Headcase - My visit to PTL

Tammy Faye Messner — better-known by her ex-husband Jim Bakker's surname — died two weeks ago. As was true of a film about her seven years ago, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, most all of the media's eulogies have sanitized the facts of her life.

Her main story is well-known. She and her first husband operated the PTL Club, a hugely popular Christian television show. Tammy was famous for the heavy makeup that streaked her face when she began crying in front of the camera, as she often did, especially during the years when she was addicted to prescription drugs.

In the same year that Tammy Faye was treated at the Betty Ford Center, 1987, Jim Bakker was forced to resign from PTL because of revelations that he'd had an affair with a secretary, Jessica Hahn, whom he paid to keep quiet. Soon afterward, PTL filed bankruptcy and Jim and Tammy Faye turned their ministry over to Jerry Falwell, who promptly banned the two.

Then, in 1988, Jim was indicted for defrauding followers of $158 million by overselling time-shares at Heritage USA, the theme park/resort in Fort Mill, S.C., that was PTL's headquarters. In 1989, Jim went to prison. Tammy Faye divorced him and married Roe Messner in 1993. He also ended up in prison, for bankruptcy fraud.

As every column written about her has noted, Tammy Faye became something of a gay icon. Her campy style – of appearance and singing – had always endeared her to many gay men. But, after the fall of PTL, she reciprocated by embracing the gay community wholeheartedly.

Back in the early '80s, when it was going strong, practically everyone I knew watched the PTL Club in the way one might watch a drag show or a theater-of-the-absurd production. Many of us enhanced the surreal quality of the show by smoking marijuana. We sat on the edge of our chairs waiting for the inevitable tears to flow and turn Tammy Faye's face into a mud bank.

Besides the pure campiness of Tammy Faye's performance, most gay men noticed something else unique about the PTL Club. These were the years early in the AIDS epidemic and most televangelists, such as Falwell, were calling the disease God's punishment for homosexuals. The Bakkers never engaged in that kind of rhetoric and, in fact, Tammy Faye shocked everyone by interviewing men with AIDS and advocating compassion. If you didn't live through that period, it's hard to imagine how stunning that was. But it seemed odd, too, because in most other respects, they were as obnoxious as most televangelists.

Not long before the fall of PTL, I spent a week at Heritage USA. I was under contract with the Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazine at the time and had pleaded for a year to be sent to PTL. I went "undercover," planning only to write from the perspective of becoming a character in PTL's bizarre theater. There was much of that – being caught pilfering prayer requests, being grabbed in the pool and baptized without my consent – but there was much more.

I hadn't been in my hotel in Charlotte an hour when a very friendly desk clerk decided to visit my room. He was gay and, when I told him why I was in town, he asked me, jokingly, if I planned to have sex with Jim. But it wasn't all a joke. He introduced me to several men who'd had sex with the televangelist. Jim Bakker was quite bisexual.

Then I met another man who told me that Tammy Faye had herself had an affair with country-western singer Gary Paxton. They had been surprised in their hotel by Jim, who, the story went, came to the scene armed with buckshot. I was also told that Tammy Faye was given to barging into a local piano bar and singing in quite secular fashion while obviously under the influence of something.

Not surprisingly, I guess, my editor at the AJC refused to print my findings and it was a few years later, after the financial scandal emerged, that the sexual material also surfaced. A CNN reporter went to Charlotte with my original manuscript and verified all my facts.

Thus, it wasn't just compassion that kept the Bakkers silent about gay people and turned Tammy Faye into a gay icon. Unconventional sexuality was a personal issue in their own lives. I think it does speak well to Tammy Faye's character that, unlike the Ted Haggards of this world, she did not attempt to hide behind a barrage of moralistic posturing. But it's also true that had the facts of her life been more openly disclosed, her religious message would have been especially profound.

Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology. For information on his private practice, go to www.cliffbostock.com.