page_title: Tammy Faye Messner
section_title: 1974–1987: The PTL Club
hierarchical_section_title: Tammy Faye Messner / Biography / 1974–1987: The PTL Club
caption_attribution_description: English: Jim Bakker during a PTL broadcast with his wife Tammy Faye, 1986.
context_page_description: Tamara Faye Messner was an American Christian singer, evangelist, author, talk show hostess, and television personality. She initially gained notice for her work with The PTL Club, a televangelist program that she co-founded with her husband Jim Bakker in 1974. They had hosted their own puppet show series for local programming in Minnesota in the early 1970s; Messner also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park.
  Messner garnered significant publicity when Jim Bakker was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of The PTL Club. She divorced Bakker in 1992 and married Roe Messner. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, from which she suffered intermittently for over a decade before dying of the disease in 2007.
  During her career Messner was noted for her eccentric and glamorous persona, as well as for her moral views that diverged from those of many mainstream Evangelists, particularly her acceptance of LGBT views and reaching out to HIV/AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
context_section_description: Messner co-founded (with Bakker) The PTL Club (Praise The Lord) in 1974, a televangelist Christian news program that they initially hosted in an abandoned furniture store in Charlotte. The series mixed "glitzy entertainment with down-home family values" and preached a "'prosperity gospel' which put a divine seal of approval on both the growing affluence of American evangelicals and the showy lifestyles of their television ministers." The PTL Club soon grew into its own network and a corporate enterprise within a year of its founding, generating $120 million annually in the 1970s. In 1978, Messner and Bakker used $200 million of PTL funds to build Heritage USA, a Christian retreat and theme park that, at the time, ranked alongside Disney World and Disneyland as one of the most popular theme parks in the United States.
  Throughout the series, Messner provided a sentimental and emotive touch to stories, and also often sang Christian songs. She was also noted for her candid discussion of topics considered taboo amongst many of her Evangelist peers, ranging from penile implants to acceptance and compassion for the LGBT community.
  At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, Messner emotionally interviewed Steven Pieters, a gay Christian minister with AIDS on "Tammy's House Party," a segment of The PTL Club, during which they discussed his sexuality, coming out, diagnosis with AIDS, and the death of his partner. During the program, Messner emotionally addressed her viewership, saying: "How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care." Throughout the AIDS epidemic, Messner advocated for viewers of The PTL Club to follow Christ and show compassion and pray for the ill, and also invited drug addicts onto the show to interview them about substance abuse. In 1987, it was reported that Messner was herself being treated for a prescription drug addiction.
  Messner's friend, the Reverend Mel White, commented on her presence on The PTL Club:
  Her fans were people who grew up in a very fundamentalist tradition, not being able to wear make-up, or dance, or go out in public. So here comes Tammy, with her dyed hair and make-up, her ebullient spirit and outspoken ways with both men and women. She talked about sex, and flirted with Jimmy. She took on the caricature of an obedient wife, and blasted it. You have never seen Pat Robertson's wife, or Jerry Falwell's wife. They stay at home, doing what those wives do.
caption: Messner with then-husband Jim Bakker during a PTL broadcast, circa 1986.
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