Tammy Faye has died. That makes me sad. I hope she gets the biggest, loudest, gaudiest, queerest, happiest funeral ever.

I admire how she came to open up in later years and had such a hardcore queer following that she loved. It was so inevitable. Sad it took so long to happen.

As I grow older I'm coming to admire those women who die with their false eyelashes on, as it were: wigs big and fluffy, pushing the edges of the beauty ideal hard til the very end. There is a kind of perverse tenacity evident in this that I admire, as different as it is from the model I grew up with.

I dun't know how I'd feel if I had a grandparent who'd given $ to the PTL and never gotten it back, but I had come to like her and her open heart in recent years. Anybody who could be chummy with Ron Jeremy and not have to let go of/put on any fake campiness to do so must have some innate sweetness. And that "lay him down" moment on the show (see link) was bizarrely moving...enough to make me like her, right there.