The loves of Billy Graham’s wife
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Sexuality, History, Creative Non Fiction, LGBTQ, Religion

The loves of Billy Graham’s wife

Are Patricia Cornwell’s stories a bit odd?

I didn’t realize a 1983 biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of America’s leading Evangelist, might have to be classed as “queer” literature. Even a lesbian love story.

I was struck by her beauty, her gentleness and spontaneous laughter. My next encounters with her came when I was in the local red brick grammar store and would see her car idling out by the endless line of orange buses wrapped around the school. She was there to pick up her younger son Ned. I would conspicuously walk back and forth in front of her car, searching with mock gravity for bus #91, until she spotted me and asked me if I wanted a ride.

The writer is Patricia Cornwell, later a famed lesbian mystery novelist. In one of the stranger narratives of Evangelicalism—which is not easy to do—Ruth Bell Graham was her friend and patroness. I have questions.

How did a tribute to female beauty get into a book marketed to Evangelical Christians?

Typically in this kind of literature, women are sentimentalized, and also sinful. I read Cornwell’s book, amazed at the long descriptions to Graham’s physicality.

Ruth had become more lovely. Her face was older now, and it seemed that all she had ever been or done was etched there. It was the face of one who often smiled: Her brow was smooth and lines radiated from her eyes; two fine creases ran from the wings of her nose to the corners of her mouth, lifting her cheeks in tucks when she smiled, her teeth bright between them like the sun shining through sashed curtains. Her eyes were wide and expressive: sparkling like water when she laughed, winking like light on a windowpane when she teased. At pensive moments, when she was alone with her thoughts, weariness and wisdom wavered through them like the shadow of a fish swimming through a pond. Her bones were more sharply defined, exquisite: the straight nose, the high cheeks, the strong jaw. Her skin was taut, her veins prominent as a leaf’s.

It’s a love letter.

Cornwell talks in various interviews about their bond. “I don’t know that I would be alive today if it wasn’t for her,” she recalls in a 2015 profile.

Amid Cornwell’s teenage anorexia, Graham made a project of helping her, including getting her started as a writer. Cornwell recalls the North Carolina scenery: “It was such a puritanical place and very ignorant. You never heard anything about women being gay. It didn’t exist. It was only men. And they were paedophiles, of course.”

Her first lesbian intimacies occurred much later, after a divorce in 1990, and she was later outed. As Cornwell recalls in a 2007 profile, her mother was horrified, telling her, “You’ve disgraced our family.”

Ruth’s reply was different. “I flew to see her, saying there would be things in the news. She just said, ‘So, honey, what else have you been doing?’”

Does that suggest she knew Cornwell was lesbian? In a 1997 profile of Cornwell in Vanity Fair, Ruth says she didn’t.

“And the fact that I’ve known her all these years and not once have I had the slightest — the slightest — clue that there was anything off base there. Never!” Tears fill the old woman’s eyes.

I wonder why she’s crying.

In a 2008 profile in The Advocate, Cornwell has more.

She recalls: “When I was growing up in evangelical, fundamentalist Billy Grahamville, as I call it — with all due respect to him, because he’s a nice man — I hadn’t even heard of a lesbian.”

And then this: “By the way, Ruth knew about me and didn’t care,” Cornwell says. “Everybody who I had a semi-serious relationship with I took up to the Grahams’ house. And she loved Staci; she met her.”

I turn back to Cornwell’s biography, wondering if there’s subtext which counts as ‘queer’. She writes about going to visit, as Ruth sends her husband away. “Bill, why don’t you go sit up there in the sun and rest while I visit with so-and-so.”

Cornwell notes that at home, Billy was different: “His eyes didn’t have that steely gleam. They were soft, as though he were far away in thought — and they became softer when they looked at her.”

I have to appreciate the scene of America’s great cleric, who presided over a religious regime of terrorizing gay and lesbian people, being shooed away so his wife can be alone with one of the world’s most famous lesbians.

How odd Graham’s own sexual status always was?

I love his conversion narrative. Growing up, he writes, he didn’t want to have anything to do with those effeminate Christians.

It was all right for old men and girls, but not for real “he-men” with red blood in their veins. I had gone to church some, but that was all. A great giant of a man stood and began to preach in such a way as I had never heard a man preach. Halfway through his message he pointed right in my direction and said, “Young man, you are a sinner.”

In forging modern ‘Evangelicalism’ as, basically, white conservative Protestants who want to be ruled by ex-jock clerics, he mobilized right-wing America into a voting block, a force for empire, organized by fictions of sexual “purity” and lots and lots (and lots) of apocalyptic ravings.

