Rev. Stephen Pieters, Longtime HIV/AIDS Activist Portrayed in ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye,’ Dies at 70

Rev. Stephen Pieters, the influential HIV/AIDS activist and survivor whose televised interview with Tammy Faye Bakker in 1985 transformed him into a national spokesperson in the battle against the disease, has died. He was 70.

Pieters died Saturday in Los Angeles after being hospitalized two weeks earlier with an infection, publicist Harlan Boll announced.

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Pieters had been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex in 1982 and Kaposi sarcoma and Stage 4 lymphoma in 1984 when he appeared via satellite on the Bakker-hosted Tammy’s House Party, seen by millions of evangelical Christians throughout the southeastern U.S. on the PTL Network.

“She wanted to be the first televangelist to interview a gay man with AIDS,” Pieters told People magazine two years ago. “It was a very scary time, and there was still a lot of fear about AIDS and about being around a person with AIDS. And I thought the opportunity to reach an audience that I would never otherwise reach was too valuable to pass by.”

That interview was re-created for Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), which starred Jessica Chastain as Bakker in an Oscar-winning turn. (Randy Havens portrayed Pieters in the film).

Chastain told THR‘s Mia Galuppo in 2021 that for her, the most important scene to get right in the movie was the Pieters interview, down to the heart-shaped necklace that Bakker wrote that day to demonstrate that “everyone is deserving of love.”

“I have been amazed at how those 25 minutes I spent with Tammy Faye have reverberated through my life, more than almost anything else I’ve done,” he once noted. “So many people have said my interview with her helped them come out or even saved them from suicide, by helping them realize they could be gay and Christian or that God was not punishing them with AIDS for being gay.”

On Twitter, Chastain wrote that Pieters “was a constant reminder that God is LOVE.”

The Pieters-Bakker interview also was used for a scene in the Elton John musical Tammy Faye that opened in London in October 2022.

Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Andover, Massachusetts. His father chaired the mathematics department at Phillips Academy. He attended that school and then Northwestern University, graduating in 1974.

Two years later, he joined Good Shepherd Parish Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and in 1979 received his master of divinity degree from McCormick Theological Seminary and became pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Connecticut.

After moving to Los Angeles, Pieters became “patient No. 1” on the first anti-viral drug trial to treat HIV in 1985. He also took the drug Suramin for a total of 39 weeks. Within six weeks of treatment, his cancers went into remission, he said.

Also in 1985, Pieters was a featured speaker at AIDS Project Los Angeles’ Commitment to Life, given by Elizabeth Taylor as the first entertainment industry dinner AIDS benefit. In 1987, he presented the Buddy of the Year Award to Whoopi Goldberg at APLA’s third Commitment to Life benefit.

In 1990, he appeared as himself in the play AIDS US/II and in 1993 was one of 12 guests at the first AIDS Prayer Breakfast at the White House with President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and National AIDS Policy Coordinator Kristine Gebbie.

Pieters also served for years on the board of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, for whom he sang since 1994 in concert halls that included Carnegie Hall in New York, Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Just before his death, Pieters offered testimony and the opening invocation for the second year at the Hollywood Museum’s annual Real to Reel: Portrayals and Perceptions of LGBTQ+s in Hollywood.

His memoir, Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this spring.

Everywhere he spoke, Pieters carried a fairy wand to teach about the importance “of believing in fairies when so many good fairies were dying, of believing in each other and in ourselves, enough to do the work of healing, whether that be healing into life, or healing into death.” That wand is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Funeral services and memorials have not been announced. Donations in his memory can be made to AIDS Project Los Angeles, City of Hope, The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles and/or Project Angel Food.

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