Outward: Slate's LGBTQ podcast - When We All Get to Heaven Just Won a Peabody Award!
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2026
⏱️ 2 minutes
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Summary
Slate and the team at Eureka Street Productions are so honored by this award and want to thank everyone who has listened to and supported the show. This series tells the story of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, one of the first gay-positive churches in America, and how its congregation faced the AIDS epidemic, including the deaths of hundreds of its members.
At the heart of the series is a remarkable discovery: 1,200 cassette tapes of sermons, memorials, and music recorded inside the church during the worst years of the crisis. A church member rescued them after they'd been thrown away. What you hear isn't people reconstructing the past from memory, it's the actual voices from inside the crisis, preserved on tape and brought to life across 10 episodes. It's a story about resilience, the strength of community, and finding beauty and hope even in the darkest of times—a message with powerful resonances decades later.
To celebrate this award, Lynne Gerber, the host of the show, recorded a special note to listeners, and we are bringing back the trailer to introduce new listeners—who are just finding When We All Get to Heaven from the Peabody Award—to the show.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Outward listeners, this is Lynn Gerber. I'm the host of When We All Get to Heaven, the podcast |
| 0:06.2 | shared in Outward last year. We are so excited to tell you that when we all get to heaven, |
| 0:12.6 | just won a Peabody Award. This is a huge deal for our little show, which we spent more than 10 |
| 0:18.8 | years making. We were honored to tell the story of this beautiful |
| 0:22.7 | and brave community, and we want to thank you for listening and sharing about the show. It means so |
| 0:28.4 | much to us. And if you're just joining us, welcome. We are thrilled that you're here, and we |
| 0:33.7 | encourage you to listen. Now here's the trailer one more time for when we all get to heaven. |
| 0:39.3 | If you were wandering around the Castro, |
| 0:42.0 | San Francisco's gay neighborhood |
| 0:43.4 | on a Sunday evening in the 80s or the 90s, |
| 0:46.7 | you might have come across a pink and purple church |
| 0:49.0 | squeezed between two houses. |
| 0:51.4 | Not where you'd expect a hopping church scene. |
| 0:56.2 | But the Metropolitan Community Church was different. What a bright, shiny, unapologetically gay place to be. We were really trying |
| 1:02.9 | to address what does Christianity look like. If your starting point is, sexuality is good. |
| 1:09.3 | You'd also notice a lot of men in the Castro sick with AIDS. |
| 1:12.7 | We were going to memorial services. |
| 1:16.0 | It seemed like every other week. |
| 1:18.4 | In 1987, this church started recording its services for people who were too sick to attend. |
| 1:25.0 | When we all get to heaven uses these recordings to tell the story of this |
| 1:28.9 | queer church and how it made meaning from AIDS. You can find new episodes on Slate's podcast Outward. |
| 1:35.4 | Follow Outward now to listen. Shoot, you can't feel that's your dad. |
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