A Church with Aids

Episode 3

NOTES:

“We Are the Church Alive, the Church with AIDS,” by Kittredge Cherry and Jamies Mitulski was published in the Christian Century on January 27, 1988.

Emily Suzanne Johnson writes about Tammy Faye Bakker, and her interview with Steve Pieters in This is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right (Oxford, 2019).

To hear more about the epic journey to pass New York’s gay/lesbian civil rights bill, check out “A History of the Struggle to Pass NYC’s 1986 Gay Rights Bill.” The Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC, June 21, 2024. 

Mark D. Jordan recounts the story of the first communion at MCC in Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk About Homosexuality (Chicago, 2011).

On how LGBTQ+ clergy who went through AIDS — including Steve Pieters,  got through Covid see “For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis, Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different.” Lynne Gerber, Religion Dispatches, December 21, 2020.

There are many, many accounts of the 1987 National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. It was a watershed event. One academic account is Amin Ghaziani’s The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington (Chicago, 2008). It talks about it in the context of the four historian national LGBTQ+ marches in Washington. You can see video of the unveiling of the AIDS quilt at the 1987 March here. 

Music:

“We See You God” is a variation on the anonymously written hymn “We See the Lord.”

The soloist in “I Lift Mine Eyes Up” is Bob Crocker. It’s by Antonin Dvorak, Biblical Songs, Op. 99, no. 9 on Psalm 121. 

“Hush, Hush. Somebody’s Calling My Name” is a traditional African American spiritual. 

Resources:

The Interactive AIDS Quilt

Transcript:

Episode 03 “A Church with AIDS”

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.

Tammy Faye Bakker: Hello, everyone, and come on in. It's just so nice to have you here with us.

Lynne Gerber: In the fall of 1985, Christian television star Tammy Faye Bakker had an out gay man on her talk show, Tammy's House Party. The show was aired on the PTL network. PTL has at least two meanings – Praise The Lord, and People That Love.

Tammy Faye Bakker: We have an experience today that really is, is touching to me. Right here on my right, I have a young man named Steve Pieters, and I'd like to introduce you to Steve.

Lynne Gerber: Steve was an MCC minister in Los Angeles. He talked about the gay church and told Tammy's audience how it helped him come out -- how MCC had saved him. But that's not why he was invited on.

Tammy Faye Bakker: Steve is a patient of AIDS, and he's so generously allowed us to talk to him today.

Lynne Gerber: Movie star Rock Hudson had died of AIDS the month before. And a lot of people outside the communities immediately affected by the disease were paying a new kind of attention. Even unlikely people. Tammy starts the conversation by asking Steve all kinds of things about being gay. Things that sound a little clueless today but were reflective of the moment -- and just how little straight people knew about homosexuality or the lives of gay people.

Tammy Faye Bakker: And, uh, did you, did you not just feel really good around girls? Did did girls make you nervous? Steve did. They did. Uh, did you feel put down by women or,

Steve Pieters: Oh, no. Quite the contrary. Tammy, I love women. I always. I've always had a lot of girlfriends. Uh, and I, you know, I've never had any problem making friends with girls. It's, that's just not where, where I felt God was leading me in terms of my romantic life.

Lynne Gerber: But the thing that really moved Tammy, the thing that clearly captured her imagination and caused her palpable sorrow, was the isolation and loneliness that people with AIDS faced. She told Steve about a TV show she had just watched about a man with AIDS.

Tammy Faye Bakker: And, and when asked what was the saddest thing in his life about the fact that he had AIDS, You know, his own parents were afraid to touch him, his own sister was afraid to touch him. (crying) And he said, to think that I might never again have a hug. You know, and how sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, And we who are supposed to be able to love everyone are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.

Lynne Gerber: It's almost hard to tell what pained her more -- the thought of a sick person facing their illness without any loving touch or the thought that so many Christians were unwilling to share a hug with people so isolated and afraid.

That same fall, when Tammy Faye Bakker interviewed Steve Pieters, Kitt Cherry and Audrey Lockwood attended MCC San Francisco for the first time. They had just returned to the United States after several years living abroad. And they were curious about a gay church.

