By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004; Page C01

CHARLOTTE

Jamiel Terry grew up a child of movement royalty.

His father, Randall Terry, was a wavy-haired charismatic possessed of a mellifluous voice and proudly extreme politics, a Christian warrior from Upstate New York who founded Operation Rescue, appeared regularly on national television and denounced murderous abortionists and demonic homosexual sodomites.

Randall Terry adopted Jamiel, and Jamiel became his adoring son. He rose to his father's defense during an unsuccessful congressional race. And he joined his dad in taking up the rhetorical sword to fight against homosexual civil unions in Vermont in 2000.

Theirs was a righteous narrative of father and son. Until Jamiel decided to write a new chapter.

"It's hard to point to one moment when you begin to come out to yourself," Jamiel begins his essay in the May issue of Out magazine, which appears on newsstands this week, "but if I had to, I'd go back to a night seven years ago when I was 17 . . . in my old bedroom at my parents' house . . . where my friend 'Johnny' and I had just finished fooling around."

This was the moment, Jamiel wrote, when he realized he was gay.

Jamiel, 24, has close-cropped hair, mocha coloring and a stud under his lower lip. He's handsome and articulate, with the preternatural ease in the spotlight found in celebrity children. He lounges in a white leather chair in a friend's house in suburban Charlotte and talks of his decision to bear public witness to his sexuality.

He wrote his article, he says, to help children of Christian fundamentalists deal with their own sexuality. Maybe he also wrote to help his father understand him. Or maybe he wrote to make him understand something else.

A few years back, Randall Terry divorced his wife, Cindy -- who once said her husband was touched by the divine -- and married a much younger woman. (Terry's ex barely speaks to him anymore.) Their four children say they still love their father but the relationship has frayed. Terry recently barred one of his adopted teenage daughters from his house after she got pregnant out of wedlock for the second time. Another adopted daughter also became pregnant as a teenager and later converted to Islam, a religion Terry has described as composed of "murderers" and "terrorists." (The couple's lone biological child, a daughter, is in college.)

The night before Jamiel's interview with The Washington Post, Randall Terry drove seven hours from his Florida home to visit Jamiel in Charlotte. Theirs was not a pleasant talk. Why, Randall demanded, didn't you tell me you were thinking of writing this and committing an act of betrayal? I could have helped you with a Christian cure for homosexuality.

Jamiel hikes his eyebrows as he recalls the conversation. "I told him: 'Dad, how was I supposed to tell you? Look at who you are.' "

You pick up the telephone and there's Randall Terry, as folksy and pained as could be.

"I'm distressed, man," he says. "This is absolutely the most gut-wrenching thing I've ever gone through. Man, I'm grieving."

You're a father, he says to the reporter. You know my pain. I tried, Randall says, to talk my son out of going public, but Jamiel paid me no heed. I tried to explain the ramifications, but Jamiel turned a deaf ear.

So Randall, 45, did what made sense to him as a father, not to mention to a man who harbors hopes of regaining a leadership role in the Christian evangelical and antiabortion movement. (The pastor of his previous church -- the Landmark Church of Binghamton, N.Y. -- unceremoniously tossed him out when he divorced his wife.) Before Jamiel's article could appear, Randall wrote his own, and titled it "My Prodigal Son, the Homosexual."

He posted this essay on several Web sites, including his own, RandallTerry.com. He wrote of his love for Jamiel and his son's gifts -- his keen mind, singing voice and cooking skill. But Randall cautions that one must understand this about his son: The Terrys rescued Jamiel from a very dark home. Jamiel was born in jail, a victim of "crimes and treacheries" too terrible to spell out (if not too terrible for a father to hint at). Jamiel is a liar who's led a double life.

"My son's life," Randall wrote, "is a shambles."

As open letters go from father to son, it's quite extraordinary. Did Randall wrestle with doubt before putting such an unsparing document on Web sites and later publishing a version of it in the Washington Times?

