Rough Transcript

Season 1: Episode 7

A Church With AIDS

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Newscaster, Reverend Jim Mitulski, Lynne Gerber, Jerry Falwell, Coni Staff, Dennis Edelmen, Reporter, Larry Speakes, Marc Minardi

Newscaster: It’s mysterious, it’s deadly, and it’s baffling medical science: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Once thought to only affect promiscuous homosexual males, AIDS is now spreading in epidemic proportions to other segments of the population.

Reverend Mitulski: There’s so much that AIDS means that we need to let go of. That’s true whether you’re the person with HIV or a person without HIV. The story is turning out differently from the way we thought it might turn out, and it’s so hard to let that go. It’s hard to let people go, people that we love. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of life. Someone said to me recently, and he’s a member of our church with AIDS, he said that next month he’s celebrating a third anniversary of his diagnosis with AIDS and he wanted to have a party. And he wondered whether or not that would be in bad taste. I said to him, don’t be silly, we are homosexuals, we determine taste. For him, he said “this has been the best three years of my life”. It was a truth, a hard truth for me who loves him, to accept, even. To let go of and to accept, but it was the truth, if you know him you know it’s the truth, I’ve known him for a long time. And he wanted to celebrate these three years. I know that this is a time for us to celebrate our commitment to be with each other through this.

Gillian Frank: That was the Reverend Jim Mitulski. During the 1980s and 1990s, Reverend Mitulski pastored the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco.

Reverend Troy Perry had founded the Metropolitan Community Church, or MCC, in 1968 in Los Angeles. The MCC was a congregation in which gay people from a variety of Christian denominations could worship together. And it quickly grew and established churches across the country.

San Francisco’s MCC was located in the Castro district, a six square block neighborhood that formed the heart of that city’s vibrant gay culture and politics. The San Francisco MCC was housed in a small church building on a residential street, which its members boldly painted pink and purple. It quickly became a welcoming space for gay Castro residents seeking a religious home .

Lauren Gutterman: In the early 1980s, young and previously healthy gay men in San Francisco suddenly grew gravely ill. Baffled medical professionals took note of gay men showing up in their offices and in emergency rooms with swollen lymph nodes, fevers, and atypical infections.

Medical officials soon identified sexual contact and blood transfusion as the primary vectors of transmission of the deadly virus that caused this collection of symptoms. They named this frightening new disease the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS.

In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Reverend Jim Mitulski was hired as the San Francisco MCC’s pastor. Mitulski had been raised Catholic in the Detroit area and he had spent time at MCC New York, where he learned about AIDS ministry and AIDS activism. When he joined MCC San Francisco he was only 27 years old.

Lynne Gerber: When we start talking about AIDS in San Francisco, we have to remember there are very specific things that made AIDS a different experience in San Francisco than it was in other places.

I am Lynne Gerber, I am a scholar of American religion and I am working on a very long project on the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco.

The first thing is just the sheer numbers. So San Francisco didn’t have the highest number of AIDS cases in the country but it had the highest density of cases. Which meant that when you got into a neighborhood like the Castro, a lot, a lot, a lot of people were getting sick. That it was hitting social networks that were already very dense, it was hitting them very deeply. It meant that not only were you worried that you might get AIDS, that your friends might get AIDS, that your lovers might get AIDS, but as the years went on it meant that your mailman got AIDS and suddenly wasn’t delivering the mail anymore. It meant that AIDS could impact the guy who cut your hair, the guy who drive your bus. What was the epicenter of gay life, of gay parties, of gay sex, of gay bars, of gay stores, of gay restaurants, became the epicenter of a gay sickness, gay weakness, and gay vulnerability.

Gillian Frank: As the AIDS epidemic devastated gay communities across the country, Reverend Mitulski’s ministry reckoned with unsettling questions: What does it mean to be a gay church with so many in the congregation dying from AIDS and so many others grieving for the recently dead? And what does it mean to participate in communion in a community ravaged by a plague?

I’m Gillian Frank.

Lauren Gutterman: And I’m Lauren Gutterman. Welcome to Sexing History. In this episode we collaborate with our friends from the When We All Get To Heaven podcast, Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom and Ariana Nedelman. Together we are going to share a story about the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco and how it sustained a faith community during the AIDS epidemic.

