AIDS Activist, Steve Pieters: 35 Years after his Interview with Tammy Faye

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Mar 16

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The year was 1985. New AIDS diagnoses had increased by 89% from the previous year. Then-President Ronald Reagan finally addressed the epidemic for the first time—four years after the first public report in the New York Times describing a “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” AZT wouldn’t be available for another two years and the protease inhibitors that would increase the life spans of people with AIDS by decades wouldn’t be available for another ten.

It was a full-fledged epidemic fueled by ignorance and fear.

Also in 1985, Steve Pieters—a proud gay minister and AIDS activist—was sitting down in a television studio in Ontario, California where he was preparing to do an interview by satellite.

Two thousand three hundred seventy-six miles away—in Charlotte, North Carolina—Tammy Faye Messner (then Bakker) was preparing to meet him on the other end.

The famed televangelist and accidental gay icon, known for her layers of makeup and unfettered displays of empathy and emotion, would be interviewing Steve for a segment on her show, Tammy’s House Party, which routinely aired to millions of devoted evangelical Christian viewers throughout the southeastern United States.

In the weeks before, Steve had gotten a call from Tammy Faye’s producer. She was referred to Steve by an AIDS activist in Atlanta after Tammy’s producers had searched the entire United States for a person with AIDS to speak with her. They had come up dry.

“I’m not really surprised at that,” Steve tells me over the phone 35 years later. “There was a lot of stigma associated with AIDS back in those days, especially in the South.”

Steve himself had reservations when the producer pitched the segment to him—and of the widely popular televangelism phenomenon as a whole.

“I was suspicious of it. I come from a progressive liberal perspective spiritually and theologically, and so I saw them and other televangelists as being kind of ‘out there’ in terms of—I was kind of suspicious of all of their money-raising and the wealth that a number of them displayed with great excitement, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to them, because I was busy enough paying attention to what was going on around me.”

Steve had already spent his adult life as a minister for the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC)—one of the few queer-affirming ministries in the States at the time. This was in addition to his gay rights activism and, later, his AIDS activism.

When Steve was housebound after his diagnosis, he and his caregiver would watch the television ministry of Jan and Paul Crouch. “Frankly, we laughed hysterically at them.”

But as Steve prepared for a broadcast with one of the most recognizable faces in the evangelical community, the influence of the electric church was no laughing matter. He had insisted on doing the interview live, for fear that they would edit his answers deceptively.

And though Tammy’s producers assured him that she only wanted to hear his story and inform her viewers, he was all too familiar with homophobia and AIDS hysteria to take them at their word alone.

“I was concerned that she would try to do a number on me. Try to tell me if I just really accepted Jesus...that she would try to convince me to follow Jesus her way, and confess and repent of my homosexuality. That [repenting] might cure my AIDS. Cause there was that kind of talk going on in conservative religious circles back in those days.”

These fears were somewhat eased when Steve and Tammy exchanged pleasantries seconds before going on the air.

“I sat down in front of this camera and they put an earpiece in my ear and Tammy Faye was on the other end of the line, and she told me, ‘This is like the Phil Donahue of PTL network.’ She said specifically, ‘We don’t talk about Jesus.’”

With that, they were on the air.

“Hello, everyone, and come on in! It’s just so nice to have you here with us,” Tammy began. “We have an experience today that really is touching to me, right here on my right I have a young man named Steve Pieters, and I’d like to introduce you to Steve,” she said, gesturing to Steve’s face illuminated on the television set next to her.

“Steve is a patient of AIDS and he so generously allowed us to talk to him today. He was going to come to Charlotte, North Carolina to be on our program here, but he is presently taking chemotherapy and I was afraid the trip would be too hard on him.”

Steve was on suramin, one of the first antiretrovirals used for people with AIDS. Like many of the early treatments, it was largely ineffective and the side effects alone had nearly killed him. And though Tammy said they did the interview by satellite out of concerns for his health, he later learned the real reason was fear that the camera crew would refuse to be in the same studio as a person with AIDS.

But to Steve’s relief, Tammy’s questions seemed aimed at combating the very misinformation about AIDS that nearly led the camera crew to strike.

She asked him about when he realized he was “different from the other boys,” and about being in the closet, and about coming out to his parents.

When Tammy thanked God that his parents had accepted and loved him, Steve responded with words that likely seemed revolutionary to Tammy’s millions of conservative religious viewers:

“Jesus loves me just the way I am. I really believe that. Jesus loves the way I love.”

That’s when Tammy began to cry, as she often did.

“Listen, Steve, this is an emotional interview for me. I just met Steve and it’s like meeting him in person here. I want to put my arm around him.”

“My arm’s right around you.”

Even in Tammy’s most cringeworthy questions—such as asking if he thought he hadn’t given girls a “fair try”—Steve knew what she was doing.

“She was asking questions that she knew her audience would want answered...And I think she knew damn well what the answers would be, or what the basic answer would be from me,” Steve said. “I don’t think that she was that naive herself about it all.”

“I know you must feel lonely sometimes,” Tammy told Steve. “With people not being well-informed on AIDS, everyone is so terribly frightened of it, you know? And therefore, they’re frightened of anyone who has it.”

