The Amazing Story of the Televangelist and his Gay Grandson
On a late-fall night in Dallas, Randy Roberts Potts is pushing the gay agenda by watching TV. And by ironing a shirt. Also by doing a puzzle, vacuuming a rug, simmering stew in a slow-cooker, and intermittently stroking the nape of his boyfriend Keaton's neck in a subdued, abstracted manner, the way his Munna might have stroked his hair when he was a child. It could be a typically staid and eventless evening for Randy, with one fat exception: He's doing all this on a 6-by-16-foot set on a patch of downtown sidewalk, surrounded by drifting crowds of passersby.
With folded arms and befuddled frowns, the onlookers try to make sense of the scene—to the right, atop rugs laid directly on the concrete, there's a farm table and a bookcase stocked with cans of black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes; to the left, a leather couch sits before a black-and-white television on which a silvery episode of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp is flickering. A few of them lean in to read a printed explanation affixed to a coatrack up front. THE GAY AGENDA, it explains, IS PERFORMANCE ART DESIGNED TO FOSTER LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE. Huh. They glance up at Randy—he's dipping a spoon into the slow-cooker now, or studying the half-done puzzle—and then lower their gaze back to the paper. In capital letters, they see: THE GAY AGENDA AS CONCEIVED SHOULD BE INCREDIBLY BORING TO WATCH.
{snip}
It's a vaguely subversive idea—the antithesis of the "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" ethos, a strategic divorcing of homosexuality from sexuality, a tent-revival effort to de-fabulize gay stereotypes. Yet the subversiveness extends far deeper than that. If any of the onlookers look closely enough, they'll notice a black-and-white portrait on the coffee table. Some might recognize the man in the frame: the late Oral Roberts, America's original celebrity televangelist and faith healer, the Oklahoma preacher who rammed Pentecostalism into the American mainstream and the taproot out of which bloomed Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker. No doubt those keen-eyed onlookers will presume this to be a cheeky jibe, an ironic detail tucked mischievously into this Ozzie-and-Harriet tableau. But it's not. That's Randy's grandfather in that photo, the man whose influence on American life and politics Randy is quietly—and often painfully—trying to upend.
http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201202/preacher-oral-roberts-grandson-randy-roberts-potts-the-gay-agenda?currentPage=1
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A really interesting read! Much more to the story at the link!
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