When we tell the story of religion and AIDS in the 1980s, we often focus on conservative leaders like Jerry Falwell describing the epidemic as the “wrath of God.”

Jerry Falwell: I believe that god does not judge people, god judges sin and I do believe that herpes, primarily caused by heterosexual promiscuity, and AIDS generally caused and believed to be caused by homosexual promiscuity is a violation, both of them, of gods laws, laws of nature and of decency and as a result, god who loves people and hates sin and deals whether it’s a drug addict or an alcoholic or someone whose living promiscuously as far as his or her moral life is concerned, we pay the price when we violate the laws of god.

Lauren Gutterman: Leaders of the religious right —empowered by the election of Ronald Reagan—declared that AIDS was divine retribution from God. In 1983 The American Family Association sent a fundraising letter that read: “Dear Family member, Since AIDS is transmitted primarily by perverse homosexuals, your name on my national petition to quarantine all homosexual establishments is crucial to your family’s health and security…. These disease-carrying deviants wander the street unconcerned, possibly making you their next victim. What else can you expect from sex-crazed degenerates but selfishness?”

Gillian Frank: At a moment when the religious right was at the forefront of public life, many men and women believed they had to choose between being religious and being gay.

The MCC’s story reminds us of a different religious experience; one in which gay Christians embraced each other while advocating a fierce and loving communal faith.

Lynne Gerber Explains:

Lynne Gerber: For people who came of age during the gay rights movement of the 60s and 70s, and the early 80s, the idea of coming out was central. The idea of coming out was about telling truths that had previously been hidden and finding the courage to live in to those truths. For folks who came out during that era and who were also religious, they found another area in their life where they were being silent where they were being hidden and that was often their religious identity. Because in gay rights contexts, religion and sexuality were seen as fundamentally at odds, and this was in large part because many Christian religious communities were making it not just hard, but actually painful to try and reconcile sexuality and religion. Religious groups didn’t just say that homosexuality and Christianity were incompatible, but that homosexuality was actually fundamentally damaging to religious life.

Here’s Reverend Jim Mitulski:

Reverend Mitulski: No one should ever believe that god punishing them, it was bad enough hearing stupid Baptist preachers saying it or Catholic priests or Catholic bishops, but what was far more painful was to see the person who had internalized this, and didn’t need a Baptist preacher or a Catholic priest to tell them this, but who would think it themselves. And I felt that as people in churches like MCC, we were best equipped to help people release themselves from toxic Christianity. The particular struggle at that time was to justify our presence in the churches, so if you were, for me as gay Catholic originally, a lot of our energy was aimed at “how can we be gay and Christian or gay and Catholic”. We weren’t trying to change the denominations’ stance on homosexuality, we were doing something else. We were really trying to address what does Christianity look like if your starting point is sexuality is good and homosexuality is acceptable. We just set up our own separate church and then from there attending to our own spiritual needs, worked on changing society.

Lauren Gutterman: In the 1980s, when most mainline Protestant churches had only begun to rethink their positions on same-sex sexuality and many conservative churches continued to view homosexuality as sin or sickness, the MCC in San Francisco offered something radically different: complete acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and transgender people into a ministry increasingly devoted to the care of people dying from AIDS.

Lynne Gerber: MCC San Francisco made a space for people to be both gay and Christian and didn’t have to repent for either one. They were one of the first churches to do Holy Unions, which were an early form of gay weddings and they did them from the very moment the church started.

Another thing the church did was that they built this radically ecumenical worship life. In the 1970s when these congregations were developing, almost all Christian denominations thought that homosexuality was sinful. So when people came to the doors of MCC, they had their sexuality in common, but they had really big cultural and theological differences when it came to their faith, how they would worship, what sacraments they would take, what hymns they would sing, what clothing their priests would wear, and they had to come together week after week to figure out a way to worship together, to build Christian life together, to build Christian community together.

Here’s Reverend Mitulski Preaching in 1991:

Reverend Mitulski: Can these bones live? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves when we think about what kind of future do we want for ourselves. We can look at Christianity and say “can these bones live?” It hasn’t worked very well, really, all things being equal, not only for gay and lesbian people but for straight people as well. It has more often than not historically served to separate people from god or disempower them in their relationships with each other than it has to liberate and to empower. Can these bones live? Our congregation is trying, we’re trying to see if it can live, it’s an experiment if you will, and I’m going experimenting belief.

