Talk of the Town - Remembering Tammy August 19 2000

Get old enough and life turns the tables on you in the strangest ways. That was my reaction a couple of years ago when a movie turned vulgarian Larry Flynt, for whom I worked years ago, into a First Amendment hero. Now another film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, has turned one more dubious figure from my past into a heroine. The film manages to sanitize Tammy Faye’s story of its central sexual theme.

Flash back 20 years and find me in the final year of an addiction to alcohol and marijuana. One of my fondest pleasures of the time, having no access to true theater of the absurd in Atlanta, was to fire up a joint and switch on the “PTL Club,” the enormously popular show featuring televangelists and marionette-look-alikes Jim Bakker and wife Tammy Faye.

I became entranced by this pair’s absurd nouveau-evangelism. It had more phony emotionalism than a Mexican soap opera and, of course, more make-up than Evita’s corpse. I ordered Tammy Faye’s dreadful books, with their stories of Chihuahuas struck dead by Jesus for peeing on Tammy’s drapes.

At the time I was under contract with Atlanta Weekly, the Sunday magazine supplement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For a year I begged my editors to send me to Heritage USA to write a story about Tammy and PTL. Not long after I quit drinking and smoking dope, I was given the OK to visit undercover.

Believe me, there was a huge difference in sitting at home watching Tammy Faye with a joint in my hand and sitting in her audience stone-cold sober while everyone but me held their hands aloft “touching God” and mumbling “thankew, Jesus.” I shocked myself by raising my own hands to fit in.

There was the afternoon I took a swim in the huge pool. I dove in the deep end and, swimming to the shallow end, found myself in the middle of a mass baptism. Bakker sidekick “Uncle Henry” grabbed me and baptized me before I knew what hit me. I attended a seminar in which we were taught to speak in tongues. Apparently the angels speak in a language quite similar to the chorus of that old song, “The Purple People Eater.”

Alas, too, I was caught stealing prayer requests from the big bin in the Upper Room at PTL. (Apparently, God has time to dispatch new tires and better work schedules to the devout.) I was chastised for my pilfering and spent 10 minutes on my knees with an attendant asking God’s forgiveness.

Realize that my visit was before the big scandals broke, though the IRS had begun some investigations. I went to PTL to write a piece on the experience as surreal theater. But to my considerable shock, I encountered PTL’s dark side nearly as soon as I arrived. Jim Bakker warmed up his audiences with a spiteful bashing of reporters. Tammy Faye’s infamous mascara-dissolving tears were clearly calculated, and it was obvious she was heavily drugged, too.

It got worse. Exploring Charlotte’s nightlife, I met several gay men who worked at PTL and told me intimate details of Jim Bakker’s bisexual life, particularly with his bi buddy and fellow evangelist John Wesley Fletcher, who arranged the infamous Jessica Hahn threeway. (You do remember it was a threeway, don’t you?) I also learned that Tammy had an affair with singer Gary Paxton and that Jim had tracked them down to a motel in Nashville where he was alleged to have wielded a gun. And, of course, I gleaned early rumblings of the fraud scandal that had yet to break in the national media.

I returned to Atlanta and wrote my findings — actually toning them down quite a bit. The paper had already begun promoting the story heavily as a kind of quirky celebrity profile. You can imagine my shock when an editor called me and told me that they could not run the story as I’d written it. They asked me to re-write it, to further tone it down, thus deferring the chance to break the scandal that erupted a few years later.

I felt quite vindicated when the fraud scandal broke, though the sexy stuff was not initially reported. A friend who worked at a national magazine called me and I agreed to sell them my original manuscript. Meantime, though, another reporter called me after getting wind of my original story and interviewed me about it. Naively, I had no suspicion of his intentions. Basically, he flew to Charlotte the next day, verified everything I told him and broke some more of the dirt (ruining the sale of my original manuscript).

And now, about 15 years later, Tammy Faye and Jim have turned into forgiven camp figures and victims of Jerry Falwell. The media once again are participating in a tidy revisioning of a story that could have been used to demonstrate what really lies behind puritanical, fundamentalist agendas. It’s not just political and economic ambition. It’s also denial of actual pleasure and sexual truth, the weird appetites to which all of us, including the holy, are heir. If Tammy Faye is a gay icon, as endless reviewers suggest, it’s partly because the film about her, with the media’s complicity, still keeps the whole truth in a closet.

Cliff Bostock, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Contact him at 404-525-4774 or www.soulworks.net.