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

In 1985, when worry and homophobia have 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 totally different voice.

That Might, on the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for folks with AIDS attended by tons of, he declared: “Slightly than really feel abandoned by God, I’ve by no means been extra certain of God’s love for me. God didn’t give me this illness. God is with me on this illness.”

That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Instances concerning the ostracism folks with AIDS have been encountering.

“Some folks ask, ‘How is it totally different from most cancers?’” he mentioned. “Properly, most individuals with most cancers aren’t requested to not use the toilet in a pal’s home or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had extra meals on paper plates within the final yr than I’ve had in my entire life.”

One look he made that yr had a very profound affect: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Reward the Lord) tv community, which reached thousands and thousands of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.

It was a sympathetic interview through 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 slightly than intolerance and worry.

“How unhappy,” she mentioned, “that we as Christians, who’re to be the salt of the earth, and we who’re supposed to have the ability to love everybody, are afraid so badly of an AIDS affected person that we are going to not go up and put our arm round them and inform them that we care.”

The PTL community had an viewers of thousands and thousands, and within the years since, that interview has been credited with serving to to alter at the least some viewers’ perceptions of homosexual folks, 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.

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

“That interview was why I wanted to make the film,” Ms. Chastain informed Selection on the film’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and courageous and brave and badass. I’m one hundred pc satisfied that there have been folks — conservative Christians watching at residence — who realized that they’d judged their relations unlovingly. I’m satisfied that that interview saved households 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, mentioned the trigger was a sepsis an infection.

Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had carried out with the Homosexual Males’s Refrain of Los Angeles, was trying ahead to the publication subsequent yr of his guide, “Love Is Higher Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Therapeutic, and Hope.” In it, he mentioned he was typically requested why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.

“Regardless of the motive,” he wrote, “I really feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many homosexual males of my era didn’t get to develop outdated. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, nonetheless dancing with pleasure.”

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

“I knew that I used to be totally different from the time that I used to be about 3,” Mr. Pieters informed Ms. Bakker within the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t fairly slot in.”

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

“He was freaked out,” he mentioned. “He informed me, ‘Don’t inform anyone; by no means say something to anyone about it.’”

He mentioned that after graduating from Northwestern College in 1974 with a bachelor’s diploma in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Neighborhood Church in Chicago and felt referred to as to a ministry centered on homosexual folks, that church’s most important viewers. He earned a grasp of divinity diploma at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then grew to become pastor of the Metropolitan Neighborhood Church of Hartford, Conn., earlier than transferring to Los Angeles within the early Nineteen Eighties. There he took a put up on the Metropolitan Neighborhood Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, acquired a prognosis of AIDS, though he had been displaying 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 mentioned he’d been informed in 1984 that he wouldn’t dwell out that yr. The following yr he spoke earlier than a activity power 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 identified.

“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I always hear about AIDS,” he mentioned, “I may need given up and never lived to see 1985.”

Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.

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

“I’ve had so many individuals through the years come as much as me and say, ‘I noticed your interview dwell, as a result of my mom at all times had PTL on, and it modified my life as a result of I spotted I may very well be homosexual and Christian on the identical time,’” he mentioned. “Or, ‘It modified my life as a result of I spotted that AIDS was a actuality, and I needed to begin taking good care of myself.’”

Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.