"It about tore my heart out to write that column, but Jamiel prostituted my name," Randall says. "The truth is that Jamiel is not trustworthy. The truth is that his life is one long deception. May God have mercy. May Christ have mercy."

Families surely are a most inscrutable product of God's hand. Who should know this better than Randall Terry?

Randall came rambling out of the capacious lands of northern New York. His grandmother was a civil rights activist, his aunts were strong feminists -- one would later serve as spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Rochester. Randall, as this aunt once noted with intentional irony, was raised at the knees of feminists.

Randall, though, was sweetly oblivious. He played a mean guitar and piano, and smoked bodacious amounts of herb. He was going to be a rock-and-roll star. A bright kid, he dropped out of high school a few months short of graduation, stuck out a thumb and disappeared into the West.

A few months and boatloads of dope and magic mushrooms later, he washed ashore in Galveston, Tex. He had his epiphany in a diner and that was that. Randall Terry never had much trouble divining God's will after that -- the transmissions were crystal clear.

Terry returned to Rochester and began talking of God and hellfire, and selling used cars. Once he fell to his knees by the side of a highway and beseeched the Lord to forgive his sins. He enrolled in a Bible school, where he met his wife, Cindy. They talked of serving as missionaries in Central America. But "God interrupted" and delivered unto Terry a vision of a battle plan to fight abortion.

Terry read civil rights tracts, including Coretta Scott King's memoir, and slowly hatched a plan. In 1986 he founded Operation Rescue. This would become a significant moment in the history of the Christian right, the first time an evangelical general would wield the tools of civil disobedience in the service of the antiabortion cause.

In 1988, Terry and his legions started standing in front of local abortion clinics, screaming and pleading with pregnant women to turn away. They tossed their bodies against car doors to keep abortion patients from getting out. They waved crucifixes and screamed "Mommy, Mommy" at the women. When Terry commanded, hundreds went jellyfish-limp and blockaded the "death clinics."

In 1989, a "Holy Week of Rescue" shut down a family planning clinic in Los Angeles. More than 40,000 people were arrested in these demonstrations over four years. Subtlety wasn't Terry's thing -- he described Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a "whore" and an "adulteress" and arranged to have a dead fetus presented to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. (He also opposed birth control and divorce -- "Families," he wrote in his 1995 book "The Judgment of God," "are destroyed as a father vents his mid life crisis by abandoning his wife for a 'younger, prettier model.' ")

A few years earlier came a day that looms large in the Legend of Randall Terry. Terry had stopped a troubled young woman outside an abortion clinic and persuaded her to bring her pregnancy to term. The baby, Tila, was born in 1985.

"After I saved Tila's life, we helped her mother out with baby furniture and clothes," Terry recalls. "We became more and more involved with her family. The children stayed with us for summers, holidays, weekends."

In 1987, Randall and Cindy agreed to take in Tila and her older brother, Jamiel, then 8, and his older sister, Ebony, as foster children. In 1994, they formally adopted Tila and Jamiel. The children are biracial. Their biological mother, who was white, has since died.

Randall circulated a résumé at the time that described his family. "Children: One by birth and three black foster children."

Terry's fame arced high during this time, his days and nights a blur of airports and appearances on "Crossfire" and "Nightline." ("Did you see my sound bites?" he'd inquire when reporters called for interviews in the late 1980s.)

The family lived in a Victorian home set in the rolling farmland outside Binghamton in south central New York. Randall was the outsize patriarch, his energy inexhaustible, his laughter infectious, his control considerable. He read everything, sang like an angel and played that piano. At night, he'd tuck in the children and pray with them.

"I idolized my dad. He's a very magnetic person and my best friend," Jamiel says. "He was running a major national organization, we'd have all sorts of guests -- Jerry Falwell came by.

"Our life was never boring."

Randall takes pride in saying he shielded his family from the media spotlight. But the membrane between public and private life can be porous for a movement man. When Randall ran for Congress in 1998 and faced charges of racism, Jamiel stepped forward. Identifying himself as a person of color, Jamiel demanded that his father's opponent apologize.

