Queer Power Hour | When We All Get To Heaven
Date and Time
- Thursday, Jan 22, 2026 7pm - 8:30pm
Location
KALW
220 Montgomery St
Details
Join KALW's Queer Power Hour for a live spotlight on When We All Get to Heaven, a 10-episode series that tells the story of one of the first gay-positive churches, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, and how it faced the personal, social, and political trials of the AIDS epidemic, including the deaths of hundreds of its members.
Series co-creator Lynne Gerber will be joined by Rev. Jim Mitulski who has pastored LGBTQ and HIV affected churches since 1983. Together, they'll share archival audio, photos, and personal stories about this challenging and important moment in Bay Area life.
Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar in San Francisco. Her research and writing is focused on religion, morality, and the body in the United States. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2012). Her work has also appeared in American Quarterly, Nova Religio, Gender & Society, Salon, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. She has held research positions and taught at Harvard Divinity School and the University of California at Berkeley. Lynne’s article on MCCSF minister Rev. Jim Mitulski in The Revealer won the 2022 Association of LGBTQ Journalists Award in Profile Writing. She’s been a friend of MCCSF since she first attended a Sunday evening service in December of 2001.
Rev. Jim Mitulski has pastored LGBTQ and HIV affected churches since 1983. His first church was the Metropolitan Community Churchin Greenwich Village in NYC, where he had been a student minister prior, a ground zero for AIDS in the United States. This church was located one block from St. Vincent's Hospital, one of the first hospitals to treat patients with what was first called Gay Related Infectious DIsease or GRID. He worked next at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco 1986-2001, in the heart of the Castro. The podcast covers that period , and tells the story of that church in the most HIV/AIDS affected neighborhood on the West Coast at that time. Jim went on to work at churches in Berkeley CA, Dallas, Denver, Boston, Duluth and is currently the pastor of the Congregational Church of the Peninsula in Belmont CA. His work on HIV is both personal and political. He is a long term HIV /AIDS survivor of over 30 years, and has been active in many social justice cause , especially immigration, racial justice, and LGBTQ rights. He lives in Oakland CA.