Steve elaborated to her about how people would refuse to let him use the bathroom in their home and would steam clean any dishes he’d use, if he wasn’t served on paper plates that could be easily thrown away.

Tammy wept as she said:

“How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”

“Steve,” she continued. “I just want to tell you something. If there would have been any way...I want to tell you there’s a lot of Christians here who love you and who wouldn’t be afraid to put their arm around you and tell you that we love you and that we care.”

Astonishingly enough, the audience applauded.

After the segment, Steve heard that network executives pressured Tammy to do an interview with a Christian psychiatrist who would give advice on how to “cure” homosexuality or pray away AIDS. She refused.

“She got in trouble for it, and apparently she just stuck her heels in and said no. I think this was an interview that told her that things could be different and that she could indeed be different as a televangelist and reach out to the gay community.”

According to Steve, there was little to no immediate response from the queer community. The only reason the video survives today is because Steve’s caregiver taped it.

The interaction, however, would change both of their lives.

Tammy reportedly began going to Pride parades and to hospices for AIDS patients. Her son, Jay Bakker—now a queer-affirming minister himself—would later tell Steve that she would take him and his sister by the hand to visit MCC church services.

“She knew right away,” Steve tells me, “that she had a different understanding and a different calling than other televangelists.”

Steve’s ministry changed as well. After the interview, he began receiving more preaching engagements across the globe.

“It kind of launched my career as a professional AIDS survivor at a time when it seemed like nobody was surviving. I did get well a year or so later, and I began traveling and trying to give people hope and help people deal with grief, and that sort of thing.”

Tammy’s embrace of AIDS awareness and acceptance of queer people sadly still remains ahead of its time. Steve spoke on the direction the white evangelical church has taken in the 35 years since their interview.

“It’s a shame that we still have to fight the fight. It seems like religious bigotry is so...I can’t think of the right word. It’s promulgated by fundamentalists and conservative churches. Hatred seems to be part of the discourse going on today...and I think a lot of it is because of conservative religious institutions that continue to promulgate that LGBT people are less than heterosexuals.”

“In the same way I think that racism,” he continued, “is fortified by the sense of white evangelicals being, y’know, ‘the chosen people,’ and I think there’s just a horrible streak of bigotry that is part of the conservative church’s fault—it’s not part of it, it’s largely their fault, I think. So we still have a lot of work to do.”

Tammy remains a sort of queer icon, but largely for the wrong reasons.

I was writing this very article in a sixty year old West Village queer bar. I ran into a friend and fellow regular there, and when I told him that I was writing about Tammy Faye, he laughed and said, “I used to have a tee shirt about her! It has a smudged makeup face-print and says I Just Ran Into Tammy Faye!”

We laughed, but it echoed a point made by Steve in our interview.

“I think that unfortunately there’s a caricature of Tammy Faye that exists in a lot of people’s minds. That she was this kind of comic figure and I think that takes away from the fact that she had a heart of gold; when she really did reach out to LGBT folks long before other people did, and set a real example.”

Tammy Faye’s final television appearance came in July of 2007 on Larry King Live. Plagued by cancer, weighing only 65 pounds, and unable to speak above a whisper, the once-vivacious televangelist even struggled to remember her favorite bible verse. She passed away two days later.

“I heard it on the news like everybody else,” Steve recalls of her death. “And I wasn’t surprised, having seen her on Larry King. I was sad about it. I had a great deal of affection for her and that interview with her played a really important role in my life too, you know what I mean? That changed me and my direction as well.”

Just before we concluded our interview, Steve told me that Tammy sent him a signed bible and a collection of her recordings as a thank-you gift in the days following their interview. A decades-long veteran of the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus, he confessed that he never thought much of Tammy Faye as a singer, yet one song of hers stuck out to him.

Still undergoing near-deadly suramin treatments in hopes of curtailing a virus that seemed all but damning, her recording of Don’t Give Up on the Brink of a Miracle helped motivate him to defy every designation of AIDS as a death sentence—even as he was a “skeleton with skin.”

“That song kind of became a cheerleading song to me. I mean,Tammy became my cheerleader. And I really tried to internalize that. ‘Don’t give up on the brink of a miracle because God’s still on the throne.’ That confirmed everything I’d always said about God being greater than AIDS, about the resurrection being a sign that I could be fully alive in the face of death, and that I could possibly heal from this horrible disease that was killing—it seemed like killing everybody.”

Steve’s interview with Tammy was the first ever recorded by satellite on hers and then-husband Jim Bakker’s network, Praise the Lord (PTL). In a way, that’s more than appropriate. Two people of different theologies and circumstances traversed ideological miles to meet at a halfway point of human empathy and hope, undeterred by false detours of hysteria and fear.

“She opened up her heart as the interview went on, and I opened mine, and it was just a great meeting of hearts between us.”

Original Steve and Tammy Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjXXdQ6VceQ&t=542s

Evan Brechtel is a queer writer living in New York. You can find his body of work at www.evanbrechtel.net. @EvanBrechtel.

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