The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) takes us back to the golden age of televangelism, when the big names were world-famous celebrities with huge political and social influence. They had dinner at the White House. They were parodied on Saturday Night Live.
1. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio) turned his Moral Majority into a seething- ground for anti-gay hatred. He blamed them for everything. An airplane crash in Peru -- must have been some gays on board. Rise in teen pregnancy -- gay rights make our kids think they can do anything they want. Your basement is flooded -- God is punishing you for not hating gays enough. "A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you."
2. Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) proclaimed that God was punishing all of the gays by giving them AIDS, but they wanted to infect as many straight people as possible, with the goal of destroying society before becoming extinct. They had special rings that, when you shook their hand, would prick you with a little of their blood, so you would catch AIDS and die. They would spit on your food or cough on you on purpose
3. Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) said that he would kill any gay man who looked at him romantically. He saw his huge tv ministry decimated after two prostitution scandals, in spite of his famous "I have sinned" speech.
4. Oral Roberts managed to build a whole homophobic university with sleazy fundraising techniques, like claiming that if viewers didn't send in $8,000,000, God would kill him.
More after the break
5. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (Andrew Garfield,top photo and left, Jessica Chastain) ran the PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, the most direct influence of Eli and Aimee-Leigh's Praise Be to He hour.
Tammy Faye, however, believed in compassion. In 1987, she interviewed Steve Pieters, a gay minister (who had AIDS), without ever saying "God's punishment." She asked stupid-sounding questions like "If you've never been with a woman, how do you know you don't like it?". but later explained that those were the questions her viewers had.
She regularly attended pride events and was interviewed in gay magazines through her post-PTL years. Her heavy make-up made her look like a drag queen, and she went with it, attending -- and judging "Tammy Faye Drag" contests.
Tammy Faye was not entirely gay-positive: she didn't support same-sex marriage, and continued to believe that same-sex acts were sinful. But so was premarital and extramarital sex between straight people; why should gay people be subjected to discrimination and prejudice?
Many evangelicals today still hate LGBT persons, but imagine what it was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when almost all of them did! My sister didn't speak to me for five years after I came out (my brother was always fine with it). In that morass of homophobia, Tammy Faye was a beacon of hope.
Bonus: Louis Cacelmi as Richard Fletcher, who furnished prostitutes for Jim Bakker and claimed to have had sex with him.
Jessica Chastain got an Oscar for this - they suggest that Jim might be gay but never show anything which is to bad because Andrew Garfied in a gay sex scene would be hot
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