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 “Somewhere.”

RESOURCES:


Transcript

NOTE: This audio documentary podcast was produced and designed to be heard. If you are able, do listen to the audio, which includes emotions and sounds not on the page. Transcripts may contain errors. Check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Jim Mitulski: Have you had the experience of not even being able to remember the names of people who were once dear to you?

Jim Mitulski: This week, I was driving in my truck, and I popped in a Madonna tape. And when I did, I had a remembrance of a person who was very dear to me, with whom I saw Truth or Dare three times in one week. But I could hardly remember him anymore, because there have been so many people that we've lost, that I've lost. I really, for a moment, almost couldn't remember his name. And he really was very dear to me. And I wanted to cry out, I remember you.

Lynne Gerber: It’s 1993. The guy speaking is Jim Mitulski. He's a minister. And at 35 he’s already officiated at more funerals than many pastors will ever do in their whole lives.

Jim Mitulski: And there are people here, uh, that I want to cry out to the universe. They lived. They were here. We knew them. We loved them. We remember them tonight at this table.

Lynne Gerber: The table sits at the front of a church sanctuary, which looks a little bit like the inside of a barn with a high ceiling, a small balcony, and rafters painted white. The building itself is wedged between two houses on a residential street in a busy San Francisco neighborhood.

Jim Mitulski: And I invite you at this moment to lift up the names of people that perhaps you can barely remember or people who you remember so well it hurts to say their names almost. Say their names so that they become part of this communion.

Lynne Gerber: It's a Sunday night and the people there are mostly men. A lot of them are young. And a lot of them are sick. Some may be walking with canes or IV poles. Some may be lying in the laps of their friends, too weak to sit up. If you listen closely you can hear their coughing. Some walked just a few blocks to be at this healing service. Others drove for miles.

Jim Mitulski: This is a table of remembrance and a table of promise as well, that one day we will be with all the people that we've ever loved together at a heavenly banquet where no one can ever separate us ever again.

Lynne Gerber: The people here didn’t always necessarily spend a lot of time in churches. Neither did the people they were remembering. They usually weren’t welcomed. They were told that their suffering was their own fault – and that, by God’s logic, it was deserved. They were gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And a month earlier, in January of 1993, San Francisco reached the grim marker of 10,000 dead.

Jim Mitulski: Our healing comes tonight in our remembering and in our claiming that promise of love that is stronger than death and of love that never ends.

Lynne Gerber: The people Jim's talking to are living – or trying to live – through the overlapping crises that were AIDS in the 1980s and early 90s. The medical crisis of a novel, brutal, fatal disease with no treatment and no cure. The social crisis hitting mostly marginalized people – queer folks, drug users, people of color -- with everyone else terrified of being next. The political crisis of a government that seemed indifferent to AIDS, contemptuous of people with it, and doing close to nothing to support sick people or the search for treatment. Especially in that first, terrible decade.

Lynne Gerber: So what do you do if you’re one of those people facing AIDS? You’re up against an existential threat. You need to make meaning of suffering, death and what comes after, if anything comes after. And you need the support of community. The kind of community that knows how to do stuff -- like bring over meals and organize rides to doctors appointments and tell stories and sing songs that make crises make a little more sense. A community like a church.

But many, many churches won’t welcome you or the people you love most. They don’t recognize you in life. And won’t remember you in death. And what do you do if you’re Jim or one of the other pastors, facing this congregation with these tools of Christian faith, knowing full well how that faith can betray queer people. Because as out gay and lesbian ministers, it’s betrayed you too.

Lynne Gerber: Maybe you make another kind of church. One where the question of homosexuality is settled as a blessing, not a curse. Where the queer lost are remembered, and queer kin are recognized. Where queer lives can be grieved and fought for and remembered and maybe even saved.

