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Kevin Fong at the Gay/Lesbian Freedom Day Parade, 1999. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Kevin Fong.
When we’ve talked with people who were members of MCCSF during these years, they often remember communion. For Steve Marlowe, the sight of same sex couples receiving communion together was utterly transformative:
Kevin Fong remembered the intensity of the spiritual energy he experienced as a celebrant – the person sharing the ritual elements of bread and cup with congregants and praying over them. He also remembers how celebrants served communion to his friend Scott when he was too sick to receive it standing up:
They also talk about the importance of remembering this community, these extraordinary years, and those who were lost and are always on the edge of being forgotten. Bob Lawrence went to seminary and became a clergy person because of his experience at MCCSF and the kind of love and faith it was able to contain in that time:
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We offer this exhibit as a different way to commune with a time and a place that’s past. We’re fortunate that this community believed strongly enough in its own historical significance that it recorded its materials and preserved its history. It’s what makes sharing this history possible. As researchers we know how rare these kinds of sources are and how easily these kinds of voices can be lost. We also believe that sharing archival sound is a particularly potent way to remember – that hearing historic voices and sounds can evoke whole worlds.
“We Are the Church Alive” was written by MCCSF music minister Jack Hoggatt-St. John and David Pelletier in 1980. It became increasingly meaningful to the congregation as the AIDS epidemic progressed. MCCSF Archive, June 25, 1989.
Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom, and Ariana Nedelman are collaborating on an audio documentary on MCCSF called When We All Get to Heaven.
Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar whose work is focused on religion, the body, and morality in the United States. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2011). Her research has appeared in The Revealer, American Quarterly, Gender & Society, Nova Religio, Religion Dispatches, and Salon. Lynne has an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union.
Ariana Nedelman is the Executive Producer at a small feminist production company that treats secular texts as if they were sacred. She is a former associate producer at Pemberley Digital, where she helped produce an Emmy Award winning adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. She has her B.A. in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago.
Siri Colom is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Worcester State University. She uses the lens of sociology to think about how structural oppression manifests, emerges, and is contested in everyday politics. She focuses on communities that are facing or have faced social, political, economic, or environmental disasters. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.