Podcast Review: When We All Get To Heaven from Eureka Street Productions

Transcript:

As a women’s basketball fan, I am well aware that queer people can be religious. Like half of the WNBA is lesbians with a bible verse in their instagram bio. But for most people, being queer and being religious are incompatible with one another — two ends of a spectrum that can never coexist. 

And, this perception is for good reason. Why would a queer person seek out religion when most of us have had a negative experience with it? When pastors call for us to be executed, extremists attack our safe spaces, and governments roll back our rights in the name of God? 

Well, desperate people find faith in moments of crisis and desperate queer people are no different. In the late 20th century specifically, as HIV/AIDS ravaged the LGBT community, many queer people found hope, peace, and community in organized religion with many attending churches that catered to them specifically. 

In this podcast episode I will be discussing Eureka Street Productions’ When We All Get to Heaven which documents one of these gay churches, weaving together a tapestry of archival recordings in order to tell a story of faith, community, and resilience in the face of loss. 

When We All Get to Heaven is a 2025 podcast hosted by independent scholar Lynne Gerber. It focuses on San Francisco’s Metropolitan Community Church or MCC, which was one of the first gay positive churches, following the congregation throughout the AIDS epidemic. 

It features oral history interviews from surviving church members, a narration by Gerber, and audio recordings from MCC’s archive of over 1200 cassette tapes. 

Obviously this is a podcast about AIDS but it also is so much more than that. It is about how AIDS affected one small community near the epicenter of the crisis in San Francisco. By focusing in on just MCC, a church that was deeply affected by AIDS, listeners are able to see the full human cost of the epidemic. 

They hear the stories of people who are no longer with us and hear from the people who are. They learn about how these survivors persevered as the bodies of their friends and loved ones piled up, how they found solace in religion and were guided by the bible as they cared for the sick. By sharing these stories of real people affected by AIDS, When We All Get To Heaven transforms the AIDS Crisis from being this nebulous, abstract historical event into something that is real, and human, and personal. It reminds readers that this wasn’t that long ago, that people are still hurting, people are still mourning… 

As a result, When We All Get To Heaven also occupies this really interesting place between history project and memorial. 

I think with mass casualty events in history, with epidemics and pandemics and war, it's really easy to slip into thinking about people in terms of body count. They cease to be individuals and simply exist as numbers. But by taking this very microhistorical angle where they focus on how one church in one city was affected by AIDS listeners can really get to know these parishioners who died. You learn their names, you learn their stories, you hear from the people who loved them — it is impossible to ignore the fact that these were human beings, with unique lives and interests and personalities, who had people that loved them.

I typically am not a huge fan of podcasts. I just find it incredibly boring to listen to what is essentially a few people having a conversation for an hour. It just feels incredibly monotonous and I’ve found that it’s really easy for me to get distracted and miss things. 

I am, however, a huge fan of documentaries and I think that is why I loved When We All Get To Heaven so much. 

It felt like a documentary. It had variation and a good balance of archival material, oral history interviews, and narration from the host. It was just really, really engaging and definitely shifted my perspective on what a podcast could look like. That it can be less conversational and more documentary.

I also think that this was the perfect project to turn into a podcast. I think sometimes I listen to a podcast and I go, I really wish that I could see this footage that they are talking about. 

For instance, I listened to a BBC podcast about Mad Cow disease recently and was a bit confused why it was turned into a radio program when almost every clip of historic audio they used was originally in video form. Like why turn this into a podcast and not a documentary? 

It almost feels sometimes like people are making podcasts for the sake of simply having a podcast rather than because its the best medium for their project. 

But when you are dealing primarily with audio from the beginning, like the Eureka Street Productions team was with the MCC archives, I think that's when a podcast makes sense. Its a medium built for audio and it was the perfect way to tell this story.

If you are interested in listening to When We All Get To Heaven you can find it on spotify, or apple podcasts, or you can listen from their website directly at Heaven Podcast dot org. The podcast is ongoing and new episodes are being released every single friday.

My name is Lily Theders, I am a grad student at Loyola University Chicago and I hope that you enjoyed my review of When We All Get to Heaven!