Lynne Gerber: The recording of folks calling out the names of their dead is from a communion service at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, or MCC. It's a queer, christian church and it offered communion two or three times every Sunday through the hardest years of the AIDS crisis. When people were too sick to come to church, the church brought the ritual to their homes and their hospital rooms. And starting in 1987, they also brought cassette tapes.

Lynne Gerber: The reason we have any story to tell at all is those tapes.

Lynne Gerber: In 1987 a guy named Keith was a regular at MCC. He worked in audio and wanted to help folks who were sick and missing out on the spiritual center of the week. This is the tech olden days -- if you missed an event, you couldn't watch it on the internet five minutes later. Cassette recordings would help people stay part of things. People who were too sick to come to church could get news from the announcements, sing along with the hymns, learn a little something from the sermons. They could stay part of the church's community. So Keith designed a soundroom, got professional equipment, pulled together some volunteers, recorded services, and made copies on humble, portable cassette tapes.

They made these recordings for years. Then times changed and technology changed and these recordings were put away and forgotten.

Lynne Gerber: Almost twenty-five years later a guy named Steve, another long time MCC congregant, asked me if I knew about all these tapes he had found. I’m a scholar of American religion and a longtime friend of the church. And I had recently gotten interested in their history. Now I’m not Christian and I’m not a lesbian, and I told MCC that when I first started hanging out there. And they told me, you know, we have this saying – if you’re here, you’re queer.

Lynne Gerber: So there I was in the church office when Steve told me he had picked all these tapes out of a trash pile and stored them under the floor of the soundroom. I wasn't sure that I really wanted to know what Steve found while poking through the church's garbage. I imagined a box or two of random, wobbly recordings of Christmas services or choir concerts. Maybe a sermon or two. But it turns out, my imagination was seriously limited. And his trash-picking -- a revelation. He showed me a collection of 1,200 cassettes, recordings of two services every Sunday for most of the years between 1987 and 2003. I knew what those years were about in San Francisco, and that these tapes had to be a remarkable record of a terrible time. But I didn't know specifics.

Lynne Gerber: Then I started listening. And my imagination was utterly taken by the stories these tapes were telling. Stories of people. Of relationships. Of crises, of fear and fury, and faith. I didn't know people laughed that much in church. I didn't know all the different ways they channeled their grief. I didn't know any of the songs! The combination of utter queerness and utter Christian-ness messed with my head.

I listened and I listened. And I've been listening ever since.

SOUND MONTAGE

Unknown (singing): Dear God, there were times I hated my life…

Lea Brown: From up here I can see every kind of dyke I’ve ever heard of and a few new ones. I can see high femmes and stone butches and baby dykes.

Unknown (singing): If June in San Francisco is as good as it gets, I can live with that.

Karen Foster: We at the Metropolitan Community Church refute the claim that any person’s sexual orientation needs to be changed.

Jim Mitulski: I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry when I think of Randy Nasser who was losing his vision. When I came to see him in the hospital and I walked in the room and I said it’s Jim Mitulski and he said I know. I recognize the shape.

Don Lamb and Robert Glen (singing): I want a wedding in a big church with bridesmaids and flowergirls./We’ll have an old-fashioned wedding

Paul Francis: I do remember one time at dinner when there was a very handsome male couple, sitting at the table next to me. And one of us decided that they were much too attractive to be together. And we went over and told them that they had to break up and go get ugly lovers.

Eric Rofes: And I told her what safe sex is, and I told her how I aim to survive, and I told her that I didn't come out of the closet not to have sex.

Sharna Sutherin: Now one of his t-shirts I think it says, I have – is it four or eight – t-cells left and I’ve named them. And the last one, his last t-cell is named God.

Congregation (singing): We are standing on holy ground

Cleve Jones: I remember standing with my friend at the corner of Castro and Market and I remember saying to Joseph you know I wish we could level all these pretty Victorians and if this was a meadow and there were a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, then people would look at it and they would understand what’s happening to us here.