Gillian Frank: One of the hallmarks of MCC’s service was the offering of communion. Here’s Lynne Gerber.

Lynne Gerber: Communion is the ritual meal that involves sharing bread and sharing wine in remembrance of Jesus’s last night before his crucifixion. For centuries Christians have been fighting over the question of who is allowed to partake in this ritual meal: who gets the bread, who gets the cup, and who by extension can consider themselves legitimate, real and valued members of the Christian community.

Troy Perry had to do something about communion, and he made a choice that sounds really simple, but it was actually really radical. He decided he was going to make it open and available to anybody who wanted it. Regardless of whether or not they believed in Jesus, regardless of whether or not they thought they were a sinner. If you came to an MCC church and you wanted it, you could get communion. These were people who knew what it was like to not be allowed to take communion because of their sexuality and because of their presumed sin. Their church was going to be marked by the truth that all people were welcome at gods table.

Coni Staff: Now what communion at MCC evolved into was this very intimate affair, where people could go with their partners with their lovers and with their friends. So it was in some ways an early way of the Church affirming gay relationships and gay kinships that wasn’t quite gay marriage but it was a way to sanctify those connections. Because people would visibly get up in the congregation, they would go with their lovers or they would go with their friends and they would stand in front of a Clergy person offering them communion, putting their hands on them, feeding them bread and wine, and giving them a blessing. So everyone could see who was connected to who, peoples relationships were treated with that kind of dignity and with that kind of sacredness and that kind of respect. That was part of what made communion so profoundly powerful to people who had never been able to – even if they had been able to sustain themselves in a Church where they had been closeted or even open – to be able to bring your relationships into it and have them be open and affirmed was just a whole new level of acceptance.

Dennis Edelmen: When we got out here, we knew San Francisco MCC existed and our impression of it, not having been there was: oh my god, it’s kind of a sex orgy-service or something. I, when I first went that Sunday had no idea, it would’ve been fine if it were a sex orgy, but I arrived, and it was not. In front of the church there was a parking spot right in front of the church and there were three or four Harley Davidson motorcycles outside, and I opened the window and said, “is it okay to park here?” and they said to me “Well with New Jersey license plates you can park anywhere you want”. So, I pulled into the parking spot right in front of the church and went in and there was this fundamentalist evangelical room with vomit green shag carpet and decrepit décor, it was just unbelievably awful. It had a baptismal for dunking up front, but I was immediately at home and I actually cried.

Lynne Gerber: That was Dennis Edelman. He and his partner Mike Minardy first started going to MCC San Francisco in 1983. Connie Staff and her partner Dianne Calium started going to the church in 1980.

Coni Staff: We, we walked in, we looked around and we saw men. We saw a lot of men. So Diane and I almost walked out because while it was very welcoming, it was a sea of men. That’s how I’ve always described it, it was a sea of men.

Lynne Gerber: It’s difficult to get an accurate assessment of the demographics of the congregation, they didn’t keep great records and a lot of them haven’t been preserved, but I think it’s safe to say that the congregation was overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. It was however, pretty diverse in terms of economics. It ranged from people who had high level jobs in finance in banks and corporations in the city and it went all the way down to people who were living on the edge and people who were homeless.

Lauren Gutterman: The MCC’s pastoral response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic became all the more important because of the federal government’s neglect and conservative politician’s demonization of people with AIDS.

The government’s casual cruelty and neglect was on display in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, responded to a reporter’s questions about AIDS.

Reporter: Is the president concerned about this subject Larry that seems to have evoked concern *laughter in room* but I mean is he going to do anything Larry.

Larry Speakes: Last I have not heard him express anything I’m sorry.

Reporter: He has expressed no opinion about this epidemic?

Larry Speakes: No but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. *Laughter in room* 

Reporter: Would you ask him Larry?

Larry Speakes: Have you been checked?

Reporter: I beg your pardon; I didn’t hear the answer.

Larry Speakes: Ha ha, ohhh, it’s hard work. I don’t get paid enough. Uh, is there anything else we need to do here.