It's hard to know after talking with Jamiel and his sisters how much of their narrative is reality and how much desire. They insist their childhood was happy even as they say their parents' unyielding moral code allowed for few adolescent stumbles. They were to study the Bible and live its word. They were schooled at home and in fundamentalist schools. R-rated movies were out. So was divorce and any talk of sexuality.

"My parents were very strict and sheltering," recalls Tila, a startling 18-year-old beauty who is unmarried and now pregnant for the second time. "They were very loving but we never talked about anything."

Ebony, now 28, left home when she was 16 and became pregnant soon after. "When you get out of a family with very strict rules, you are exposed to so much," she says. "You discover how easy it is to make the wrong choice."

When his parents divorced, Randall refused to let his children speak with their grandfather for three years. At 16, Jamiel was a summer intern with the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson. Afterward, Jamiel announced that he wanted to become a chef.

His father was not amused.

"He told me I could leave his house at that very moment," Jamiel recalls. "He wanted me to be a lawyer, a judge, in the movement. He told me he'd cut me off cold if I became a chef."

At the time, Jamiel was beginning to wrestle with a far greater inner conflict -- his own sexuality. Asked if he tried to broach this subject with his parents, Jamiel returns a look that suggests you're on crack. As he noted in Out magazine: "When you grow up in a house where to be the thing you are is an abominable sin, you tend to try and shed those behaviors."

He practiced deepening his voice. He avoided anything hinting of the effeminate. And he dated girls even as he fooled around with male friends in his bedroom. "It was so secret and so hidden, I don't think I even felt the weight of it," Jamiel says.

Sometimes he'd sneak into his father's library late at night and look at his collection of books on gays and gay life (Terry maintained the collection so he could speak with authority on such questions).

"I looked at the pictures of shirtless men," Jamiel wrote. "I even picked up some useful knowledge about safe sex from these volumes."

An air of cognitive dissonance attends to this voyage of discovery, to his navigation between nights of desire and days of self-loathing. A 20-year-old Jamiel did a stint with the short-lived Steve Forbes for President 2000 campaign. Later he repaired to Vermont to help his father campaign against gay civil unions.

It was an awkward reunion. Randall Terry recently had separated from Cindy and taken up with a young former housekeeper and aide. He was shunned by many friends and activists in the antiabortion movement. Randall moved for a while to Nashville and tried his hand at country music. (He recently cut a second album with Ronnie Milsap's band. "It's to die for, man," Randall says.)

"My father kept saying, 'It's no one's business that I got divorced,' " Jamiel recalls. "I'd tell him: 'Dad, you sent out 100,000 Christmas cards with pictures of our perfect Christian family. You led Christian workshops on being a good husband. That's why people are disappointed.' "

Randall conceded that Jamiel had a point.

Now Randall plunged into his second act, as an anti-gay-rights crusader, heading an organization called Loyal Opposition.

"The Bible," Randall notes, "doesn't condemn divorce, but it does condemn homosexuality."

He opened an office in Montpelier, within sight of Vermont's gold-domed Capitol building. One day he walked outside the capitol during a legislative vote and shook his head as though to dislodge images too horrible for words.

"It's hideous in there, man," he told reporters. "It's unbelievable. It's demonic."

Jamiel felt a little queasy about the whole undertaking. But that didn't stop him from staying on in Vermont. Jamiel isn't particularly good at articulating, what, precisely he was thinking.

"I felt very hypocritical," he acknowledges. "I would get these angry phone calls from gays and I wanted to say: 'I know, I know, I'm gay, too!' "

Soon Jamiel quit and headed south. Many months later, he told his family that he was gay. His mother thought he was having a nervous breakdown. His father offered to send Jamiel away for a three-month Christian cure. Jamiel declined the offer.

"I'm going to be at your funeral," Randall told his son. "You'll be dead by 40."