Kitt Cherry: And one thing I remember was the rainbow flags

Audrey Lockwood: All over the place

Kitt Cherry: were along the sides of the Sanctuary. And we'd never seen them before.

Audrey Lockwood: We didn’t know what they were.

Lynne Gerber: Really?

Audrey Lockwood: We'd never seen them before.

Kitt Cherry: Yeah, cause I remember trying to make conversation. I'm like, oh, these are pretty decorations.

Audrey Lockwood: What pretty flags.

Kitt Cherry: And they were like, oh, those are the flags of Gay Pride

Audrey Lockwood: And we're going, whoa.

Kitt Cherry: What?

Audrey Lockwood: What?

Kitt Cherry: We have a flag?

Lynne Gerber: They found themselves in a church where touch was freely shared – a world apart from the one Tammy Faye feared.

Kitt Cherry: Okay, I remember this. There was the part where we did the community prayer and we all join hands and you're invited to say out loud your joys and concerns and. So I'm holding Audrey in one hand and some stranger who's a gay man in the other. And then he prays out saying something about how he has AIDS and needs healing. I hadn't met anybody who'd said they had AIDS and here I was already holding his hand.

Lynne Gerber: On the first day!

Kitt Cherry: On the first day! Yeah.

Lynne Gerber: This is When We All Get to Heaven. Episode Three: A Church with AIDS. I’m Lynne Gerber.

Lynne Gerber: MCC San Francisco was the kind of place where you could easily find yourself hugging a person with AIDS. And whether or not you knew that's what you were doing, by the time you got to the hugging part you might not even care. That Sunday when Kitt Cherry found herself unknowingly holding hands with a man with AIDS, Nancy Wilson was the guest preacher.

Nancy Wilson: Also to say, um, wanted to say especially how proud we are of you. MCC San Francisco. Uh, for a lot of reasons. I'm just delighted at your sanctuary. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and I didn't plan to be color coordinated. But, but it looks like I am. I hope you can see me.

Lynne Gerber: Nancy, like Steve Pieters, was an MCC minister in Los Angeles. She was in San Francisco to encourage a congregation in the midst of a big change.

Nancy Wilson: really, really thankful, uh, for, and especially for your witness in this city. you alone, uh, know, uh, how hard this church has worked. Has worked to be such an effective witness for us, especially during the AIDS crisis. Um, you face that ministry in a daily basis in ways that, uh, almost no other churches except our churches, probably in New York are facing that at this time. And we know that God has the right pastor in mind for you.

Lynne Gerber: In the mid-80s it was clear that AIDS wasn't going away any time soon. Like many gay organizations, MCC churches had to figure out if and how AIDS was going to be part of their identity moving forward. And many were looking for new leadership to guide them through that question.

Nancy Wilson: Clearly in MCC, we live in a pivotal time. I believe that with the crisis that we're facing in our community. We live in very, very pivotal times, times of great transition and change. your church is only one of dozens of churches in MCC right now that are searching for pastors. And when a church searches for a pastor, it also searches for its identity, doesn't it? What kind of church really are we? What do we want to be? What's our future? What's our sense of where we're going? Who we want to continue to be. So it's a time for us to decide if we are dabblers or if we're going to be serious.

Lynne Gerber: We know what MCC San Francisco decided. They were gonna be serious. They didn't want to just be a church that served people with AIDS. They didn't even want to just be a church with a lot of people with AIDS in it. By the late 80s MCC started calling itself “a church with AIDS.” The name reflected an orientation they took toward AIDS -- one that asked everyone in the church to identify with it -- whether or not they had it or were at particular risk of getting it. It meant stepping toward AIDS, the fear of it and the stigma of it, in faith that God would meet them there.

