Associated Press - Saturday, December 1, 2001
Margie Mason, Associated Press Writer

During each sermon, the Rev. Jim Mitulski would survey his Castro District congregation, wondering whom he would have to bury next. In all, he presided over about 500 funerals of AIDS victims.

Now battling HIV himself, Mitulski understands better than most why infection rates are rising again among some gays. He hopes his own life story can serve as scripture to others trying to prevent new infections.

"I can summarize it in three words: People make mistakes. You can use that as an insight to beat people up with it or to work with them on it," he said. Mitulski, 43, who works for the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center in San Francisco, said World AIDS Day, Saturday, is a good time to reflect on a past filled with death, and hope that another generation can be spared.

The signs haven't been encouraging. In San Francisco, HIV infections among gay men have more than doubled in the past four years.

AIDS has killed 22 million people worldwide and left 36 million others facing a death sentence since it was discovered in 1981. About 18,000 of the deaths have been in San Francisco.

"Saturday, all day, was funerals. That's what we did," Mitulski said. Mitulski, was ordained in 1983 in New York at one of more than 300 Metropolitan Community Churches that cater to gays and lesbians.

Fresh out of Columbia University with only an undergraduate degree in religion, the 23-year-old from Royal Oak, Mich., held the hands of some of the nation's first dying AIDS patients.

"There wasn't a lot of time for reflection, and there wasn't a way to identify who had HIV and who didn't. They weren't even sure how it was transmitted," he said.

After five years of watching victims waste away, Mitulski said God called him to preach in San Francisco.

"He took that position in San Francisco during the absolute worst period of the epidemic," said activist Cleve Jones, who started the AIDS quilt project. "Many of us fled. I fled when I got sick, but he stayed."

Mitulski said he kept his spirits up by also presiding over gay weddings - ceremonies only his predominantly gay church would perform. He smiles remembering how the words "in sickness and in health" and "till death do us part" took on different meanings.

In many ways, he "was the heart and soul of an entire community in mourning," said Mark Leno, a San Francisco supervisor who worked with the reverend to open a gay homeless youth shelter in the Castro.

But by the early 1990s, Mitulski said, the death and dying began to overwhelm him. He starting running to the dance clubs on weekends and using drugs with other gay men.

"I think I lost my sense of humor completely," he said. "You forgot to think about the future. Everything became just right then. That moment. That day. And you got used to that. Individually, I suffered from real severe depression, and I think on some interior level, while I believed in the afterlife, I also gave up. I stopped caring."

Mitulski suspects he got HIV through unprotected sex when he was struggling emotionally in the early '90s. He was scared and embarrassed that he had allowed himself - the leader of a 500-member church and a model others looked to for hope - to fall victim to the disease.

But Mitulski said his own infection helped renew his compassion, and gave him a new perspective on preventing infections, which still strike 40,000 Americans a year, 40 percent of them gay and bisexual men.

"I will say that I made something of it, which is the best you can say when you make a mistake," he said.

Mitulski left his church last year saying he felt his work there was done. Relatively healthy, thanks to retroviral drugs, he now sings in the choir of an Episcopal church and gives an occasional guest sermon. He said he still feels welcome and like a member of the family at his former church.

"I showed up. I kept the light on, it's safe to say for many years," Mitulski said. "It was a very rewarding time, even though it was a very painful time if both things can be true in equal measure."

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On the Net:

World AIDS Day: http://www.worldaidsday.org/
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