‘I Believe God Is With Me’ : AIDS-Stricken Pastor Salved by His Beliefs

Two weeks after the Rev. Steve Pieters learned he had AIDS, he was asked to preach the Easter sermon at North Hollywood’s Metropolitan Community Church.

Still reeling from his diagnosis, Pieters was suddenly and intensely aware that whatever was going to happen to him in the future, at the moment he was very much alive.

“You know what I’ve discovered?” the boyish, blue-eyed minister said from the pulpit, as the group celebrated Christ’s Resurrection. “They’ve told me the worst thing they can tell me, and I can still dance. You want to see?” And Pieters, 33, a self-styled “fool for Christ,” tap-danced for the congregation. The music in his head, in the best tradition of Christianity and Gene Kelly, was “Singin’ in the Rain.”

1,060 Cases in L.A.

Pieters is one of 1,060 Los Angeles residents with diagnosed cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, one of 12,736 known AIDS victims nationwide. Pieters is also a licensed minister of the Metropolitan Community Church, a predominantly homosexual Christian sect of about 30,000 members founded in Los Angeles in 1968.

Formerly a pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in Hartford, Conn., he is now on the staff at the North Hollywood church.

As a gay activist minister with AIDS, Pieters may be uniquely qualified to talk about the spiritual implications of a disorder that would try the patience of Job. In his view, the gay church must be on the cutting edge of a tragic new ministry--providing the consolations of religion to those, mostly homosexual males, with AIDS. “None of the other churches is going to do it first,” he tells his colleagues.

Pieters has made a videotape on spirituality and AIDS, produced by Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley, and has preached to his denomination on its special obligation to “be present to” people with AIDS through such simple but godly acts as sharing meals and laughs with them.

He gives weekly pastoral care over the phone to 40 other men with AIDS and is visible in Los Angeles’ well-organized AIDS prevention and support program.

Funeral Arrangements Made

But the year and a half since his diagnosis has not been all good works, tap-dancing and smiling through. Pieters has made funeral arrangements, which he described as “your basic pine box and cremation.”

He and his lover separated a month ago, a separation he said was “probably more difficult than the diagnosis.” And, although he currently has few symptoms of AIDS, he still has days when he takes out his Shakespeare and howls at fate along with Lear.

“God is greater than AIDS,” Pieters said, tired but otherwise fit-looking, as he sat recently in his Silver Lake apartment. As he stroked his cat, Grindle, he talked about his illness, his homosexuality and his faith. Theological texts sat on his crowded shelves next to books on the art of Walt Disney. A religious icon was displayed near a ceramic figure of Peter Pan.

“I have been greatly blessed,” he said. “Life is exciting for me now. I’ve bounced back. I’m active. I’m happy. I’m excited about what I’m doing with my life.”

That attitude has been hard won, Pieters said. His initial response to finding out he had the life-threatening disease was to regret his homosexuality. In a journal, he wrote: “I found myself feeling that if I had just stayed in the closet, if I had never come out, if I had never had sex, then I wouldn’t have AIDS, and I wouldn’t be facing my mortality quite so soon.”

Largely because of his faith, however, he was able to decide that “I hate AIDS, but I love being gay,” he said. If gay ghettoes in Los Angeles increased his chances of contracting the disease, they also have allowed him to live a life he loves and are providing him with the support community he needs, said Pieters, who grew up in Andover, Mass.

A Gift of God

“I may never have contracted AIDS if I had never come out of the closet, but the closet would have suffocated me,” he wrote. “My spirit would have died.”

Like other members of his church, he believes that his sexuality is a gift of God. That theological position has helped him dismiss in his own mind the argument of some fundamentalist Christians that AIDS is God’s curse on homosexuals. “I don’t believe God is punishing me,” he said. “I believe God is with me, struggling against this disease.”

Pieters had night sweats and other classic symptoms of the disorder throughout 1983. Desperately ill, he went to a doctor who assured him that he did not have AIDS. Nonetheless, he was sometimes so terrified of discovering lesions that he wouldn’t take off his clothes for three days in a row. Then in April, 1984, he was told that the sores on his feet were signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer associated with AIDS.

In tears, he began calling his friends, only to get their answering machines. “By the second or third answering machine, I was leaving the message, ‘I’ve just been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and I’d really appreciate a call back.’ ”

On that dreadful first night, surrounded by a half-dozen friends, he collapsed in the arms of Nancy Radclyffe, the Metropolitan Community Church’s minister to its clergy in this area.

‘Felt Every Fear’

“I fell off the edge of the cliff,” he recalled. “I felt every fear I’d felt all year--the terror of facing an imminent death, all the things I would miss, being torn from my friends.” One of his worst terrors was that he would never have another lover.

“I’m so scared,” he told Radclyffe. She said he had good reason to be scared. “We came out of that and decided we had to order a pizza,” he recalled. “I took great delight in serving up great bowls of ice cream. We watched ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns. We laughed a lot and cried a lot. The next morning I woke up crying.”

Radclyffe spent the night with him, sleeping on the sofa, and the next day, he began turning the pages of his Bible, finding solace in such verses as those from I Corinthians, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Later that day, despair struck him in the supermarket as he picked through the oranges. Driving home, at the intersection of the Golden State and Pasadena freeways, he briefly considered not turning the steering wheel, in hopes of running off the road. “I haven’t felt suicidal since,” he said.