We don't know exactly how they started using that name or all they had to go through to get there. The archival record in the mid-80s is pretty thin. There aren’t meeting minutes or a new mission statement or a set of focus groups transcripts that take us through that process. But we do know two things that can help us imagine how the shift from a gay church to a church with AIDS happened. We know there was new leadership in the church. And there’s this one story that we heard over and over. A moment embedded in people's memories that's come to symbolize this shift for a lot of folks who went through it. We're going to explore those two puzzle pieces -- fragments, really -- that tell us something about a transition that was foundational for all that MCC would do over the next decade. Together they'll give us a picture of what it meant to MCC San Francisco to become a church with AIDS.

Lynne Gerber: Our first puzzle piece is the change in leadership MCC went through in 1986. The one Nancy was talking about.

Hiring a new pastor is a really big deal. Especially for a church that's already kinda marginal cause it's kinda gay. And for one that's starting to accept that it's facing a storm but still isn't sure how big it's going to be or how long it's going to last. You have to find a very particular person.

MCC San Francisco found two very particular people. Jim Mitulski, who became the pastor, and his partner, Bob Crocker, who became the music director. Jim and Bob were religion geeks of the highest order. To say that Jim is a church person is a bit of an understatement. Thanks in large part to his grandmother.

Jim Mitulski: who was also a religious fanatic, but a benign one. And she was quite eccentric and belonged to six churches. at the same time. And she was kind of wealthy and she drove a big black Lincoln and she went to them all daily. Uh, she's Catholic and they have daily services. And so I would frequently go with her making her rounds from the time I was little until I was older. So I did have this kind of unnatural appetite for church.

Lynne Gerber: Bob grew up attending a Lutheran church and went to a Catholic high school. In that high school, he wrote a thesis on Martin Luther's Concept of Sin. And one on Lutheran/Catholic dialogue on the eucharist. And another on the Eucharist as sacrifice. That's the kind of church person Bob is. Jim and Bob met in New York in the mid-70s.

Bob Crocker: September of 1976. when I was at Columbia, they had a piano in the lounge at John Jay, one of the, one of the, dormitories. and you had to stop at the cage there where the RA was to get the key.

Lynne Gerber: Each went to college at Columbia in search of God and love and literature and sex and politics and art. And, in a moment of deep mutual recognition, they found each other.

Bob Crocker: So I walked down there to get the key and they said, he said, well, if someone's in there, go get the key from them. And, so I'm walking toward the student lounge, and I'm hearing, I think it was, Langham, Father Eternal, Ruler of Creation, I'm hearing a hymn. and, it's Jim Mitulski, with his Organist's Edition of the 1940 Episcopal hymnal. And what's under my arm, but my, like my confirmation class service book and hymnal, so the opening, the opening line of our relationship, this is no shit. First words ever said, ‘nice hymnal.’ And then of course it sounded like, I mean, we were like, Oh, you little freak, you know, but then we're like, no, I have to talk to him! If you let me see yours, I'll let you see mine!

Lynne Gerber: Oh my god,

Lynne Gerber: Jim and Bob were both looking for ways to be gay and religious. This was not easy. And it could be pretty painful. As Jim learned during the years-long struggle to pass a gay rights bill in New York City. Every year, for more than a decade, gay activists proposed a bill to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. Every year there were hearings where a regular cast of New Yorkers spoke in favor and against. And every year he was in New York, Jim went to those hearings.

Jim Mitulski: and I just, one year I sat through it and I watched like every smart New Yorker get up and testify in favor of the gay rights movement. And every stupid New Yorker who speaks is religious and every smart person who speaks is secular. and of course you, at that age, you want, everything's so important, you know, we really thought we were changing the world, and I think it was the 78, this one, I just fell apart in hearing chamber. And I started crying and I couldn't stop. I just thought I can't be religious anymore. I freaking can't stand it. in the ways that you only can do when you're 20. but it was true. something snapped in me because I wanted to be. I identified with the religious people. But I just couldn't bear it.

Lynne Gerber: That's where he met MCC.

