Following in the footsteps of his late mother to end religious and political discrimination against gays and lesbians, Christian punk preacher Jay Bakker leads Revolution New York City, a church that meets Sunday afternoons in a bar. Services are recorded and posted on the Web site (www.revolutionnyc.com) “to create an online church for people who have given up on church.”

Now 32 and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., Bakker is the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, whose Praise The Lord ministry and television network imploded in scandal in the 1980s. Afterward, Tammy Faye, who divorced an imprisoned Jim and married Roe Messner, re-emerged as a television and cult personality — this time embracing gay men infected with the AIDS virus. She died of cancer last year.
Bakker’s activism on behalf of gays and lesbians started three years ago, after he saw friends mistreated because of their sexual orientation. He began to study the Bible and now says he’s convinced that passages condemning homosexuality refer to worship of a fertility god or male prostitution but not the caring and respectful relationships established between people of the same sex. Bakker himself is not gay but is now separated from his wife, Amanda.

Advertisement