Marvin Gaye (1939–1984) had many personal relationships throughout his life. He was married twice and had three children, one he adopted and two biological children. His first marriage to Anna Gordy Gaye inspired many of his early hits, including "Pride and Joy" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" as well as the album, Here, My Dear, released a year after their divorce in 1977. His relationship and second marriage to Jan Gaye inspired the later recordings, Let's Get It On and I Want You.

Rumors of liaisons with his Motown duet partners such as Mary Wells, Kim Weston and Tammi Terrell were denied by Gaye and his partners though Gaye admitted to a very close bond with Terrell, whose 1967 stage collapse and subsequent 1970 death from a brain tumor negatively impacted Gaye's life to the point that he was consumed by depression and drug addiction.

Gaye's relationship with his father, Marvin Gay Sr., was reportedly volatile with his father committing child abuse all while being raised under a strict Seventh-day Adventist sect called the House of God. Gaye's faith played heavily into his work with religious themes being heavily explored on his albums,What's Going On and In Our Lifetime. Gaye's relationship with his father later culminated in his murder at his father's hands in 1984.

Early life, faith and family

Gaye's parents were Marvin Gay Sr. (1914–1998), a storefront minister of a Hebrew Pentecostal church known as the House of God, and Alberta Gay (1913–1987), a schoolteacher and domestic. Gaye's father had moved to Washington, D.C. from Lexington, Kentucky in his late teens while Gaye's mother settled there after having an out-of-wedlock child in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Both parents were African American.

They married on July 2, 1935. Gaye was the second eldest of the children they would have together, including two sisters Jeanne (1936–2021) and Zeola (b. 1945), a dancer, author and playwright, and younger brother Frankie (1941–2001), a musician and former United States Army veteran. In addition, Gaye was a half-brother of Michael Cooper, Alberta's son from a previous relationship, and Antwaun Carey Gay, Gay Sr.'s youngest child with a mistress.

Michael Cooper was sent to live with Gaye's aunt in Detroit after his father decided not to raise him for being a illegitimate child. In addition, Gaye was a cousin to Wu-Tang Clan founding member Masta Killa.

Gaye, his brother and their two sisters were raised as Seventh-day Adventists and brought up in their father's House of God sect, where their father served as Bishop. The House of God labels itself a "Hebrew Pentecostal" denomination, advocates strict conduct, and claims to adhere to both the Old and New Testaments. Gaye remembered the family having to observe an extended Sabbath starting from "Friday night at sundown" into Saturday—similar to Shabbat in mainstream Judaism.

He later explained, "We kept the Sabbath in the purest sense. Father anointed converts with olive oil and baptized them in the river. The Sabbath was his day, it was God's day, and it was also a day for singing. Every member was blessed with a good voice. The joy of music was the joy of God." Gaye began singing solos during church services at the age of four. At times, Gaye's father would force his children to answer Biblical questions, disciplining them if they answered wrong. His father later quit his ministry when he was unable to secure the highest position of Chief Apostle at the church.

Though Gaye ceased going to church after his teenage years, he remained religiously devout and some teachings from the House of God later influenced his music, including the albums What's Going On, which featured the gospel songs "God is Love" and "Wholy Holy", the latter of which was covered a year later by fellow R&B and soul musician Aretha Franklin on her acclaimed live gospel album, Amazing Grace, and In Our Lifetime, which was a concept album that was based on the belief that the world was facing a possible Armageddon based on a passage from the Biblical chapter of Revelations.

The Gay family initially lived at a public housing project, the Fairfax Apartments (now demolished) at 1617 1st Street SW in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood. Although it was one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, with many elegant Federal-style homes, most buildings were small, in disrepair, and lacking electricity and running water. The alleys were full of one- and two-story shacks, and nearly every dwelling was overcrowded. Gaye and his friends nicknamed the area "Simple City", calling it "half-city, half country".

In 1953 or 1954, the Gays moved into the East Capitol Dwellings public housing project in D.C.'s Capitol View neighborhood. Their townhouse apartment (Unit 12, 60th Street NE, now demolished) was Marvin's home until 1962.

According to Gaye's sister Jeanne, their father never held a job for longer than three years. Gay Sr. worked briefly in the post office and at Western Union, but a back injury laid him off early on the former job and when explaining why he left the latter job, Gay Sr. stated to author David Ritz that people were working on the "day of the Sabbath". To bring in income, Gaye's mother Alberta worked as a domestic worker, cleaning houses in the Maryland and Virginia areas.

Around 1963, after he became a best-selling artist with Motown, Gaye bought his parents an eight-room, two-story residence at D.C.'s Fifteenth and Varnum Street, where they lived until 1975 when the immediate Gaye family moved to Los Angeles. Following the move to the residence on Varnum Street, Alberta Gay retired from domestic work. Gay Sr. later sold the property in October 1982 while his wife was undergoing a life-saving kidney surgery.