Dave [unknown last name]: I sat down in front of doctors and I said what are we going to do now? And they looked at me and said well, we’re going to try this. I said what do you mean we’re going to try? You mean you don’t know? And he said no, we don’t.

Congregation (singing): There’s a place for us

Sharna Sutherin: We may not be able to cure AIDS right now. But every time a person with AIDS lives one more day, connects with one more person, eats one more meal, sings one more praise, they are participating in healing.

Ron Russell Coons: Each one is of infinite worth, whether that person is diseased or not. We have AIDS as a community and God loves us.

Troy Perry: And to the enemies who are attacking us, we say to you, we’re not closing up shop. We’re just starting a revival here at Eucharica [sic] Street at Metropolitan Community Church. And we’re going to go on. God bless you this morning. Amen.

Congregation (singing): Somehow. Some day. Somewhere.

Lynne Gerber: I first got interested in this church’s history because of what MCC called "the AIDS years" and how the disease had devastated the congregation and the community. I remembered the 80s and how talk of AIDS was saturated with moral and religious condemnation. I could not have imagined a way for Christianity to be redeemed from that -- or that queer people would even bother trying.

Lynne Gerber: But I started to listen to these tapes. And I was totally riveted.

Ron Davis: When we all get to heaven, 174. Let's start with the chorus.

Lynne Gerber: Because the congregation's refusal to deny their queerness or their religiousness, and the religious things they made out of that very refusal -- moved me in this way that I couldn't let go of.

Lynne Gerber: Take this as an example.

Singing: When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be. When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout with victory. Sing the wondrous love of Jesus Sing God's mercy thy grace. In the mansion, bright and blessed, you’ll prepare for us a place. When we all get together, what a day of rejoicing that will be.

Lynne Gerber: On first listen, to a religious outsider like me, this sounds like a kind of Christianity that could give me real pause. The kind of Christianity that sets itself up in opposition to ‘urban coastal dwellers’, such as myself, and to queer people everywhere.

Singing: When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory.

Lynne Gerber: On a different kind of first listen, a religious insider might hear things I couldn't. Like how they changed the words. If you grew up in church singing this song and were humming along, you might have gotten through the “Sing the wondrous love of Jesus” part just fine, but you might have stopped short at “sing God’s mercy and thy grace.” Because odds are good the words you sang as a kid were “sing His mercy and His grace.” But MCC is a queer church and a feminist church – and, in some ways, an orthodox one. By orthodox I mean that they believed certain theological basics of Christian faith that stretch way back into antiquity. And according to those basics, God is beyond all human categories, gender included. MCC knew their theology and they were serious enough about their own blend of queerness, feminism and orthodoxy to rewrite all of their beloved hymns to reflect what they truly believed.

Lynne Gerber: First listeners across the board may well hear the kind of queer sensibility in the singing that made me unable to turn away. A sensibility that becomes more visceral on the second or third listen, when you realize that this is being sung by a gay church at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And the words start sinking in. “When We All Get to Heaven” – heaven is real, we queer folks are gonna get there, and some of us with AIDS are gonna get there really soon. Some of us are there already. “We’ll sing and shout the victory” – there’s something for us to celebrate here. We think we won something– the biggest thing, actually– and we're gonna shout about it.

Lynne Gerber: And just, the sheer audacity of the “we,” “we all.” This song is about us. All of us. The promise of this place is for all of us. And we’re gonna make church as if that might actually be true. We’re gonna go on faith.

Singing: Oh, what a day of rejoicing that will be. When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory.

Ron Davis: Wow, glory. Whew, if you can't feel that, you're dead.

Lynne Gerber: Back in the MCC sanctuary that Sunday evening in 1993 communion is about to start.

Jim Mitulski: Our healing comes tonight in our remembering and in our claiming that promise of love that is stronger than death and of love that never ends.

Lynne Gerber: Jim picks up a loaf of bread and a chalice and raises them before the congregation.

