Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope

The late Pieters (1952–2023; I’m Still Dancing) meticulously recounts his tumultuous life as a gay pastor and AIDS activist during the height of the 1980s crisis and beyond. Pieters grew up performing in musicals and felt most at home onstage, where his “exhilaration... countered the shame I felt about being a homosexual.” After college he looked for acting work until he was seized by a sudden calling to minister to the LGBTQ community. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1982, he was diagnosed with what was then called GRID (Gay-related Immune Deficiency) and later with lymphoma. Told he wouldn’t survive for more than a year, Pieters was given the drug Suramin as part of a 90-person experimental trial. (All of the test subjects, except for Pieters and one other, eventually died of AIDS.) Among other subjects, he poignantly describes how he dealt with the ravages of his illness while ministering to other sufferers; threw himself into AIDS activism; and was interviewed by televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in a landmark 1985 conversation that “changed the dynamic between conservative Christians and the LGBTQ community.” Though rendered in workaday prose, Pieters’ extraordinary achievements enrich the narrative without overshadowing his reflections on his survivor’s guilt and self-destructive tendencies. It’s a worthy rendering of an uncommon life. (May)