Prelude: Setting the table

Episode 1

Rev. Jim Mitulski raises the cup at a communion service at MCCSF. Date unknown. Courtesy of the MCC San Francisco Collection, San Francisco Public Library

In 1993, more than 10 years into the AIDS epidemic, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCC-SF) tries to remember all they’ve lost. We think about remembering too after encountering an archive of 1200 cassette recordings of this queer church’s services during the height of the epidemic. Whether you’re a regular church goer or would never step into one, we invite you to spend time with this LGBTQ+, San Francisco church as it struggles to reconcile sexuality and faith in the midst of an existential crisis. 

Notes:

  • The worship service in this episode was on February 28, 1993. 

  • The movie Jim went to three times in one week is the classic Madonna: Truth or Dare.

  • San Francisco’s mayor Frank Jordan announced the 10,000th death from AIDS in San Francisco in January of 1993 (New York Times report). The city’s gay newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter, disputed that number, saying it was higher.  

  • Indifference and fear permeated the early days of AIDS and the government’s public response. Some moments became symbols of that callousness. The sense of indifference was exemplified by President Ronald Regan’s refusal to speak the word AIDS publicly for years as it was ravaging American communities. The first time said AIDS was in 1985 in response to a reporter’s question (no speech, no agenda, no plan). This was a few months after the death of Reagan’s personal friend, Rock Hudson, from AIDS made non-gay people start to take the disease more seriously. His first public speech on AIDS wasn’t until 1987 remarks he gave at an amFAR meeting at the invitation of Elizabeth Taylor. (This history is summarized in this piece by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.)  A moment that became a symbol of the government’s contempt of people with HIV was Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes laughing about AIDS in response to a question from a journalist on October 15, 1982. It’s the subject of the short documentary When AIDS was Funny and a transcript of the exchange was reprinted in Vox and Mother Jones.  

  • The story of what was happening inside the government was more complex than its most public faces presented. Historian Jennifer Brier documents this in her book Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Epidemic (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). People in government agencies played important roles in changing that dynamic within government, between government agencies and PWAs (Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health is the most well-known example), and between the government and the general public (Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was the most visible example.) On Fauci and other collaborative relationships between scientists, government and people with AIDS/AIDS activists see Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1998). On C. Everett Koop see Antony Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford, 2015). 

  • The Dyke March proclamation was written and read by Rev. Lea Brown. Rev. Karen Foster read the statement that sexual orientation does not need to be changed. Jim Mitulski recalled his hospital visit with the man who recognized him by his shape. Paul Francis told strangers at a restaurant to get ugly lovers and Eric Rofes told his mother that he was going to stay safe and keep having sex. Cleve Jones had the vision of a thousand rotting corpses, Rev. Ron Russell Coons preached that we have AIDS as a community, and Rev. Troy Perry proclaimed a revival on Eureka Street. The other people heard in the episode are either unknown or did not want to be named.  

Music:

THANKS:

Special thank to:

  • Steve Ferrario – for preserving all those tapes and sharing them with us!

  • Ron Wismer – for telling us about his brother, Keith.

  • Paul Katz and Henry Mach – for the use of “June in San Francisco.”

  • The estate of Leonard Bernstein – for the use of “There’s a Place for Us.”

RESOURCES: