Most people will remember Tammy Faye as the woman with the running mascara from the PTL Club. In the 1980s, I remember t-shirts with the phrase "I ran into Tammy Faye at the mall" and what looked liked makeup smudges on them. I thought those shirts were hilarious!
However, for gay and lesbian people who grew up conservative Christian during the 1980s, there's another reason to remember Tammy Faye. She was one of the first people to have a person with AIDS on her talk show (long before Princess Di famously hugged a patient at the Middlesex hospital).
At a time when people were still afraid you could catch AIDS from breathing the same air as an infected person, Tammy Faye insisted on interviewing an AIDS patient in person, and told her staff and crew that God would protect her if there was a danger. While other televangelists were celebrating "God's punishment" on the gay community, Tammy Faye challenged her television audience to follow Christ's example and reach out to the sick and needy. I don't think there's any way to say how much that gracious act meant to scared, young, gay Christians like me.
Later, Tammy Faye was one of the first conservative Christian celebrities to openly embrace gay and lesbian people as we were -- without calling for us to change. By then, she had fallen from grace herself, and was living post-scandal in Southern California. But, I believe her embrace of gay people was genuine.
Even during the height of her celebrity, when she was running her mascara daily on national television, Tammy Faye was one of the few televangelists to embrace a gospel of love, instead of a gospel of hate. As Larry King said about her toward the end of her long battle with cancer, "If she's 65 pounds, it's all heart."
I like to think she's in heaven now with her old pal/nemesis Jerry Falwell, saying, "See, Jerry, I was right. God does love everyone -- even you and me."