Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

In 1985, when worry and homophobia had been nonetheless driving a lot of the dialog surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a homosexual pastor who had the illness, was a decidedly completely different voice.

That May, on the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for individuals with AIDS attended by a whole lot, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”

That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times in regards to the ostracism individuals with AIDS had been encountering.

“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he stated. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”

One look he made that 12 months had a very profound impression: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) tv community, which reached tens of millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.

It was a sympathetic interview during which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being homosexual and about his sickness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her viewers to be ruled by compassion moderately than intolerance and worry.

“How sad,” she stated, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and 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.”

The PTL community had an viewers of tens of millions, and within the years since, that interview has been credited with serving to to alter not less than some viewers’ perceptions of homosexual individuals, AIDS and religion. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later generally known as Tammy Faye Messner) referred to as on Christians to as a substitute present empathy.

Among these impressed together with her stand, a few years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who gained an Oscar final 12 months for her function as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” during which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened final 12 months in London, additionally integrated the 1985 interview.)

“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain instructed Variety on the film’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”

If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters lengthy defied AIDS, surviving for many years regardless of repeated well being struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., close to Los Angeles. He was 70.

His spokesman, Harlan Boll, stated the trigger was a sepsis an infection.

Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had carried out with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was wanting ahead to the publication subsequent 12 months of his e-book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he stated he was typically requested why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.

“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”

Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a arithmetic instructor and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mom, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.

“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters instructed Ms. Bakker within the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”

When he was a youngster, he stated, he acknowledged that he was homosexual and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.

“He was freaked out,” he stated. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”

He stated that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s diploma in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt referred to as to a ministry targeted on homosexual individuals, that church’s principal viewers. He earned a grasp of divinity diploma at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then grew to become pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., earlier than shifting to Los Angeles within the early Eighties. There he took a publish on the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, obtained a prognosis of AIDS, though he had been exhibiting signs as early as 1982.

He confronted quite a few well being issues through the years, however simply being round to face them was one thing of a victory: He stated he’d been instructed in 1984 that he wouldn’t reside out that 12 months. The subsequent 12 months he spoke earlier than a process drive on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officers to not write off those that had already been recognized.

“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he stated, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”

Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.

At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impression of his 1985 interview.

“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he stated. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”

Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.