The rise and fall of Tammy Faye

Tammy Faye Bakker was a chirpy, perky televangelist noted for her lavish mascara and her barrel-stave eyelashes. She once conducted an interview on her PTL (Praise the Lord) chat show for which she remains revered among gays.

It was in 1985 and she was talking to Steve Pieters, a soft-spoken church pastor with a soup-strainer moustache. He had Aids, a disease that killed Rock Hudson that year and was scything through Reagan’s America. Tammy wanted to know all about Steve’s faith, his health and his orientation. ‘Have you given women a fair try?’, she asked rather naively. The pastor told his story and the interview deepened into an extraordinary confessional. He was facing death bravely but he simply couldn’t bear the thought that no one would ever touch him again and that he would die un-hugged and alone.

As Tammy watched him on telly link-up – the poor man was too ill to travel to the studio – she comforted him as best she could. Her tears flowed unbidden: ‘I wanna tell you that there’s a lot of Christians here who love you and wouldn’t be afraid to put our arms around you and tell you that we care.’

As for her network audience, many were doubtless thinking the opposite: that for this sinning pastor, God’s judgment was coming and right soon. (Amazingly, Pieters ultimately recovered and is still preaching.) But the effect of the interview was electric – and lasting. Tammy knocked America a degree off its axis and from that day on she became the bubbly, kitsch patron saint of American gays and lesbians.

Tammy, who always stuck up for the sick and outcast, was a female counterweight to her brimstone male colleagues, notably the ball-busting Reverend Jerry Falwell who denounced Tinky Winky in the Teletubbies as a sick homo.