religion + AIDS
podcasts
The Revealer, “San Francisco’s ‘AIDS Church’ and the 40th Anniversary of HIV/AIDS” (27 May 2021)
Classical Ideas, “We Who Must Die Demand a Miracle and MCC San Francisco” (14 March 2021)
Here Be Monsters, “Envisioning AIDS” (13 March 2019)
Sexing History, “A Church with AIDS” (January 2018)
essays
“AIDS and the Blessings of Staying: The Ministry of Rev. Jim Mitulski.” The Revealer (3 June 2021)
“For Clergy Who Ministered through the AIDS Crisis, COVID Is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different,”
Religion Dispatches (21 December 2020)
“AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion: An Interview with Anthony Petro,” Notches (27 October 2015)
the pink & purple church in the Castro
It started as a place where queer people could be out and proud about their sexuality and their faith.
When AIDS hit, it became a place where they could sing and pray, heal and mourn, resist and celebrate.
This exhibit uses archival sound to tell the story of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF) and how it got through the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It’s drawn from a collection of audio recordings made by MCCSF starting in 1987 — a collection of more than 1200 cassettes stored under the floor in the church’s sound room, unknown to the rest of the congregation.
video
Rev. Jim Mitulski, Mark D. Jordan, and Lynne Gerber explore the profound challenges AIDS has made to Christian theologies, both liberal and conservative, and the constructive possibilities of an AIDS Theology of Liberation
(Harvard University | 2 March 2017).
book chapter
“‘We Who Must Die Demand a Miracle’: Christmas 1989 at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco,” in Devotions and Desires, ed. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White (UNC 2018)
forthcoming
“Love is Stronger than Death: Making Meaning of AIDS in the Sermons of Rev. Jim Mitulski”