These were months of deep struggle, a time during which Jamiel thought more than once of suicide. Eventually, he came to a point of calm and thought of writing about his struggle. After a fashion, he sees himself acting on his father's teachings.

"We were taught that if you saw pain in the world, you should speak out," he says. "I knew that because of my name I could get published and help young men and women who are gay and struggling because of their religious upbringing.

"I was raised in a family where it's immoral to see a problem and remain silent."

"The only reason you want to talk with me is because his last name is Terry. He's playing you and he's prostituting my name."

So the father talks about the son whom he raised to adulthood. In a long phone conversation, Randall Terry says his son is lost, a drug user and a liar who has written bad checks. Randall says Out magazine paid Jamiel $5,000 to write the article and become its "homosexual poster boy." Randall says the magazine's editors "put words in my son's mouth."

(For the record, Jamiel and the editors of Out say much of this is wrong. Jamiel says he sought out the magazine because he felt an obligation to help those struggling with their own sexual identity. He was paid roughly $2,500. While his account was edited, Jamiel claims ownership of the words.)

In Randall's view, most -- no, make that all -- of Jamiel's problems arise from his formative years in his biological mom's home.

"Tragically," Randall writes in his online essay, "by the time we got him as a foster child, he had already learned a lifestyle of deceit. . . . My hope was that providing a loving safe home, his life would be spared. . . . Unfortunately, my hopes and prayers were not realized."

Randall, by turns, is voluble and pained at what he says is a media intrusion into his privacy and that of his family. Then he puts his mother -- Jamiel's grandmother -- on the phone to talk about Jamiel's problems. Then Randall gets back on the phone and demands to know: Did Jamiel tell you what his biological mother did for a living?

The reporter replies that Jamiel and Tila describe their biological mother as more child than adult, a thoroughly lost woman of the street.

Randall exhales into the phone, disgusted. "Dealing with Jamiel is like dealing with his biological mother -- you never know when he's playing you," he says. "I will tell you for sure: Jamiel's mother was a prostitute."

"God rest her soul," he adds.

Brick by brick, Randall dismantles the House of Terry. He says Jamiel has been bounced from three colleges and tries to suck up to wealthy family friends. Randall had to bar Tila from his house because, he says, "to quote an AA phrase, her life just became more and more unmanageable."

As for Ebony, she left home as a teenager and became pregnant. But their relationship is good. At least, he says, she's honest.

By the way, Terry adds, you do know that I never officially adopted her?

Since leaving the Terry home, Ebony has become a Muslim, a conversion she attributes -- for better and worse -- to her upbringing.

"We learned that, nine times out of 10, if someone is being persecuted for their religion, there's probably some truth to the religion," Ebony says. "And the Christian community is supposed to stand for forgiveness and charity, but my experience hasn't been entirely positive."

The irony is that Jamiel's essay is quite a tender piece. He describes a loving childhood, writes of his love for his father, and concludes with a vision of future reconciliation. Even Randall, who will be in Washington this Sunday protesting a massive abortion rights rally, acknowledges the essay could have been worse.

"Overall, the article isn't unfair to me," he says. "But that isn't the issue. He prostituted my name."

Hours later, Jamiel is told of his father's counterattack. He sighs. Jamiel acknowledges he's had a troubled time these past few years, with a drunken-driving conviction and some bad checks.

"Dad doesn't mess around with Tomahawks, he sends in the nuclear warheads," Jamiel says. "My father's first and foremost aim is to protect himself. He talks about how I prostitute the family's name, but he's used the fact that he saved my sister from abortion and rescued me from hardship in his speeches and interviews. What's the difference?"

Jamiel pauses and adds: "My father talks about how deceitful I am. But I was 11, 12, 13, 14. How was I supposed to make sense, in a family that didn't talk about it, of what I was feeling? How am I deceitful?"

"I still fight the thought that I'm committing a mortal sin." There's a moment of silence and Jamiel continues. "God knows my heart. Randall Terry doesn't know my heart."