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Photograph: Randy Pottsīut 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. I’ve often taken out ads on Craigslist in Tulsa and, often, my ads were flagged and removed.Ī Craiglist ad removed from the site. 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. He moved back to his hometown, living only a few miles away from his televangelist father.ĭon turned out to be the first man, in 10 years of looking, who’d agreed to talk to me on the record. He married a woman and adopted two children. 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 was the eldest son of one of the world’s first televangelists.īut my family still insists publicly: Ronald David Roberts was not gay.
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He served in the military translated cold war-era Polish code for the NSA. 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. We agree he was a brilliant man, fluent in eight languages including Russian, Polish, and Mandarin Chinese. Two: he was found dead in a car along the side of a road in Osage County with a.
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One: the view below – the same street where Matt Dillon was shot in the movie Tex – was one of his last. Those of us left behind by my uncle agree on a few concrete things. I was visiting Don Pierstorff, a retiree who worked as a teaching assistant with Uncle Ronnie at USC.ĭon Pierstorff in May 2016. I arrived in Orange County in May with the sky overcast and jacarandas spilling purple flowers onto neighborhood streets. Last month, I flew to Los Angeles to find what other people who knew him better can still remember. That’s all I have: one memory of a man who was dead by the time I was seven. I’m not going to smoke in Munna’s house, too.” He laughed: “It’s bad enough I walk into your Munna’s house with this beard, kid. I asked him, “Uncle Ronnie, why aren’t you smoking?” I was only five years old, maybe six. In my sole memory of him, he was sitting in my grandmother’s den, but to my chagrin he wasn’t smoking. 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 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.