Born the third of twelve siblings, Penniman was put out of the home by his father, who told him that he had spoiled his wish to have seven sons because he was a homosexual. After Penniman began making records, his father had started to open up to him. But he was shot by Penniman's best friend, Frank, outside a local bar. At the time Penniman was 19 years old.
Penniman married only once in his life. His only wife was Ernestine Campbell, whom he met while in church in 1957. They married in 1959 and divorced less than two years later. The marriage didn't produce any children. Though he doesn't have any biological children, he did adopt the son of a deceased church associate in the early 1960s. In June 1956, Penniman met what has been described as his life-long soul mate, Audrey Robinson, who goes by the name, Lee Angel, who was 16 when they first met and who had graduated from high school early and was then a college student.
Though he had made statements denouncing homosexuality after his second conversion to religion, Richard said in an interview withPenthouse in 1995, "I've been gay all my life and I know God is a God of love, not of hate, how can I [put] down the fisherman when I've been fishing all my life?" A decade before, he told his biographer Ted White, "what kind of sexual am I? I am omnisexual!" Lee Angel described that she and Richard had a "an orthodox physical relationship".However, Richard said that he didn't share his sexuality with Lee Angel and his only wife because, he says, "they just thought of me as a pumper [fan of masturbation]. I was pumping so much peter in those days; eight or nine times a day." In addition to addictions to cocaine and alcohol, Richard also said he also used angel dust during his debauchery period in the late sixties through mid seventies.
Richard now lives in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
