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal. I’d heard that a gay preacher had received a letter from Uncle Ronnie and so, when I first felt ready for my people’s history, I read Troy’s autobiography: The Lord Is My Shepherd, and He Knows I’m Gay.

Troy Perry started the first gay-affirming church in 1969 in Los Angeles: he was a former Assemblies of God minister and, when he came out, he was told he’d never preach again.

This spring, I met Troy and his husband Phillip at a restaurant in Silver Lake and we talked about my grandfather, Oral. Troy heard him preaching back when Troy was in the closet, sometime in early 1960s LA:

Your grandfather is the first person I ever heard use the word homosexual from the pulpit and it wasn’t a put-down. I was heterosexually married and he got up and said: “A young man came last night and fell into my arms and said, ‘Brother Roberts, can the Lord help me? I’m a homosexual.’” Now he said it here in California, he would’ve never said it in Oklahoma, but he knew his audience. Well, he says – and all the blood rushed out of my face, I didn’t know what he was fixin’ to say – all your grandfather said at the time was: ‘I told him, yes, son, God can help you.’ And he moved on, didn’t quote scripture or anything. OK?

Troy continued:

Your uncle was bright as a peck – he was an expert on Chinese antiquities! Well, he heard me speak at USC and he wrote me a letter, he said “Dear Reverend Perry, I wanted to write you and send you a check.” I was in a TV show – God, Gays, & the Gospel – and he’d read about it, and he said: “I don’t consider myself religious anymore, but I wanted to help you.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A detail of artwork at USC, where Don taught. Photograph: Randy Potts

I, like my uncle before me, am not religious, but I haven’t lost my faith. I believe in things – concrete things, things with weight attached to them – and I believe in things like the weight of my uncle’s story.

Before I came out, I slept with many men. The second man, a college tennis player for Southern Nazarene University, used to call me, often, to tell me how much better it was on the other side. I would roll my eyes: I was married with children. I wasn’t gay. I liked fucking him but it was just a thing. “Gay” was a commitment. “Gay” was a conversion. “Gay” was music I was supposed to like and didn’t, people I was supposed to act like, and didn’t.

Once, walking to the gym downtown, a gay man called me out: “Honey, could you spare me a dollar, I need some food” – I cut him off quickly, mortified, shaking my head no. “Oh, sorry, honey, I thought you was family – I was sure you were a sister!”



Coming out in Oklahoma is a conversion: its attendant testimony, catechisms, and shibboleths have weight, gravitas. They sink in. We Oklahoma queers can’t speak English without the influence of the King James Version; we can’t talk about sex or coming out without using the words we heard in church.

For us especially, coming out is a conversion to a new faith – one that, for most Christians in Oklahoma, requires you leave Jesus behind.

Coming out, we’re family: growing up in the church, I’d watched men refer to other Christian men as their brothers.

Coming out, I am now greeted by gay men as their sister, often with a holy kiss.

It has been the privilege of my family to tell my Uncle Ronnie’s life in a short, easy paragraph:

Ronald David Roberts married, adopted two children, and taught high school English. He was too brilliant for this world. It tormented him, that brilliance, and he turned to drugs, and a gun.

It is the privilege of those with power to tell us who we are. It has been the privilege of heterosexuals to tell transgender men and women what constitutes gender, to corral the tools of scientific inquiry and subject subjective flesh and bone to its will: “You are a man. You are a woman. You two, and only you two, were meant to marry, were meant to fuck.”

Armed with facts – artifacts, photographs, testimony – it is now my privilege to tell that power to fuck off.

Denied the cross, we Oklahoma queers bear the weight of all the stories the straights refuse to tell. We tell these stories because: it’s the only ground we have. After his sailor died, Uncle Ronnie married a woman, moved back to Tulsa, and adopted two children.

As far as I can tell, the pain of that first loss: with him until the end.

We tell our stories because, for us queer folk, telling is a matter of life and death. When we didn’t tell them, we died. Life demands it: represent.

This essay is adapted from Book VI of The Bible Went Down With the Birdie Jean, a reported memoir that will include interviews, essays, and poetry accompanying 300 photographs on Instagram in Fall 2016; you can follow the account now: @thebirdiejean.