Jim Mitulski: We remember Jesus taking bread and breaking it and sharing it with his friends and saying, this is my body. We remember him taking a cup and sharing it with them and saying, this is my life.

Lynne Gerber: Sharing the bread and the cup is the core of communion – a ritual remembrance of Jesus’s last night before his crucifixion. For many Christians it’s the sacred center of their ritual life. The Bible says Jesus asked his friends to eat bread and drink wine to remember him after he was gone. And they did.

Jim Mitulski: We remember the woman who broke open an alabaster jar, and about whom Jesus said, Remember her, she has done a beautiful thing.

Lynne Gerber: The woman with the alabaster jar, she was an outcast, sexually suspect, shamed for this extravagant offering she made to Jesus. But she wasn't shamed by Jesus himself. He's the one who saw the beauty in her gift and said it would be remembered. Few Christians remember her, especially at communion. But that night MCC did.

Jim Mitulski: And tonight, we remember all the people we love. Let us pray. God, we give you thanks for this bread and this cup, these symbols of remembrance and of promise to us. Nourish us in this meal, with food that satisfies.

Lynne Gerber: When We All Get to Heaven is a podcast for all of us – religious or not, queer or not, HIV positive or not, alive in the early AIDS years or not. The people that made these recordings encompass those differences, those of us making this podcast do too. And we know our listeners will too. Whether you’ve spent half your life in a church or would never enter a real live one, we invite you to spend some time with this one. Because this is a community that knew how to face loss and make hope in hard times. And that’s something all of us are going to need to learn how to do if we’re going to get through the existential crises in front of us.

Jim Mitulski: In your many names we pray. Amen.

Lynne Gerber: Before they share communion at MCC San Francisco -- before folks are invited to eat a piece of bread and take a sip of juice -- they let folks know that the table is open to everyone. That you don’t have to believe in Christianity, in God, or in anything at all to be welcome to the table.

Jim Mitulski: Everyone is welcome to come forward tonight to share in this communion. Communion with God, however it is that you understand God. Communion with people past and present and to come. Come forward and receive the bread and cup. Come forward and have someone pray with you for healing of any sort, if you like. This is a time to receive, a time to be open to God's grace. If you wish to receive healing, come here. If you wish to receive communion, go there. If you want to just be in your seat and pray for healing for others, let us create a tabernacle of healing tonight with our prayers and our thoughts.

Lynne Gerber: We're setting a different kind of table of remembrance with this project. A table set in sounds and stories. In moments captured on tape decades ago, and in conversation we've had with folks about those moments in just the last few years. Different listeners will hear different things in it and will take different things from it. But here, too, all are welcome.

CREDITS

When We all Get To Heaven is a project of Eureka Street Productions and is distributed by Slate. It was co-created and produced by me, Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom and Ariana Nedelman.

If you love the show, we’d love your help. The best way for new listeners to find us is through word of mouth. Please spread the word and tell folks about us. The next best way is through listener reviews. Please review us on whatever app brought you here. Thanks so much!

Our story editor is Sayre Quevedo. Our sound designer is David Herman. Our first managing producer was Sarah Ventre. Our current managing producer is Krissy Clark. Tim Dillinger-Curenton is our Consulting Producer. Betsy Towner Levine is our fact checker. And our outreach coordinator is Ariana Martinez.

The music comes largely from MCC San Francisco’s archive and is performed by its members, ministers, and friends. Additional music is by Tasty Morsels.

We had additional story editing support from Arwen Nicks, Allison Behringer, and Krissy Clark.

A lot of other people helped make this project possible, you can find their names on our website. You can also find pictures and links for each episode there at – heavenpodcast.org.

Our project is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B Carpenter Foundation and some amazing individual donors. It was also made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can visit them at www.calhum.org.

Eureka Street Productions has 501c3 status through our fiscal sponsor FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds

And many thanks to MCC San Francisco, its members, and its clergy past and present – for all of their work and for always supporting ours.