Gaye attended Syphax Elementary School and then Randall Junior High School. Gaye began to take singing much more seriously in junior high, and he joined and became a singing star with the Randall Junior High Glee Club. Gaye was encouraged to pursue a music career after a performance at a school play at age 11 when he sang Mario Lanza's "Be My Love".

Gaye briefly attended Spingarn High School before transferring to Cardozo High School. At Cardozo, Gaye joined several doo-wop vocal groups, including the Dippers and the D.C. Tones.

Relationship with Marvin Gay Sr. Gaye's relationship with his father was troubled from childhood. According to his sister, Jeanne, Gaye suffered abuse at the hands of his father, who would strike him for any shortcoming, including putting his hairbrush in the wrong place or coming home from school a minute late. Gaye's sister recalled that Gaye would "constantly provoke Father. He disappeared on Saturday mornings when it was time to go to church." Jeanne Gaye explained that, between the ages of 7 and well into his teenage years, Gaye's home life "consisted of a series of brutal whippings."

Gaye explained his father's abuse to author David Ritz years later: "It wasn't simply that my father beat me, though that was bad enough. By the time I was twelve, there wasn't an inch on my body that hadn't been bruised and beaten by him." He stated what made the beatings worse was his father prolonging the time before punishing Gaye, making him remove his clothes and having him hear his father's belt buckle "just loud enough" before he received the punishment. Gaye felt a part of his father was "enjoying the whole thing". Gaye and his siblings suffered from nocturnal enuresis (i.e., bedwetting); more whippings resulted.

Alberta Gay later stated that her husband hated Gaye, as she told David Ritz in 1979:

Conversely, Gay Sr. said this about his eldest son:

According to Alberta, Gay Sr. began to drink heavily in the 1950s, only furthering the friction in his relationship with the teenage Gaye and, said Alberta, "he never did develop any love for the boy." As a teenager, Gaye was often kicked out of the family home by his father for what Gay Sr. perceived to be "misbehavior".

The beatings and arguments affected Gaye to the point that, whenever he needed to express his need for attention, he would do it through antagonism and projections of violence. Although Gaye would later describe living with his father as "like living with a king, a very peculiar, changeable, cruel and all-powerful king", he embraced the love of his mother, explaining, "If it wasn't for Mother, who was always there to console me and praise me for my singing, I think I would have been one of those child suicide cases you read about in the papers".

Their relationship remained strained throughout Gaye's adulthood. After moving his parents to D.C.'s black middle class Fifteenth and Varnum Street, Gaye would only visit the house if his father wasn't around or if his father made himself scarce. Gaye often told his Motown colleagues that despite buying his father a Cadillac and gifting him a million dollars that his father would still admonish him for "singing the devil's music" and not being a minister.

On May 1, 1972, Gaye returned to D.C. where the city hosted "Marvin Gaye Day" and he was awarded the key to the city and later performed at the Kennedy Center that night, where it would be his father's first time watching him perform professionally. Gaye later told David Ritz that he felt it was the first time he "made [his] father proud". Frankie Gaye, Marvin's brother, confirmed it saying their father told Gaye he was "proud of him"

In the days leading up to his death in 1984, Gaye told a friend that his father briefly nursed him with his hands in his bedroom after complaining of his back being sore, which startled Gaye, who had been used to his mother Alberta doing it. The friend reminded him, "see? Your father loves you, man."

Air Force tenure In October 1956, a 17-year-old Gaye ran away from home and dropped out of Cardozo to enlist in the United States Air Force. Sent to bases in states such as Kansas, Texas, and Wyoming, Gaye quickly grew tired of having to do menial tasks and began rebelling against the sergeant's strict orders. Eventually, Gaye told officers he had a mental illness and was honorably discharged shortly afterward in June 1957 just eight months after enlisting.

Before leaving the Air Force, Gaye lost his virginity to a prostitute. Gaye explained the experience as "freaky" and started an obsession with what he liked to call "love for sale". Gaye noted he saw "a world of pure sex where people turned off their minds and fed their lusts, no questions asked. The concept sickened me, but I also found it exciting." Upon his exit from the Air Force, his sergeant stated that Gaye refused to follow orders.

Marriages

Anna Gordy Gaye Gaye first met Anna Ruby Gordy (January 28, 1922 – January 31, 2014), 17 years his senior, while Gaye was a staff drummer for the label Anna Records around 1960. It started with Gaye flirting with her to get her attention.Marvin Gaye: Motown on Showtime, 1987 According to Gaye's brother Frankie, the couple began living together at her apartment after just two months of meeting each other. After a two-year courtship, the couple married on June 8, 1963, in Detroit.

During Gaye's early years in Motown, he was inspired by his relationship with his wife, often writing songs dedicated to her, including his 1963 top ten hit, "Pride and Joy". Of that song, Gaye later told David Ritz, "When I composed 'Pride and Joy', I was head over heels in love with Anna. I just wrote what I felt about her, and what she did for me. She was my pride and joy."