By Andy Furman
NKyTribune Reporter
All he ever wanted to do was preach – and eventually become a preacher. Today, Ken Baker preaches on FOX 19 NOW – WXIX – as an Emmy-nominated journalist. This was the second career choice for the Lloyd High School graduate.
He tells his story in his book – Joy accompanies us.
“My childhood consisted of church and sports in the summer,” he told the Northern Kentucky Tribune“Our family is probably at church several times a week.”
Baker, 35, says he went to church on Tuesdays for prayer, Wednesdays for Bible study and, of course, Sundays for regular services. He says he spent most of his free time as a 12-year-old preaching.
“Yes, I was an ordained minister. The name of my parish was KEB Ministries. I was the real deal. I believed I was going to be the next superstar preacher traveling the world saving souls,” he writes.
In a way, he does that today – but not from the pulpit. What happened?
At 17, he says, he felt like a shaken bottle of lemonade.
“I was still very active in the church. I led the youth service, gave sermons, sang in the adult choir and still prayed,” he wrote.
But his life was now a misery, he wrote. He felt like he was carrying the weight of the world. He was homosexual – and he didn’t dare tell a soul.
“I just couldn’t tell anyone that I was gay,” he said.
He hoped for a change – even a miracle – perhaps that’s why he chose Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“I remember thinking that if God was going to perform a miracle and free me from my ‘struggle,'” he wrote, “he would have to do it here.”
In the early 1960s, Reverend Oral Roberts founded the university that bore his name. Roberts was an evangelist of healing. His crusades to heal people spanned the country, and typically a caravan of buses would travel to the university’s Mabee Center each month to pray and heal. Oral Roberts University is based on educating the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—within certain limits. Men and women were allowed into each other’s rooms only once per semester. All students knew the rules—there were no public displays of affection on campus, all students had to be in their rooms by 10 p.m., and every Wednesday and Friday—from 11 a.m. to noon—the school was closed for services. On Sundays you had to go to church, and of course partying and drinking were not allowed.
Not the best environment for a gay student – that’s what Ken Baker discovered.
“I took a cross-country trip to Hawaii with my class president (Michael) from school,” Baker writes, “and he told me quite openly that he, too, was gay.”
That was the bombshell, because Michael was soon removed as captain and Ken Baker was put on trial and had to confess that he was struggling with his homosexuality.
“I was sentenced to weekly counseling sessions with one of the psychology students,” he said.
Baker made it clear in his book that he and Michael were just friends.
“There was nothing romantic about our relationship,” he said.
Finally the day came when Ken Baker told his parents.
“I was 18,” he said, “when I came home from college. My mother was crying; my father was telling me to move out of our house in Northern Kentucky – and yet he still helped me financially.”
On his career as a preacher: “The church gave me the left foot of the community; I could neither join the choir nor preach.”
But he was able to tell his story through the medium of television – he had a minor in communications.
“I was selling shoes one day and Lisa Cooney from Channel 5 came in,” Baker said. “I told her about my love of television and storytelling. She got me an internship at WLWT.”
When a position opened up at Channel 19, I jumped at the chance, he said.
“It’s funny,” Baker says, “all my non-church friends knew I was gay. It was the religious people and my family who gave me grief and made my life difficult.”
“Nobody cared except these people, they accepted me happily, just as I had always dreamed of being accepted as a gay man.
“God loves me and it’s okay to be gay.”
