a televangelist who went to prison for fraud has died at 86. his ex-wife is the one the gays still light candles for.

Tammy Faye Messner. Photo: Darwin Bell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Associated Press and NBC News

Jim Bakker died Monday at 86. "It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening," his wife Lori Bakker wrote on the Facebook page of The Jim Bakker Show, per NBC. The AP reports the cause was not immediately clear. He had a stroke in 2020.

The obituaries all tell the same story, so here it is fast. In 1974 he started the PTL Satellite Network. At its mid-1980s peak, according to the AP, "The PTL Club" drew up to 13 million viewers a night, and the ministry ran the Heritage USA theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In 1987 it came apart. In 1989 he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years, which was later cut, and he served just under five. He came back with a Missouri TV show near Branson and, in 2021, a settlement over claims that a silver supplement could treat COVID.

That is his story. Ours is the woman sitting next to him.

tammy faye and the 1985 interview

In October 1985, on her show Tammy's House Party, Tammy Faye Bakker did a live 25-minute interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor with AIDS, according to National Geographic. On evangelical television. In 1985. "Tammy Faye decided that she wanted to be the first televangelist to interview a gay man with AIDS," Pieters later told ABC7 Los Angeles. On air she said, per National Geographic, "how sad, that we as Christians" are "afraid so badly of an AIDS patient."

The gays did not forget. By 2000 there was a documentary, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, narrated by RuPaul. The Austin Chronicle noted at the time that she had been "embraced by members of the gay community for her warm acceptance of homosexuals and people with AIDS." She divorced Jim in 1992 while he was in prison, the AP says, and she died in 2007, per Fox News. In 2022 Jessica Chastain won the best actress Oscar for playing her and said from the stage, per the AP, "I'm inspired by her radical acts of love." Elton John wrote her a musical. You do not get an Elton John musical by accident.

and jim, on us

Her ex-husband went another way. In 2022, talking about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law on his show, Bakker said of preachers who backed it, "They will kill us in our pulpits," reported by both The Advocate and QNotes.

His son Jay, quoted by NBC, called their relationship "very complicated." We will leave the eulogy to the people who loved him. For the rest of us, there is a woman in very serious eyelashes who looked into a camera in 1985 and decided a gay man dying of AIDS deserved kindness on Christian TV. We will be remembering her this week. We suspect she would have been kinder about him than we are.