I’m struck by the “queer” details which you find all along the way. Graham became America’s great “evangelist”—with a little boy’s name. Ruth would protest: “How in the world can you call a grown man who is 6-foot-2 ‘Billy’?”

Then, while overseeing a ruthlessly misogynist system which didn’t permit women to speak publicly, he’d praise his wife as being more godly than him.

She is a much better theologian than I am and she studies all the time. She’s got one of the finest libraries that you could imagine and she usually keeps about 20 translations of the Bible on her desk,” said Billy.

She raised his five children as he was often away on his ‘crusades’. He was the leader of a “family”-centered religion but basically a deadbeat dad.

I notice a 1977 newspaper profile where she speaks of it. “When the children were growing up, I felt that I should stay home,” she says. “Children need one parent at home.”

Unfortunately, her kids ended up trying to be more like their absent father, which seems to have driven them to becoming mentally ill.

Ruth, though, seems to have been genuinely torn on a lot of features of the Evangelical war machine. I check a bunch of her books, marketed to the Evangelical ladies. There’s no anti-gay commentary. That might be understood as a deliberate silence.

She’d defend her friend Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade, but her rare discussion of the gay issue isn’t done on biblical grounds. “Men can have men friends. Women can have women friends, but this homosexual, lesbian relationship. It leads to nowhere. There’s no love, no mutual respect and security, no children.”

This is a woman who’s been trained, all her life, to see all her life’s value in having children and being a mother. Even for her to acquire a library and do Bible study, to do it on her own, was a defiance of the system.

And she doesn’t use the Bible against gays. She just says gay families aren’t in great shape. I wonder why that might be.

I bet she realized she didn’t really understand the sexual issues you were supposed to get so hot and bothered about. Cornwell writes: “Her parents had never discussed sex with her (she later claimed that she had ‘learned the facts of life from the Bible’).”

These are people who didn’t know the most basic facts about the body or about eroticism, but were having to pretend to have super-knowledge, and to be continually happy and well-adjusted. A tough gig.

And Ruth, as a good wife, had to side with whatever her husband was doing. But with Patricia Cornwell, she went with her friend.

In a T.V. interview, Billy Graham was asked what he’d do if he had a gay child. He replied: “Why, I would love that one even more.”

You had to take his word for it. He left an avalanche of horrifying anti-gay commentary for which he never atoned. There’s interesting scenes. After spending the 1980s denouncing AIDS victims as being punished by God, in 1993 he’s called on it.

Then he said that he hadn’t meant it.

‘I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement,’ Graham said in a telephone interview with a (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reporter Friday.

To be Evangelical is to say what you think you should say. If you’re a “leader” of it, that might just be saying what you think they want to hear.

If you’re his wife, you might know that deep down, he’s just a child.

Did Evangelicals like any women who weren’t able to be read as queer? It tells itself it wants women to ‘submit’ and loves women of masculine force.

Patricia Cornwell & Ruth Bell Graham. from: Footprints of a Pilgrim: The Life and Loves of Ruth Bell Graham (2001)

I think of the late 19th century superstar Frances Willard (i.e. ‘Frank’), whose Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a lesbian haven. You won’t find that out in any Christian histories. Try Lillian Faderman’s To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America (1999).

The stories are usually concealed. The WCTU was long a home for the great Katharine Bushnell, who kick-started feminist Bible scholarship, whose queer story I tried to excavate. Or Eleanor Roosevelt, who was beloved by Christians. The subject of her religious faith, notes Mary Ann Glendon, is often overlooked—maybe because she’s widely seen as lesbian?

I think of Agnes Moorehead, a.k.a. Endora on Bewitched. And Dolly Parton. Yes, she and her friend sleep in the same bed, she says in 1994, “but we’ve never been lovers, just good old pure, sweet, fun-loving friends.”

Elisabeth Elliot is starting to look a little bit that way? The other day I was reading a memoir of her by the son of her college best friend, recalling Elliot and his mother had “roomed together at Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, even sleeping in the same bed for the year.”

Is that lesbian? They’d say no—which is why the anecdote is public. Mostly, sexual information is censored and buried. And that’s why “queer” might work—in being indescribable, undefined efforts to be human, maybe, when they’ll be punished, if they’re caught.

After the 1983 book, Cornwell said Ruth wouldn’t talk to her for years. She never says why. They reconciled, and in 1997 she published a revision, Ruth: a Portrait. There’d been a curious ingredient in the original.

Now, there was more of it.