Deep into the AIDS crisis in October 1985, a prominent Los Angeles minister named Stephen Pieters traveled to a television studio for a satellite-link interview that his friends begged him to avoid.
On the other end was the Pentecostal televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, of the Charlotte-based PTL Television Network. Then at her peak, with more than 13 million viewers, she and her broadcaster husband, Jim, held great sway with conservative Christian followers whose beliefs were seen as sharply at odds with the gay community and AIDS patients such as Rev. Pieters.
“It would wreck my reputation as a liberal gay activist preacher,” Rev. Pieters, who died July 8 at 70, recalled being told. But the 25-minute segment became a watershed in public perceptions about AIDS. Pieters also emerged as an eloquent and nationally renowned spokesman for those facing AIDS, which at the time was considered not only a likely death sentence but also put patients at high risk for experiencing shame and humiliation.
The interview, however, almost didn’t happen. When he was approached by producers for the show “Tammy’s House Party,” Pieters offered to come to the Charlotte studio. Bakker’s team sent plane tickets but then called to cancel.
Pieters often spoke to the media in Los Angeles at outdoor venues to mitigate worries of close contact at a time when many people had questions about how HIV was spread. In the Bakker interview, he believed that the crew did not want him in the building. An agreement was made for the satellite link. He saw the show as a chance to discuss AIDS and spirituality before an audience he would normally never encounter.
To his surprise – braced for the possibility she would “pounce” on him over his sexuality – Bakker showed empathy from the beginning. She asked about Pieters’s path to coming out, and he talked about his religious faith. She raised the public’s dread and misunderstanding of AIDS.
Did some people even fear “to breathe the same air you breathe?” she asked.
“Yes, Tammy, that happens. I was asked not to use the bathroom in somebody’s house,” he said. “I remember going to a party once where every time I finished my soft drink the host took the glass to the kitchen … and steam cleaned it.”
Near the end of the interview, Bakker looked into the camera. “How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth and 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 arms around them and tell them that we care,” she said.
The studio audience applauded. It brought praise but also fierce denunciations from the religious right. (The interview was 18 months before Princess Diana made world headlines in 1987 for visiting AIDS patients.)
“Your courage in doing this interview is bringing me to life,” Pieters said at the end of the interview. “It’s giving me life.”
Bakker, in one act of outreach, shattered the belief that all evangelicals were enemies of gays and lesbians and began her transformation as one of the few prominent figures from Bible Belt TV seeking connections to the LGBTQ+ community.
“It really rocked the conservative Christian community and kind of rocked the gay and lesbian community as well,” said Pieters.
The interview and its cultural fallout were introduced to a new generation in 2021 with the film, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” starring Jessica Chastain in an Oscar-winning performance as Bakker and Randy Havens as Pieters. In October 2022, the musical “Tammy Faye” opened in London with songs composed by Elton John, and with the Bakker-Pieters interview as one of the pivotal scenes.
“I’ve had any number of people come up to me through the years and say that my interview with Tammy Faye saved their lives or helped them to realize they could be gay and Christian,” Pieters told the Guardian in 2021, “and it turned them around and made them realize they had to come out.”
Pieters’s own health struggles became sources of hope and medical study. He was “patient No. 1” in 1985 for an anti-viral drug, suramin, to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Suramin was abandoned for treatment because of high toxicity. But Pieters’s 39-week trial offered insights into antiretroviral therapy, which became the standard treatment for HIV.
Doctors gave Pieters a grim prognosis in 1984 when he developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, skin lesions often linked to HIV infection, and stage-four lymphoma. “I wouldn’t see 1985,” he recalled as one doctor’s prediction. The Kaposi’s and lymphoma went into remission during the suramin trial, but his overall health still fluctuated wildly over the decades.
By the late 1980s, Pieters had stabilized enough to resume roles including field director for the AIDS ministry at the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in the Los Angeles area. He joined the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles in the bass section, performing in New York, Moscow, and other places until recent years.
In 1990, he appeared as himself in the play “AIDS US/II” in Los Angeles. Three years later, Pieters was a guest at the first AIDS Prayer Breakfast at the White House, hosted by President Bill Clinton.
“I have been amazed at how those 25 minutes I spent with Tammy Faye have reverberated … more than almost anything else I’ve done,” Pieters once said.
Albert Stephen Pieters was born in Lawrence, Mass., on Aug. 2, 1952, and raised in nearby Andover, where his father was chairman of the mathematics department at Phillips Academy.
Pieters graduated from Phillips and received a bachelor’s degree in speech at Northwestern University in 1974. Two years later, he joined the Good Shepherd Parish Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and began a career in ministry.
He received a master’s in divinity degree in 1979 from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., and began programs for the gay community. (He received a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University in 2003.)
In April 1982, Pieters began experiencing the symptoms of what is now known as HIV. He resigned from his position in Hartford and moved to Los Angeles.
A few months after the Bakker interview, Pieters was again severely ill. “I went blind, and I wasted away to nothing,” he recalled on the BBC podcast “Things Fell Apart.” He said he listened to a song on Bakker’s 1985 album “Tammy” called “Don’t Give Up (On the Brink of a Miracle).”
Later that year, he was the featured speaker at the first AIDS Project Los Angeles benefit. His writings include two memoirs, “I’m Still Dancing” (1991) and “Love is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope,” scheduled to be published next year.
Survivors include a brother, said a family spokesman, Harlan Boll, who announced the death. Pieters died at a hospital in Los Angeles from an infection.
Pieters never met Tammy Faye Bakker in person. (Jim Bakker was convicted in 1989 of crimes related to illegally steering donations to pay for the couple’s lavish lifestyle; they divorced while he was in prison.)
Pieters did, however, become friends with the Bakkers’s son, Jay. He once described to Pieters how his mother took part in a Pride parade, where she broke into a Christian song.
“She had them all singing along,” Pieters said, “and I would have loved to have seen that.”
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