“Tutti frutti” rock legend Little Richard has decided at the ripe old age of 84 to give up his sinful homosexuality and renounce his wig-wearing, make-up loving ways.
During an interview with 3ABN, he spoke about his sexuality, saying he was dedicating his final years to living “like Jesus” – insisting men should live as men and women as women.
“Anybody come in show business, they’re going to say you’re gay. Are you straight? Are you a homosexual something? They’re going to say it. But God, Jesus, he made men, men, he made women, women, you know? And you’ve got to live the way God wants you to live.”
He also spoke out against “unnatural affections” – i.e. wigs, makeup, and his past proclivities toward gender-bending.
“You know, all these things. So much unnatural affection. So much of people just doing everything and don’t think about God. Don’t want no parts of him,” he said.
The formerly outrageous star appeared for the first time in his long career bald, makeup-free, and relatively subdued.
He spoke of how God’s love “saved him” and how It can save others as well.
“Regardless of whatever you are, he loves you. I don’t care what you are. He loves you and he can save you. All you’ve got to do is say, ‘Lord, take me as I am. I’m a sinner.’ But we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The only holy, righteous person is Jesus and he wants us to be just like him because, in order to go to Heaven, we’ve got to look like him,” Richard said. “I don’t want to sing rock and roll no more. … I want to be holy like Jesus.”
This is quite a different tune than he used to sing.
Ebony reminds us:
Richard, whose real name is Richard Wayne Penniman, is quoted in a 2012 GQ interview saying, “We are all both male and female. Sex to me is like a smorgasbord. Whatever I feel like, I go for. What kind of sexual am I? I am omnisexual!”
In a 1995 interview with Penthouse, the “Good Golly Miss Molly” singer shared, “I’ve been gay all my life and I know God is a God of love, not of hate.”
And in a Playboy magazine interview with John Waters, he once said:
“I love gay people. I believe I was the founder of gay. I’m the one who started to be so bold tellin’ the world! You got to remember my dad put me out of the house because of that. I used to take my mother’s curtains and put them on my shoulders. And I used to call myself at the time the Magnificent One. I was wearing make-up and eyelashes when no men were wearing that. I was very beautiful; I had hair hanging everywhere. If you let anybody know you was gay, you was in trouble; so when I came out I didn’t care what nobody thought. A lot of people were scared to be with me.”
Watch the shocking interview below.
(Photos of classic Richard: Media Punch; screen grab from the 3ABN interview/YouTube)
