(RNS) — The Rev. Stephen Pieters, a minister and HIV/AIDS activist best known for his exceptional interview with televangelist Tammy Faye Messner in 1985, died Saturday (July 8) at age 70.
After four decades of defying doctors’ diagnoses of terminal conditions related to HIV, as well as the stigma associated with AIDS in the early years of the epidemic, Pieters died from gastrointestinal cancer in Los Angeles, after being hospitalized for an infection, his spokesperson, Harlan Boll, told Religion News Service.
“His remarkable story of recovery served as an inspiring example of healing and hope to many across the country and around the world,” Boll’s statement read.
It was during the depths of experimental medical treatment that Messner, then Tammy Faye Bakker, spoke with Pieters on “Tammy’s House Party,” a talk show broadcast on her and her then-husband Jim Bakker’s PTL (Praise the Lord) network that at the time drew some 20 million viewers. Messner died of cancer in 2007.
Pieters negotiated for the 25-minute interview to be live, so his responses would be impossible to edit or scrap altogether. Pieters joined the show via television from Los Angeles, with a live satellite feed to the PTL set.
The vanguard interview aired in an era when fear and false information about HIV/AIDS ran rampant in conservative Christian communities, as preachers and broadcasters such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson perpetuated AIDS disinformation.
Some of Messner’s questions come across as antiquated to modern ears — she inquires, for instance, if Pieters “gave girls a fair try” — but she displayed an empathy toward Pieters that was unprecedented for her listeners and indeed for Americans at large. Hearing of Pieters’ faith, Messner wept and declared she wished to wrap her arms around him in a hug.
“How sad that we as Christians — who are to be the salt of the earth, 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,” Messner implored her viewers.
“Jesus loves me just the way I am. I really believe that. Jesus loves the way I love,” Pieters told Messner, after sharing his experience of coming out as gay and being hospitalized multiple times.
Appearing in November 1985, the interview followed President Ronald Reagan’s first public use of the word AIDS, which came in response to a reporter’s question on Sept. 17, four years after the crisis began and after thousands of Americans had died from the disease.
Born Aug. 2, 1952, in Andover, Massachusetts, Pieters attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1974, and in 1979, earned a Master of Divinity degree from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He soon moved to Hartford, Connecticut, as the pastor of Metropolitan Community Church, an outpost of the Protestant denomination founded to affirm LGBTQ Christians.
In 1982, he resigned from his Hartford church and took an MCC church in Los Angeles, where he was diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex, known then as GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency. In April 1984, he was given diagnoses of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and stage four lymphoma. The prognosis was grim. Pieters’ doctor told him he had less than a year to live.
