When We All Get To Heaven - Incite at Columbia University

“When We All Get to Heaven” is a documentary project 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 500 of its members.

The forthcoming project is based on an archive of 1200 cassette tapes recorded by the congregation during the height of the AIDS epidemic. This event will feature a short talk by Gerber, Nedelman, and Colom, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

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About the Presenters

Lynne Gerber (she/her) is an independent scholar and a co-founder of Eureka Street Productions. Her research interests are in the places where religion, morality, and the body overlap. 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. Her recent work focuses on religious responses to the emergence of HIV/AIDS in 1980s and 90s San Francisco. She is currently collaborating on various written, digital, and audio projects related to the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF), one of the earliest gay Christian churches in the country. She is a co-producer and host of the documentary podcast When We All Get to Heaven, which tells the story of MCCSF and how it engaged HIV/AIDS. It is scheduled for release in June of 2025.

Ariana Nedelman (she/her) is the co-founder of Not Sorry Productions where she has co-created four podcasts: Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Hot and Bothered, The Real Question, and Let’s Ask Taylor Swift. She is also the co-creator and a producer of the upcoming independent audio project When We All Get to Heaven. She has her BA from the University of Chicago and a graduate certificate from The Salt Institute of Documentary Studies.

Siri Colom (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Worcester State University. Her research focuses on race, environment, and urban politics, with a particular focus on the ways communities come apart and together after disasters. She uses the lens of sociology to think about how structural oppression manifests and emerges in the everyday politics of people attempting to rebuild lives and homes. She co-authored a research project on the LGBTQ community for the Rhode Island Foundation. Currently, she is mid-production on an audio documentary on how an LGBTQ church in San Francisco survived the social and political disaster brought about by the AIDS epidemic during the 80s and 90s. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California Berkeley.