Tammy Faye

It is 1986, there is Gin in my glass—I was always behind or ahead of the times, depending on your outlook. Friends are gathered around the television, drinking their preferred beer and wine-coolers as we watch videos on MTV. This was back when MTV played music videos, as the name suggests. Someone walks in and says, “PTL is on. Quick, change the station.”

“What the Hell is PTL,” I ask.

“Praise the Lord! That’s what. You’ve got to see Tammy Faye . . . trust me.”

I change the station and see a teen girl in a high-necked dress, lost in a sea of bows and flounces, singing. She is singing “They Need Someone to tell Them Jesus Loves Them” with great conviction in the kind of belt usually reserved for productions of “Annie.” She finishes the song and the camera moves to a weeping clown on a plush sofa, makeup running down its face, crying “Oh they do! They do need someone to tell them Jesus loves them.”

That was my introduction to Tammy Faye Bakker. She sat there, the tragic clown like Pagliacci, complete with off-beat wardrobe and makeup suitable to an opera, and for some inexplicable reason, I liked her. Maybe it was just the comic appeal. There was plenty of that. The woman wore a fluffy sweater that looked like it had been made from a dead Easter bunny, her hair was teased within an inch of its life and the makeup—well, it spoke for itself.

I would never have guessed that over 20-years later, her name would have reached household-word status. It’s true that every news agency in the country covered the PTL Club’s fall from grace, amid Jim Bakker’s affair with Jessica Hahn and the Bakkers’ frivolous lifestyle at the expense of their supporters. But those stories tend to be forgotten down the road, or end-up lumped together with other scandals: The Bakkers, Gary Hart, Iran-Contra, and S&L all comprise a 1980s scandal stew.

But she wasn’t forgotten. In fact, she was embraced.

Despite her living the high-life in the worst taste possible, many women of all groups saw her as one of them. She was a wife and mother, one of her husband’s biggest supporters and greatest assets, and yet, he cheated on her. A lot of women knew just how she felt, and they admired her. Some admired her for staying with him despite his infidelity, and supporting him while all his cronies abandoned him. Others admired her for leaving him once there was nothing more she could do for him, and beginning a new life for herself.

The gay community loved her. It might be assumed that gays liked her for the same reasons liquored-up teens did- for the camp value. Imagine all the late-eighties Halloween parties in The Castro or on Fire Island with hundreds of “Tammy Fayes” in attendance. While I’m sure there is truth in that, it went much deeper. At a time when Pat Robertson and other evangelicals were blaming and cursing the gay community for the AIDS epidemic, she was not.

This was the mid-eighties, when politicians and other public figures would never have spoken to an AIDS patient, unless it was one of the children or elderly who contracted the disease from a transfusion. Yet she spoke of compassion to the victims of this disease, and pointed out the obvious, that whatever group the disease may have originated with, it would most definitely not remain within that group. She invited AIDS victims onto her stage, both out of compassion and out of common sense.

She also had the support of quite a few of her viewers and followers, the same people she and her husband used to support their grand living. While most high-ranking Christians–people in a position of power, with something to lose by their association with the Bakker’s–left them high-and-dry, many of their lower-income fans, who had every reason to revile her, forgave her. There was no logical reason to, but they did.

In the years that followed she moved in all sorts of directions, appearing on television shows, (including her own) working for a few charities, and continuing to preach the Word among them. I guess it’s for history to determine whether her contribution to the country was a good one or not. But she was, without question, an original and an American original at that. She made no concession to her critics; she was who she was.

On that basis, if nothing else, I have to salute her.