Jim Mitulski: I started crying. And, this group of people surrounded me. until I calmed down a little bit. And they were all from MCC. Who knew? So, and they got it. Except they were religious. Like angels from nowhere appeared. And I remember until this day, I could see their faces, I could see them. And I thought, okay, how many times do I need to see this before I get that you can be gay and Christian? But you gotta, you gotta quit the church and go be the church, outside the church, which MCC was that.

Lynne Gerber: So Jim and Bob started to go to MCC New York. And they started to train for ministry there. They were there in the early 80s, when MCC New York started to get phone calls asking for clergy to visit people with this new, scary disease. And just a technical note – we interviewed Jim a lot over the years in many different audio circumstances, so the quality of his tape varies.

Jim Mitulski: I remember being called to St. Vincent Hospital to see a person. They called us because we were two blocks away, they wanted someone to come see someone who was dying. So I go over there, you know, I'm 23 years old, I think at that point, 24. but nothing really prepares you for this. So you go there and the person's terribly disfigured already, and you had to wear these spacesuits, literally to protect them, or you or both.

Lynne Gerber: the person’s terribly disfigured already and you had to wear these spacesuits, literally to protect them or you or both.

And they don't even know what's causing it, but they know you're gay. Everyone knows you're gay. Everyone's in your business. You're there because you're gay. The huge shame factor. Just at being identified as gay in an institutional setting. And this is when gay men used to lie about who they were. you wouldn't go to a regular doctor and tell them you're gay. Nobody knows that in a setting like that. Where you have no control over your identity or your information. So, they didn't know what it was, but they know who had it. And it was horrible. It was really, it was just horrible. Okay? Uh, painful, messy, ugly, horrible. And fatal. Everybody knew it. No kidding. It just didn't have any other ending.

Lynne Gerber: And at MCC New York they started to figure out how to develop an AIDS ministry.

Jim Mitulski: Our model, from the very beginning, was this is us, we are in this together. Some of us may have AIDS, some of us may not. Some of us are gay, some are not. Men and women together. It was not this benevolent model of like caring for the poor dying person, this poor pathetic person. And I know that sounds a little sarcastic, but there was that kind of, patronizing model, or feel. And that was never our approach. This is us taking care of each other, standing in solidarity with each other. And that was dignity preserving at a time when you couldn't do much else for people. That was a different approach..

Lynne Gerber: MCC New York was a great place to learn. But it already had a pastor. Jim and Bob were young, ambitious, and restless. And MCC San Francisco was looking. Coni Staff, who you heard in episode two, was on MCC San Francisco’s Hiring Team. She met Jim at MCC's national denominational conference.

Coni Staff: one of our principal goals at general conference was to look at potential candidates as we saw leadership at the conference. And have some meetings with some potential people, people who had expressed interest already, and people who may not have yet. Jim was one of those people. I said I think we should interview him. I think we should talk to him. He's really young.

Lynne Gerber: He was 27.

Coni Staff: Yet he is so strong in social justice and liberation theology. He's a very smart man, and it appears he has really good leadership skills.

Lynne Gerber: They brought him to San Francisco to preach. And the congregation loved him.

Jim Mitulski: Who knows what they thought? I think they hired me because I had AIDS experience. I think it's that simple. And I was young, and I had a partner. and AIDS didn't frighten me. But what they got was this, weirdly over, hyper, smart, but not very well socialized, geek.

Lynne Gerber: They loved Bob too. First as a clergy spouse. And then, a few months later, as the music director. Together, congregation, pastor and music director formed an orientation toward AIDS that would see them through.

Lynne Gerber: When Jim and Bob first got to MCC San Francisco, it saw itself mostly as a gay church. But in their first years there, it became a church with AIDS. And they had to learn what that meant by doing it. Our archive of recordings, which starts in 1987, tells us what being a church with AIDS came to mean as they lived with AIDS over time. But this change in perspective, this shift of identity, began before we have recordings. When all we have are peoples’ memories. And there’s one memory which is vivid in the minds of a lot of the folks who went through those earlier years. Because it was symbolic of a moment when the church changed. When they recognized that AIDS was foundational to who they were becoming. And that there was no going back.

