Tammy Faye Loves You - Interview

As her life story hits movie screens in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the former Mrs. Bakker has something to say to Jerry Falwell about God's love and embracing gay people

If you ask Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, it was Jerry Falwell who engineered the disgrace and imprisonment of her ex-husband, televangelist Jim Bakker--a headline-making scandal from 1987 that included never-proved allegations of homosexual affairs. Tammy Faye divorced Bakker; married Roe Messner, the contractor who built the Bakkers' now-defunct Christian-family theme park, Heritage USA; briefly hosted a syndicated TV talk show with gay personality Jim J. Bullock; then largely disappeared.

Now Tammy Faye's back, and she wants Falwell to know it. She even wrote him a letter, she recalls, saying, "You must ask God to forgive you and admit you did wrong." He did not respond.

Helping to engineer her comeback are gay partners Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, the directing-producing dynamos behind such documentaries as Party Monster, VH1's Video Killed the Radio Star, and the upcoming 101 Rent Boys. Fascinated with Messner's story, the duo spent most of a year convincing her to cooperate for their documentary. The result is the Sundance Film Festival hit The Eyes of Tammy Faye (which Lions Gate will open in theaters beginning July 28), which takes viewers from the shampoo-bottle puppets that launched the Bakkers as Christian TV personalities on Pat Robertson's syndicated show to their career-making God's-love-fest on syndicated TV, The PTL Club, and on through the scandals and rebirth.

The film has given Messner a new media pulpit, and part of her mission, it seems, is to rebuild the big tent of faith she feels PTL (as in "Praise the Lord") represented--including outreach to gay and lesbian people. "Gay people love Tammy Faye," says out gay activist and former Falwell associate the Rev. Mel White in the film, "because Tammy Faye loves gay people." To find out why, The Advocate joined Bailey and Barbato to interview Messner one more time.

Bailey: When we first talked, you didn't want to do this film, did you?

Messner: No. I was afraid to do this film. [But] when I met you guys, I looked in your eyes, and I knew you were honest people. And this is what you said: "I can't tell you if it's gonna be good or bad. All we can tell you is that it is going to be fair. You can't see the movie until after it's all done; you have no input in the putting together of it." And it made me almost sick to think about that. And yet I kept thinking, I trust Randy and Fenton. And I am so grateful that I did.

Barbato: I think a lot of gays and lesbians think all Christians are all the same. What's the difference between Jerry Falwell's Christianity and your Christianity?

I think Jerry Falwell's Christianity is very judgmental. My walk with God is very non judgmental. I love people just for who they are. [But] you've got to be a certain way for Jerry Falwell to accept you. And that's sad to me because, for me, that is not what the Bible says. The Bible says, "God is love." The Bible says that we all are sinners. The Bible says that all of us have come short of the glory of God. The Bible says that he loves every one of us just the same and that he doesn't classify sin, saying this sin is greater than that sin.

Bailey: I remember when the whole PTL thing happened, thinking, Oh, they're all the same, and delighting in watching the scandal. It was like Star Wars--watching the evil empire serf-destruct, and it was sort of satisfying in that respect. But PTL was different from the rest.

Bailey: Yes! And I came to understand that fully only in making the film, which makes me wonder if people at large don't understand just how different PTL was.

We had millions of members at PTL. They were Catholic. They were Jews. There was every single denomination: Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostals. When you came to PTL, it was just one big family. And everybody felt that. The minute they drove on that ground, they knew they were safe at PTL because they weren't going to be put down. The gays were welcome; the lesbians were welcome. Everybody was welcome at PTL.

Bailey: And why would that engender hostility with other Christians?

Because other Christians are not living in the day of grace. They're living with rules and regulations of their own making--not of God's making, [but] of their own making. And they're judging people by what they wear. They judged me by my makeup; they judged me by the clothes I wear. They judged me in every way possible. But that wasn't God. It's just that so many so-called Christians are judgmental. And in my heart I think that if they're judgmental, they better do their work over again. They better say another prayer [laughs].

Barbato: When we were going through the PTL archives, we found a clip of you interviewing a man with AIDS in, like, 1981! Was it your idea to have him on?

Yes. It was my idea. I asked to have him on. Because my heart went out to him. It was my television show, and I could do what I wanted. Our PTL was not judgmental. Jim was supportive of me; all of my crew around me was supportive of me.