THE FILM

In 1963, a young pastor from Texas named Cecil Williams visited the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Cecil had been invited to take over Glide Memorial, a Methodist church attended by a dwindling population of conservative worshipers. Struck by the “magnificent” diversity of the impoverished neighborhood, Cecil accepted the invitation. This Love is the tale of a radical experiment — one of inclusivity and acceptance — that Cecil and his wife, the poet Janice Mirikitani, ran at Glide for sixty years. Together they opened Glide’s doors to people of all races and beliefs, gay and trans, the mentally ill and recovering addicts, the unhoused and undocumented.

Wielding a unique brand of liberation theology, they steered Glide through tumultuous decades marked by Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, AIDS, crack, epidemic homelessness, and into today’s fentanyl crisis. This Love is also Janice and Cecil’s love story. Cecil was a Black man who came of age during Jim Crow. Janice was a Japanese American who survived internment and sexual abuse to become a revered leader and poet laureate of San Francisco. Their fierce commitment to each other, to healing each other, to testing each other’s limits, and to serving society’s most vulnerable, continues to guide us after their deaths in 2021 and 2024.