Seeing beyond Tammy Faye’s mascara

Published: July 25, 2007, 8:22 pm

Tags: people, radio tv, evangelicals

Tammy Faye Messner was anything but subtle and nuanced, at least in most of her public appearances, so to hope for nuance in her obituaries may be too much to ask. Still, I’ve yet to find a story about her life and death that comes even close to capturing the spirit of this remarkably strong woman. In the late 1980s, after the scandals at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL network, Tammy Faye was widely derided for her thickly applied makeup, her on-air weeping and her insistent belief that PTL’s collapse was the fault of the big bad media and her brethren in the TV evangelism fold who coveted PTL’s satellite channel. But in the 20 years since then, largely thanks to Tammy Faye’s developing a following among gays and lesbians, another character emerged. This character wore the same makeup, cried just as readily as ever and still mourned the loss of PTL. She also embraced her status as a camp figure, readily accepted the love and sympathy of her new admirers

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