Lauren Gutterman: It took over five years, until 1987, for President Ronald Reagan to deliver a major speech on AIDS.  By that time, close to 60,000 AIDS cases had been reported and nearly 28,000 people had died from the disease.

Gillian Frank: As the Federal government abandoned people with AIDS, San Francisco’s municipal government actively responded to the epidemic. Under Mayor Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco readily funded AIDS treatment. The city pioneered what came to be known as the San Francisco model of AIDS care. This model focused on limiting the hospital stays of people with AIDS by providing at home support. The goal was to address the medical needs of people with AIDS while keeping them socially connected.

San Francisco’s MCC joined with other groups to address the health care needs of people with AIDS. They also addressed the spiritual needs that arise for people when they are sick, dying or grieving. Marc and Dennis, early MCC members, remember those years:

Dennis Edelmen: Very quickly, after our arrival, it began to just explode with, because the AIDS epidemic exploded. And with it the expressions of horror and getting out there and doing something about it exploded. And of course, that’s when MCC, it became a new expression of spirituality, organizing around AIDS. In fact, everything we did, eventually, organized around AIDS.

Marc Minardi: Yes, it was because, well the other experience that we suddenly had that as it exploded, suddenly people we knew were getting AIDS.

Dennis Edelmen: And dying.

Marc Minardi: And dying. And suddenly, you would walk in the Castro and somebody you knew and you hadn’t seen for –

Dennis Edelmen: Two weeks

Marc Minardi: - a couple of months was physically –

Dennis Edelmen: Emaciated

Marc Minardi: Near, emaciated and it was a, it was a very intense experience. Particularly I would say ‘85, ‘86, ‘87. Really rough years.

Lynne Gerber: Between 1981 and 1992 the number of AIDS cases in San Francisco went from one hundred and twenty seven to fourteen thousand eight hundred and seventy five. That meant there were hundreds and thousands of people who were in hospitals, some of whom wanted visitors, some of whom wanted spiritual counsel, some who just didn’t want to be alone. There were also people at home and who needed help with really basic stuff that AIDS made virtually impossible: getting food, doing laundry, going to the bathroom. And people who were socially isolated who just needed people to talk to.

There were people who were scared to die because dying is really scary. They needed spiritual support. And those who died needed funerals. So leaders and member of MCC San Francisco stepped up

Coni Staff: And people were coming to MCC San Francisco, not just the congregation was beginning to, some members were sick and dying and needed services, but there were people from the community that were also coming to MCC San Francisco who might, might have come to a service in the past, or might never have, but were wanting memorial services. Because where else were they going to go? And so, this was a huge impact on the congregation, even in the early years. And we still didn’t have a lot of answers, but we knew we needed to respond with our faith. And so, and so memorial services were being booked in higher and higher frequencies.

Lynne Gerber: At almost every service, Reverend Mitulski had to make announcements about who was sick, about who was in the hospital, about where to send flowers, about who had died and who was in mourning. Death and dying suffused this church and the church had to make meaning from it.

Reverend Mitulski: How do we live with so much change and loss. Be with us in our feelings of sadness or numbness, or sorrow or grieving or anger, or when we don’t know what the feeling is. We looked up George to you and we give thanks that his presence in our community brought life and love to so many of us. Grateful that his passing was quick and painless as he wanted, and unexpected as he wanted, with Richard and all of those who love him. Be with us in our heavy-heartedness and hold us tenderly continue to sustain us with love that is stronger than death and love that never ends. In your many names we pray, amen.

I’m going to ask that you turn to hymn number 341 because this was Georges favorite hymn, and I know that we could love if we could bring ourselves to sing it for him, and it’s very spirited. Let’s stand and sing this.

Lynne Gerber: One of the major spiritual needs that people with AIDS had that MCC was particularly keen on addressing was spiritual fear in the face of death. So, these were a lot of gay men who were dying of a horrible disease, and the larger Christian discourse was saying, at least some of the very louder voices in the larger Christian discourse were saying, that this was a well deserved illness. That homosexuals were sinners and that AIDS was gods judgement and that those homosexuals were going to die and go straight to hell. Well, what you got then was a lot of homosexuals who were very very sick and suffering profoundly and terrified of dying because they were terrified they were going to go to hell. So it wasn’t just a question of relieving their physical suffering which was certainly a thing, MCC San Francisco did a lot of work pastoring to peoples spiritual concerns about the eventual outcomes of their souls after their deaths from this.

