How Did a Gay Church Embrace the Identity of "a Church with AIDS"?

"In the late '80s, two MCC San Francisco ministers wrote an article called "We Are the Church Alive, the Church with AIDS." We wanted to know how a gay/lesbian church came to call itself "a church with AIDS." The answers lie in the years before our audio archive begins. So we started asking people. We explore two stories in what's likely a more complicated shift."

"One story is about a pair of religion geeks who learned to make queer church in New York during the early years of the AIDS crisis and then came to San Francisco to lead MCCSF. And the other is how an Easter Sunday ritual made the Christian hope of life through death viscerally real. "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."

In the late 1980s a gay/lesbian church in San Francisco adopted the identity 'a church with AIDS.' The origins trace to developments before available audio archives and were reconstructed through interviews with community members. Two intertwined narratives explain the transformation. One narrative centers on leaders who learned to build queer church communities in New York during the early AIDS crisis and later led MCC San Francisco. The other centers on an Easter Sunday ritual that made the Christian hope of life through death viscerally tangible.

Read at Slate Magazine