Kitt Cherry: There were certain people who were, like, seemed to be, obviously, people with AIDS in the congregation, who would pray about it out loud a lot.

Lynne Gerber: Yeah, yeah.

Kitt Cherry: Bill Knox Bill Knox is the first one I remember dying of AIDS.

Audrey Lockwood: Yeah, he was the first one who died that we knew.

Kitt Cherry: That we knew.

Lynne Gerber: Bill Knox was a name we heard a lot in our interviews. So I asked Kitt and Audrey what he looked like.

Kitt Cherry: Oh, you've never seen a picture? It seemed, he was thin. Well

Audrey Lockwood: Very thin and sick.

Kitt Cherry: Of course they were all. It seemed like he had light brown hair and maybe a mustache.

Audrey Lockwood: He had a mustache and he had the oxygen tank. He'd often have a breathing thing.

Kitt Cherry: But he didn't have an oxygen tank when he was sitting next to me that first day.

Audrey Lockwood: No. No.

Lynne Gerber: Was he the person who was sitting next to you that first day?

Kitt Cherry: Yeah, he was Bill Knox.

Audrey Lockwood: Yeah.

Lynne Gerber: We talked to a lot of people about Bill. The details they remembered are evocative. One person's partner went to college with Bill before either were out. Another remembered that Bill was active in AA and helped a lot of guys get sober. And another said he was genuine and kind in a way that really stood out. And when he got sick, a lot of folks were there to help him. Like his friend, Dennis Edelman.

Dennis Edelman: And then of course you had people you were close to personally. and Bill Knox was one of those, in those earliest of years. and you would go visit them all the time. And you'd be in essence at their beck and call. I mean, if they needed something, you would do it.

Lynne Gerber: But Bill was also remembered as a symbol of the shift the church was making. Before Jim and Bob got there, the church had grappled with the question of how AIDS might impact the church's core ritual -- communion – that time in the service where people share bread and wine to remember Jesus. MCC churches were founded on a practice of open communion, meaning anyone who wanted to could receive it. That was certainly not true in all Christian churches. As queer Christians they knew too well the pain of being denied access to communion. It was a mistake that MCC was not going to repeat.

Coni Staff: Communion was a very intimate experience at MCC San Francisco. We touched each other. We prayed. Our faces were close together. We looked into each other's eyes. Sometimes we shed tears with one another and then the next person would walk up. So, When you don't know how, how this health calamity is being spread that didn't even have a name and the doctors didn't know how to treat, and in fact, doctors weren't sure they wanted to treat. In fact, ambulance drivers were refusing to take people to the hospital. Then your proximity to someone who seemed to be sick became a concern. Going up for communion after that person had gone up became a concern and we had to talk through those basic issues of what does it mean to be a community of faith when some of us may be getting sick and we don't know medically if we're safe. And yet, we're living out our faith in this room together.

Lynne Gerber: Coni and I had this conversation before Covid. And given all that happened – and is still happening – with Covid, I want to point out a few things here. However anxious people were about AIDS, and they were, it was never widely thought that AIDS was airborne. It was too limited an outbreak for that to be the case. Given how concentrated it was among gay men in those early years, most doctors and public health officials thought it was transmitted by something more specific to them -- sex or drugs probably. Neither of which were going to happen in communion. And one other point -- Coni's not talking about going against public health warnings based on clear science. She's talking about a moment when the science wasn't fully established yet. And she's talking about taking the risk that what scientists were speculating -- that AIDS couldn't be spread by proximity -- or by sharing a cup -- was likely to be true.

Coni Staff: And we're living out this ritual. And how are we going to do this ritual and maintain its sanctity in the way that we know it is sacred? Are we going to change it? Because we're afraid. Are we going to move a couple feet away because we're afraid? And fundamentally, we came together through our leadership and said, no, we are not. And so we held communion the same way we always held communion. And everyone was welcome. Now that didn't happen overnight. That didn't happen in a month. That didn't happen in a couple months. We had to work our way through it.

