Randy Roberts Potts, the grandson of Oral Roberts, will speak Sunday
at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa about coming out as a gay man from
an evangelical background. ANGE FITZGERALD/Courtesy
Oral Roberts' gay grandson Randy Roberts Potts says he has been shocked on occasion by how his family has treated him, but that has just inspired him to help other young gay people deal with their own issues of sexuality and religion.
Potts will talk about growing up gay in an evangelical world Sunday at All Souls Unitarian Church. It is the first time he has told his story publicly in Tulsa.
Potts was born in Tulsa, spent his first nine years in Colorado, and then lived in the Roberts family compound just north of Oral Roberts University until he graduated in 1992 from Jenks High School, where he was a junior varsity football player and a class president.
"I lived on the compound about 20 yards down the hill from Oral and saw him often, but we were not close," Potts said in a telephone interview this week from Dallas, where he lives.
"I was always told he was busy."
But he was extremely close to his grandmother, Evelyn Roberts, whom he visited nearly every day.
At age 20, Potts married a woman he met at the University of Oklahoma. After graduating from OU in 1996, he taught English for five years.
Potts said he was aware of having same-sex attractions as a child, but he didn't know what they meant.
When he was 18, he told close friends, and later his fiancee, that he was bisexual.
"This was my way of admitting my attraction but also trying to be more 'normal,' " he said.
He and his wife "spent a few years trying to figure out what that would mean for our marriage. ... We fought for the last five years," he said. "It was an unhealthy relationship."
At age 27, Potts said, he began to identify as gay with a counselor and with himself.
"I told my wife a few years later that I had to leave, and we were divorced legally in June of 2006," he said. "I have been openly gay ever since."
They have joint custody of their three children, ages 8, 10 and 12.
Potts remains estranged from his parents, Ron and Roberta Potts. His father was an ORU basketball player, and his mother is a Tulsa attorney and ORU board member.
"My parents and I stopped speaking in 2003," he said.
Roberta Potts said she learned from her daughter-in-law that her son was gay.
"Randy has never discussed it with us," she said. "We have tried to contact him, and he won't contact us."
The family division runs deep.
At Evelyn Roberts' graveside service in 2005, Potts said, an armed security guard kept him out of the family's seating section.
"I was shocked," he said. "I made a big scene. I was bawling. I was very close to Grandma."
Six months before Oral Roberts died in 2009, Potts and his children visited him at his Newport Beach, Calif., home.
"He was friendly," Potts said. "It was really good to see him."
Yet when his grandfather died, Potts said, he was not notified. And when he went to the funeral, he was not seated with the family, he said.
Roberta Potts said speaking at her father's funeral was one of the most difficult things she's ever done.
"I was so focused, honestly, that it didn't dawn on me to make sure Randy had a seat," she said. "I wish now I had made sure.
"We're not homophobic. We have no ill feelings toward homosexual persons. We have no ill feelings toward Randy at all," she said. "We love him. We'll always love him."
But "children have the power to choose how they're going to live their lives," Potts said. "We'll never stop praying for him. We'll never stop believing in him.
"But that doesn't mean we approve of his conduct. We do believe what the Bible says."
Ron Potts added: "No one set out to ostracize him. He could have called us. Our doors are always open."
Randy Potts said he has begun to speak and write about his life and gay issues.
"I've come into contact with a lot of young gay men and women out there who have heard the message from preachers that gay people are going to hell," he said, "and I want to counteract that message and give those kids hope so that they don't commit suicide or turn to drugs."
Potts is writing a book.
"It's my story, not an exposé," he said. "I'm not interested in digging up dirt on my family. I want to write a book that is healing to people with similar experiences."
Potts said he will speak Sunday about overcoming hardship, coming out as a gay man, and "how I found enough hope to move on after my family and church told me I was going to hell."
Does he still consider himself a Christian?
"I don't use a label to define my spirituality - labels divide rather than unite," he said. "We are all spiritual beings and all attempt to be good, myself included. The values that I hold dear today are by and large the same values I grew up with.
"For some people, that means I am still a Christian; for others, that alone does not qualify me," he said. "For myself, the distinction doesn't really matter."