So that was one area in particular that MCC pastors could particularly speak to because they were not equivocal about whether or not gay people were going to go to hell, they were really clear that gay people were not going to hell, that god loved them and they were not about to lose their earthly lives and be entered into even greater suffering than what they were experiencing at the ends of their lives, and that was a real thing.

The other kind of support that MCC could offer was that it could offer a certain kind of meeting ground for some parents and family members and not all. But some parents and family members who wanted to offer care and support to their children with AIDS but didn’t really know how and were from communities around the country where they couldn’t talk in their home churches about the fact that their sons had AIDS and were dying in San Francisco and couldn’t draw on their home churches to get support from their clergy. But MCC San Francisco provided a church home, where people like that, mothers and fathers and cousins and siblings would find both a welcoming place and a place that was familiar enough to religious folks that it provided a meeting ground in the Castro in San Francisco. Like the gayest of the gay meccas which would be a very big cultural divide.

Lauren Gutterman: As members of the MCC cared for the bodies and well-being of their congregation and community, the church reckoned with difficult questions about their practice of open communion. At a moment when congregants feared contagion, the MCC had to decide whether they would transform their ritual, which brought people into intimate physical and spiritual contact with each other. They literally had to ask: How do we pray together during a plague? And what form should our prayers take?

Lynne Gerber: Here’s Reverend Jim Mitulski speaking about communion.

Reverend Mitulski: In our church in San Francisco, I would have other people from the church preside at communion. My first Easter there, one of the men who had AIDS presided at the communion ceremony. Cause it’s about resurrection, Easter is. And to have him preside at the communion table, visibly with AIDS – so visibly meant in those days Kaposi’s Sarcoma. And a lot of times, you know, even in the gay community, people didn’t want to see people with AIDS visible. It was upsetting. But he was right there at the table, blessing the bread and the cup and giving his testimony about though his body was dying, his spirit was strong. Well, you know, that was a way of dealing with AIDS and engaging it head on. Rather than deny it, we broke it open.

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 this health calamity is being spread that didn’t even have a name, and that doctors didn’t know how to treat, and in fact doctors weren’t sure they wanted to treat, and 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. 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.

Lynne Gerber: This is Reverend Mitulski serving communion in 1987. (28:52)

Reverend Mitulski: We gather weekly at this table as a sign of our faith, as a sign of hope, and we are nourished through this bread and cup as with mana from heaven we are nourished with this bread and cup just as god nourishes us through our connections with god and with each other. We remember the night that Jesus was gathered with friends and he took bread and blessed it and he broke it and shared it with his friends and said “This is my body.” And he took a cup and shared it with them and said “This is the cup of my life, pour it out for you, whenever you eat and drink, remember me.”

Lynne Gerber: MCC San Francisco, particularly in the early years may not have known the way through AIDS, but one thing they knew, which they knew from their faith, that the only way to get through it was to get through it together. Whether you were gay or straight, male or female, HIV positive or HIV negative.

Reverend Mitulski: Positive or negative has a certain medical reality. It does not have to have a spiritual reality in a way that separates us, one from the other. It does not have to have a political reality that says ‘there are two kinds of people in the world and they can never be together. It does have a medical reality, that’s important. And it’s not a bad reality, neither one or the other has more value in my opinion. But the hopeful thing to me is that the question for us ‘do we want to be positive or negative’ or ‘are we positive or negative’ isn’t about antibody status. It’s about do we want to be hopeful or give up hope? Do we want to be committed or do we want to feel resigned? Can we bring ourselves to not give up on each other and not give up on God until such time as we experience the healing that I believe is God’s will for us. I think it’s important for this church and for this community to remind ourselves time and time again: God does not send illness. God does not punish us through illness. These are not judgements on us. But rather, God’s role in this is hoping with us, praying with us, experiencing with us the pain and also the joys when they happen, that, that having the reality of positive and negative in our community means right now. I pray for you that you can find in your heart a place where, whether you’re positive or negative in terms of antibody status, you can say ‘that will never separate me from the people around me.’ If you’re positive and perhaps want to spare people who are negative from possible pain or suffering, I’ve had that articulated to me a number of times, I can tell you as a person who loves a person with AIDS that I would never ever give up a minute of the relationship that we have had. Not one minute. And if you’re a person who’s negative, if you can find in your heart some place where you say ‘no matter what it means, politically, in our community, or even what toll it may take on me emotionally, I will not allow myself to be separated from those of a different antibody status.’ If you can find that place in your heart tonight, and if all of us together can commit to say ‘and we will not give God rest until we know healing. Amen.

