Angelenos Go To Bat for drag outfit Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Los Angeles Times
Page A1
May 20, 2023
With their kabuki white face paint, electric blue humor and black medieval garb, the satirical nuns of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have long been California’s most recognizable drag outfit and among its oldest queer service groups.
Since 1979, tricksters in habits have ministered at gay bars, passed the plate for AIDS and cancer, officiated same-sex marriages and given succor to queer homeless youth.
Yet, until this week, the order had remained largely cloistered from the national anti-drag culture wars.
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The outcry over the “drag nuns” began in the Midwest, with a call-in campaign led by the conservative advocacy organization CatholicVote. ******* He went on to accuse the Sisters of “taunting the women religious who serve the poor in Southern California and around the world” — a charge the group rejects in the strongest terms.
“We are not anti-Catholic,” said Sister Unity, a founding member of the Los Angeles Order, who was to be honored at Dodger Stadium. “Being anti-Catholic would be anti-people, and that’s not what we do.”
Rather, the order draws inspiration from Catholic nuns — alongside religious sisters of many other faiths — serving the needy who are neglected by others because of their sexuality or gender expression, according to the Sisters and scholars and acolytes of the group.
“Many Sisters feel there’s a difference between what they’re doing and what drag performers do,” said Melissa M. Wilcox, a professor of religious studies at UC Riverside and author of “Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody.” “The Sisters are actually emulating nuns. They’ll say, ‘We’re nuns because we do the work that nuns do.’ ”
That work includes decades of charity, outreach, education and “bar ministry” in gay communities around the world. It also includes provocative monikers, such as Sister Porn Again and Sister Mary F— Poppins, as well as outlandish garb, chaotic pronouns and flip exhortations to “go forth and sin some more.”
“I like to think of [the habit] as a bonfire or a lighthouse, so that light can shine out into places where there are no resources and there isn’t a strong community,” Sister Unity said.
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“They’re the tricksters of the movement — they make us laugh, and laughing is powerful,” said Catholic activist Rosa Manriquez, who lives near Dodger Stadium. “I doubt there’s any nun worth her ruler and her rosary who’s upset about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
To be sure, the order has a long history of provoking the church — most recently in 2009, when two Sisters in habit took Communion from the archbishop of San Francisco.
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But what could have been the ballclub’s Bud Light moment transformed instead into an impassioned defense of one of the world’s most outré drag communities. ****** Some, like Manriquez, the Catholic activist, see the skirmish as an early conflict in a larger war to come. “The population that I work with all supported the Dodgers,” she said. “Progressive Catholic organizations are allowing extremist conservative organizations to be the official voice of Catholicism, when that is not true.”
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