Lynne Gerber: In a moment when other churches were worrying about communion and contagion, leaning into the MCC's commitments about open communion was a really important step. On Jim's first Easter there, in 1987, he and Bill Knox took it a step further. Open communion meant that anyone who wanted to could receive communion. But not just anyone was asked to consecrate the bread and the cup-- to say the blessing over it, to hand it out, to offer prayers to the people receiving it. Usually that was limited to a minister or a deacon. And Bill Knox was a deacon.

Jim Mitulski: This was early on in AIDS, too. Early ish. I thought, I'm still learning this group. What if – and Bill who was deeply loved – what if we asked Bill to preside at the Eucharist on Easter? So we did. And he did. And here's a visibly dying man, deeply loved by the congregation early on in AIDS. on Easter, the day of resurrection, somehow. it's a reversal.

Lynne Gerber: So it's like a Ritualized expression of something that needs to be

Jim Mitulski: Really needs to be

Lynne Gerber: represented or something or shifted or something.

Jim Mitulski: a transformation it's so extreme almost. but it's it's such a powerful intervention in a sense in a situation That needs to be shook up

Lynne Gerber: so it was the intervention of, about recognizing AIDS or making it central or making it, what was the,

Jim Mitulski: it was a wake up moment that, okay, this is our Easter day. We are not going to be killed by this. Yeah. We will not be defeated by this. It's a faith statement. On the day of resurrection, we are going to assert that we are stronger than death. Hmm. By having our person who is most visibly vulnerable to physical death, make our strongest faith statement about our belief that love is stronger than death,

Lynne Gerber: I try to picture that moment sometimes. A spring morning with the church as full as it gets. Easter bonnets everywhere -- MCC had this amazing annual Easter bonnet contest. Waiting for the central ritual of the central day in the church's calendar -- the day that celebrates resurrection after crucifixion -- life from death.

Jim Mitulski: He was frail. I mean, even visually though. So, seeing him behind the altar. Well, we weren't used to seeing our friends that frail yet. It was still a little shocking. Yeah. Never got easy, but Yeah. But we sure weren't used to seeing them standing behind the altar. I can still see it. I've seen a lot since then. Yeah. Yeah. I can still see it. But it wasn't appalling. It was healing. It was a powerful moment.

Lynne Gerber: This church wasn't one to take life from death too literally. No one was getting miraculously cured. There was no easy triumph here. But when the time came, people got up, walked to the front, and received the bread of life from the hands of a man with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions – clear visual evidence of AIDS. Maybe those frail hands touched your head. Maybe his frail voice whispered prayer in your ear. A man so close to death ritually enacting life. Handing it to you.

Lynne Gerber: It was a powerful reversal -- to come closer to AIDS when every impulse says to run, to receive from a person perceived as not having much to give. It was a moment that symbolized a possibility that the church wanted to live into. One that they could hold onto through this storm. Because they were truly getting that the storm wasn't ending any time soon. This is Dennis again.

Dennis Edelman: But in terms of Bill and that those early years, and my idea that the central message of Christianity is there's life through death, which Bill, to me, exemplified so well. It was soon thereafter that the whole community of dying men said to themselves, It was almost like a collective, uh, a collective, uh, epiphany. We're dying and we're going to live these years positively. We're going to act up. We're going to speak out. We're going to change things. We're going to defeat Ronald Reagan. And we're, and so this community of, that was dying, went about life with an extreme vigor to change things. So there's life through death if you have a humanity about you.

Lynne Gerber: AIDS didn't start at MCC San Francisco on Easter 1987 with Bill Knox giving communion. Some of the city’s very first public information sessions on AIDS were held there years before. In 1982 composer Patrick Cowley died of AIDS and disco diva Sylvester sang at his funeral – which was at MCC. Coni started caring for her church friend Fred in 1983. AIDS was at the church from its beginning.

Lynne Gerber: But when we talked to people who were active in MCC in those years, many of their memories of AIDS start right around when Jim and Bob arrive. Because that's when AIDS became more firmly part of the life of the church. When they stretched Christianity's ritual vocabulary to encompass AIDS. Doing that -- recognizing that they were a church with AIDS, resisting the fear of that designation, and symbolically engaging it -- gave them a way through. A way through with the possibility of love, dignity, and integrity.

