By Claire Yacoboski
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international group of community-minded drag queens and queer activists who truly see themselves as nuns, making them a ‘serious parody,’ that goes beyond performance art, says Melissa M. Wilcox, who wrote a book about the movement.
“They are doing the work of nuns for the communities that nuns rarely serve,” Wilcox told a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
Wilcox, a professor of religious studies at UC Riverside, joined the Walter H. Capps Center at UCSB to celebrate its 60th anniversary. She published Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody six years ago, and spoke about the movement, which combines drag and street performance with charity and activism, using religious imagery to raise awareness on gender and society’s morals.
UC Riverside religious studies professor Melissa M. Wilcox shows a video of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at a 2007 protest in San Francisco. Wilcox was hosted by UCSB’s Walter H. Capps Center on its 60th anniversary. Photo Courtesy of the Walter H. Capps Center
Established in San Francisco on Easter Saturday, 1979, the founding Sisters found some retired nuns’ habits, put them on, and walked around. Onlookers experienced a “psychological car-wreck,” as they just couldn’t look away, Wilcox said. The Sisters realized that there was something powerful in what they were doing, and they could really do something influential with it.
Today, the Sisters have grown into an international organization with hundreds of members across various orders, or "houses," from Australia to Uruguay, from Canada to Colombia. While many Sisters live regular lives outside their habits, they come together as a community to perform charity work on the local level and campaign for Queer rights, often engaging in public events. Their lifestyle is a blend of their secular lives and their roles as "nuns," where they embody a unique form of spiritual leadership within the LGBTQ+ community.
Wilcox broke down the meaning of their order’s name: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. While indulgence in Catholicism refers to removing punishment for sins — or as Wilcox joked, a “get-out-of-hell-free card” — the Sisters saw it as their way to “wipe their slate clean of the religious trauma” they had endured all their lives. Being queer in Christian communities meant that a great majority of the Sisters had experienced discrimination, Wilcox said, and being a part of the order helped many of them to heal those wounds.
About a year later in 1980, Christians flooded the Castro district in San Francisco in an attempt to convert the queer people living there. But the Sisters arrived to counter-protest. They began praying for the Christians, hoping to, “free them from the demons of homophobia,” Wilcox said. “They sang hymns and danced, and invited Christians to dance alongside them.”
Author and religious studies professor Melissa M. Wilcox discusses the significance of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and their activism, at a UCSB Capps Center event.
She also shared a story about when the Archbishop of San Francisco held a mass for the parishioners in the area in 2007 that the Sisters attended. As they went to the altar to receive Communion, onlookers waited to see how Archbishop Niederaur would treat them. The Archbishop served the Sisters just as he had served everyone else, Wilcox noted.
“If the Archbishop was content with Sisters, why has there been so much public outrage?” she said.
Seventeen years later, the order was given the LA Dodgers’ Community Service Award during the team’s annual Pride Night Celebration in 2023. This announcement, too, quickly garnered public outrage. Even public figures such as former Vice President Mike Pence took to Twitter to express his anger. He called the Sisters “anti-Catholic bigots,” writing that “the Dodgers should be apologizing to Catholics across America,” Wilcox said. Pence, she pointed out, said that America’s pastime should respect the faith of every American “no matter what” — except when it came to queers. The Dodgers rescinded their invitation, based on an outcry from many Catholics, including politicians such as Pence and Senator Marco Rubio. The Dodgers then reversed themselves again, due to public pressure.
Wilcox says that public outrage lies in the refusal to see the Sisters as truly emulating nuns. The Sisters are what she called a “serious parody.” They truly see themselves as nuns, doing community service, organizing fundraisers, and speaking up for the oppressed. The Sisters of the order see themselves as speaking up for Roman Catholic nuns as well.
Recent intolerance toward the group, Wilcox says, reflects a shift away from portraying gay and lesbian people as “predatory,” to portraying trans people as “predatory.” Since the majority of Sisters are gay men wearing religious garb traditionally meant for women, certain members of the public felt justified in using the Sisters as the target of their outrage. It doesn’t stop the Sisters from carrying out their role to serve the community. Most of the orders are registered as non-profit organizations, engaging in raising money for those affected by AIDS, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, and teaching about the harmful effects of drug use.
The Sisters challenge what society expects of both religious figures and LGBTQ+ identities by blending parody, activism, and a deep commitment to community service. They persistently disrupt traditional norms surrounding gender and religion, and it's this refusal to conform that keeps them in the spotlight, says Wilcox.
Claire Yacoboski is a fourth-year Communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.