Tammy Faye R.I.P.

I lived in Montana for two years in the 1970s, since my lover was there. (Long story.) I lived in in the capital city of Helena, situated on the skirts of the Rocky Mountains near the Continental Divide, and ended up getting a nice job working in the State Capitol in the public information department of the state education agency--writing, reporting, copyediting, doing photography, layout, sketches, graphic design, etc.

It was beautiful in all respects. The winters were pretty cold, but I was already used to cold weather (for a Floridian), having lived a year in Germany and two years in Virginia. The first time I ever saw snow was on a bus in Germany, on a field trip from the Goethe Institute language school in Ebersberg (outside Munich) to visit Nuremberg. It was Albrecht Duerer's 500th anniversary, as I recall, and there was a huge amount of his work on display in his home town, which I found fascinating.

Anyway, I'm kind of a night owl and there wasn't a lot to watch on TV in Helena late at night. No movies or anything. So I watched the PTL Club, with Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye. I can't say I loved the program but I watched it since it was the most entertaining program on TV at that time of night. I always thought Tammy Faye was a trip. Honestly, she made it worth watching. That was before the "family values" theme/meme and all the Christian evangelicals made gays their number one enemy. The show was rather innocent (by today's standards) and Tammy Faye, outrageous as she was with all her makeup and her tearing up which made her makeup run, came across as a genuinely caring person. I never heard her say anything along the lines of "love the sinner, hate the sin," the polite way of saying "God hates fags."