If religion and homosexuality seem an odd mix to some, they have always been intertwined for Pieters, whose grandfather was a Presbyterian missionary to Korea. Pieters became bored with organized religion in his teens. But while trying to break into theater in Chicago in 1976, he discovered the Metropolitan Community Church.

“Until I met the people at MCC, I didn’t think it was possible to be a happy homosexual and to live a happy, fulfilling life style,” he said.

That year Pieters came out as a homosexual and entered McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, where he earned his divinity degree. As the only openly homosexual seminarian at that Presbyterian institution, he hammered out his theology in an atmosphere that was sometimes, in his view, decidedly lacking in Christian love.

He also had his first sexual encounter, with an older student. “I understand he’s now an upstanding minister in Minnesota,” Pieters said. “He wouldn’t have anything to do with me on campus, but, oh, was he interested in me off campus!”

‘A Lot of Playing Around’

Pieters came to Los Angeles in 1982 after an unsatisfying stint as pastor of the gay church in Hartford. “My main goal those first few months in Los Angeles was to have a good time,” he said. “I did a lot of playing around of the kind I hadn’t been able to do while I was pastoring.”

He frequented the homosexual bathhouses and cruised the bars and discos. He now believes he had already been infected with the AIDS virus. “I think I probably got it from a man I slept with in New York City in 1981 who died last fall,” Pieters said. The man was also a minister.

Learning to forgive himself and others has been an important part of his AIDS experience, Pieters said. He mourned for the man he believes gave him AIDS by remembering how David mourned for his beloved Jonathan in the Old Testament, he said. Nor does he feel any useless guilt about the possibility that he unwittingly passed the virus on to someone else.

“I had a good time, and I know the other guys had a good time, too,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets about that period. I don’t think any of us who are gay have any regrets about the celebration of our sexuality that happened in the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s before all this happened. There was no way we could have known.”

For all his Christian optimism, Pieters hates having AIDS. It’s hard to keep tap-dancing when you’ve got what he describes as “the leprosy of the 20th Century.”

“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’ Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life,” he said, bitterness suddenly lining his youthful face.

Initial Reluctance

Initially, he said, even some church members were reluctant to reach out to him because of their fear of AIDS. During a long period of being housebound, he recalled, he phoned the Valley church and asked to be given Communion at home.

“I had to call three different deacons before I could find one who would bring it to me,” he said. The Good Samaritan, a lesbian deacon, also gave him the simple sacrament of companionship for a hour or so. “Sometimes, when you have AIDS, all you want is someone to hold your hand while you watch TV,” he said.

In the course of casual contact, Pieters pointed out, he is more likely to catch something from someone else than they are to contract AIDS. After all, his is the faulty immune system. Its consciousness raised, the Valley church has been increasingly aggressive about serving those affected by AIDS, including the lovers and families of patients.

As a person with AIDS, Pieters said some of the most bruising rejections are from would-be sexual partners. Pieters, who works out regularly and takes vitamins, looks healthy and is occasionally approached by other men, much to his pleasure. He tells prospective partners that he has AIDS and now “plays safe,” practicing such anti-AIDS precautions as using condoms.

“More often than not that turns them off and scares them away,” he said. Last summer, for example, he was thrilled when the best-looking man on the sun deck of his gym asked for his phone number. Pieters delivered his spiel, and the other man got up without a word and walked away.

The next time Pieters saw him was in the cashier’s line at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where many AIDS patients are treated. The man, who has since died, told Pieters how ashamed he was of his lack of grace under pressure. “He told me he had someone do to him what he did to me,” Pieters said.

Works at Being Healthy

His faith has given Pieters hope. He emphasizes that he is living now, not dying. He works at being healthy. He treats himself with the Three Stooges on his VCR. He indulges in an occasional cathartic cry over a movie death scene but eschews tragic movies such as “Dark Victory” or “I Want to Live.” He has gone to Disneyland several times since he became ill, to keep in touch with wonder and magic.

Getting the cable Disney Channel was one of the first things he did after he was told he had AIDS. His favorite Disney character is Peter Pan.

“I like to point out to people that in the stage version Tinker Bell is lying dying and Peter turns to the audience and says, ‘Clap, if you believe in fairies,’ and thousands of homophobic people in theaters all over the country have applauded at that point,” he said. “Well, now’s the time to really believe in fairies, because we’re dying.”

Pieters has been responding well to an experimental anti-AIDS drug called suramin, which inhibits a blood enzyme that the AIDS virus needs to reproduce. Nine men with AIDS have been receiving the drug at County-USC Medical Center through a program of the National Cancer Institute.

According to Dr. Jean Hawkins of the program, Pieter’s blood currently shows no sign of the AIDS virus. The absence of the virus is cause for no more than cautious optimism, she said, explaining that the immune systems of all nine men are still abnormal.

Pieters knows he will die eventually. “None of us has any guarantees,” he said. “All we have is today. We’re all terminal.” But he believes in a divine plan to keep him alive long enough to help the growing numbers who will eventually face what he has gone through.

Pieters regrets that he may die without a lover at his side, and he is sorry he never fathered a child. But he said he is confident of an afterlife “joined with the universal love that is God.”

“When it is time, I hope I meet my death with grace, not fear,” he said. “But, I’m not ready yet.”