Lynne Gerber: In the fall of 1987, Jim and other church members went on a pilgrimage of sorts. To Washington DC. With a few hundred thousand other people.

Jim Mitulski: What we saw in Washington two weeks ago, three weeks ago, was over 500,000 lesbians and gay men and people who are straight, who stand with us in our situation, coming together to what I would describe as embodying God's passion for justice for lesbian and gay people.

Lynne Gerber: The Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was one part a pilgrimage of queer devotion.

Jim Mitulski: We're in Washington, right? We're there to lobby our congressional representatives, our senators. Bill Lowell says, We've got to go see the ruby slippers at the National At the National, uh, what is it, the Museum of American Culture. So, it was just like, it was like going to visit a relic. I mean, there were streams of lesbian and gay people going to see these ruby slippers. They were there.

Lynne Gerber: It was one part pilgrimage of queer protest.

Jim Mitulski: the rally was on one side of a street. All the way up to the Capitol building. And it was wonderful. There were thousands of people just pouring in one after another, delegation after delegation.

Lynne Gerber: And it was one part pilgrimage of queer sorrows. It was the largest public display to date of the AIDS quilt, a project commemorating people lost to AIDS in quilt panels designed and created by people who loved them. The quilt was displayed on the ground on the National Mall. It had 1,920 panels.

Jim Mitulski: And across the street, the Names Quilt was laid out and, we had about 15 panels from our church there. It's the most impressive thing. I guess there were 2000 banners there, maybe more all laid out and it was laid out with walkways. So you could actually walk into the quilt and walk among it. There were. Monitors holding, Kleenex boxes, and you really needed it.

Lynne Gerber: A lot had changed at MCC since Jim and Bob first came.

Jim Mitulski: You know, it made me think of, of some things. One is, our church has changed a lot in the last year. and we've talked about how some members have left, their spiritual journeys have left because they weren't comfortable with the direction we were going in. And we miss them. And others have come because of, the direction we're going. And our church has grown. But we've lost some people in a way that can never be replaced, I think. When we saw banners for Wayne Mielke and Bill Knox and Steve Clover and Kurt Stutzman and all those banners that hung in our church,

Lynne Gerber: And they had to let go of a lot in order to move forward.

Jim Mitulski: We were walking away from the quilt and, I was in my usual hyper mode. I was talking a mile a minute because I was really pissed off and I was angry and I was sad. And none of us were in touch with our feelings, I think. And Carlene, of course, said, wait, let's just stop. And we stopped and we held each other in a little circle. And I cried and others cried. And Michael Hagler said, I'm sure gonna miss those guys. I'm sure gonna miss those guys. What else can you say, you know?

Lynne Gerber: By the end of the 1987 March on Washington the movement for lesbian and gay rights had come to a new place about AIDS. MCC had too. The quilt was a startling display of how much they'd lost. And the protest was another startling display -- of how much power queer people and people with AIDS actually had. New AIDS groups with new tactics, groups like ACT UP, were showing that it was time to put that power to use.

Jim Mitulski: AIDS is our issue. AIDS has affected the life of our church over the last three years, four years, more than we ever could have known, I think. And I think it will be the issue that is our issue for the future, too. The thing about AIDS is this, I guess. It's not a tragedy that's going to destroy us. I don't believe that. Too much has happened. You know, the AIDS quilt was a testimony to that.

Jim Mitulski: Those people were with us and are depending on us to make a difference in what happens. And I believe that we can. I believe that we can

Lynne Gerber: AIDS couldn't be just about death and loss and grief. It had to be about taking that death and loss and grief and using it. For something.

Lynne Gerber:  Next time on When We All Get to Heaven – MCC makes new friends

Linda Rochelle: When Jim called me and asked me to come here, you know, I couldn't say no. You know, I was floating on air. You know, I ran and told everybody. I'm going back to MCC.

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.