Gillian Frank: In the 1980s and 1990s, multiple generations of gay men died prematurely.

Lynne Gerber: The level of grieving is something I can’t even really wrap my head around because so many people were so sick and so many people died. You’re talking about a congregation that hosted 3, 4, 5, 6 memorial services per week, and these were not just memorial services that the clergy are performing. So, you have clergy who are performing that many funerals a week every week for years, but a lot of them, these were tight social networks, a lot of congregants were going to 2, 3, 4, 5, funerals a week every week for years.

The kind of accumulation of grief in this community is something that’s really difficult to convey because the magnitude of it is kind of inconceivable. I mean I think in a church of you know, whatever, I think when Jim first got there the Church was about 150 people, when he left the church was 500 people. But in a congregation of 150 people, if you know five people die in a year it’s kind of a big deal and in this congregation, I mean, they wished for years when only five people would die, that was something they couldn’t dream of in 1989.

So I think when thinking about grief one thing to keep in mind is this accumulation of grief, that there’s always this excess of grief that the church tries to hold, and the grief is always exceeding what the church can hold. And the grief, for many of those people, still exceeds what they can hold now many years after the protease inhibitors have come out and really changed the course of AIDS in communities like this. That excess is still excessive even to this day.

Gillian Frank: The trauma of AIDS continues to be felt across decades. The sustained, staggering and cumulative loss, on the gay community, on the MCC and on countless friends, loved ones and families didn’t end in the 1980s. It never really ended.

In 1980 two members of the MCC wrote a hymn that spoke to their experience in a gay church, where they could bring together their sexual orientation, and their Christian faith.

The song gained new meanings during the AIDS epidemic.

MCC Hymn: We are the church alive Christ Christens on this earth, we give god’s spirit body in the act of our new birth.

Dennis Edelmen: It was soon thereafter that the whole community of dying men said to themselves, it was almost like a collective 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 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.

Gillian Frank: In the 1980s and 1990s, as religious conservatives declared AIDS to be a death sentence and the wrath of God, many congregants in the MCC described their church with one sentence that summed up the church’s identity in this period: We are the church alive, the church with AIDS.

MCC Hymn:

We are the Church Alive, the body must be healed;

Where strife has bruised and battered us, God’s wholeness is revealed.

Our mission is an urgent one; in strength and health let’s stand,

So that our witness to God’s light will shine across the land.

We are the Church Alive, all praise to God on high.

Creator, Savior, Comforter! We laud and magnify

Your name, Almighty God of love; pray, give us life that we

May be your Church, the Church Alive, for all eternity.

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Gillian Frank and me.

Our intern is Jayne Swift.

We created this episode in collaboration with Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom and Ariana Nedelman from the We All Get to Heaven podcast. Please visit them at heavenpodcast.org

Special thanks to Reverend Jim Mituslki, Coni Staff, Dennis Edelmen, Marc Minardi, and Patrick Horay for sharing their stories with us. Thank you to the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco for sharing their archive with us. And special acknowledgment goes out to the Women’s Studies and Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for helping to make this episode possible.

One of the voices you heard singing in this episode is Jack Hoggatt-St. John, who died a few weeks ago on January 9, 2018. He wrote the song, “A Church Alive.”

Gillian Frank: Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Allen Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation. Created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet and gay activist Phil Zwickler, the Foundation "seeks to promote human rights, education, health and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community, and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard." Visit them at pzfoundation.org

Sexing History is also supported by a 2018 Media Production Grant from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. The Humanities Media Project: Their goal is to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society.

Lauren Gutterman: If you’re enjoying our show and want to help us grow, please review us on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you. And if you like an episode, please share it on Facebook and twitter.

I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank: I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History.

[End of Audio]

Transcription by Ian McCabe, University of Delaware