In 2014, while the marriage equality movement worked to prove just how normal and nuclear LGBTQ families could be, Des Moines-born musician Perfume Genius released “Queen,” its lyrics glamorizing age-old stereotypes of queer men: “cracked, peeling,” “wrapped in golden leaves,” “riddled with disease” and, triumphantly, “No family is safe when I sashay.” The song quickly became a Pride anthem, following a long tradition of LGBTQ art and performance poking fun at gay panic while reclaiming the words, images and symbols used to oppress those who don’t conform to a strict conservative Christian ideal.
Take the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a 45-year-old group of queer and trans folks best known for dressing up as Catholic nuns, painting their faces white, adopting silly and/or self-important titles and ministering at public events and protests.
“From the moment I met the Sisters,” said one member, Sister Saviour Applause, “they were fuckin’ modern-day badass drag queen superhero nuns!”
The Sisters’ most recent sashay through the public eye came in May of last year, courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who announced they would honor the nonprofit with a Community Hero Award before a home game as part of the team’s Pride Night. Offended by the Sisters’ creative take on clerical dress and behavior — and empowered by a culture war painting drag artists and trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people as demonic and predatory — many Catholic organizations and voices, like the Catholic League and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, were outraged. The Dodgers hastily rescinded the Sisters’ invitation for 2023.
It all felt a little on-the-nose, banning an LGBTQ nonprofit on Pride Night, especially one with a history of using “humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit,” as the Sisters describe their mission. Other human rights groups agreed — backlash from L.A. Pride, the Los Angeles LGBT Center and the ACLU of Southern California, all of whom threatened to pull out of the event, convinced the Dodgers to re-extend the Sisters’ invitation.
While their tone is tongue-in-cheek, the Sisters are serious about activism. It takes months of meetings, service work and event attendance before a member earns a place among the order (including the right to wear the white face and habit). Many sisters are ex-Catholics or otherwise non-religious, but all beliefs, backgrounds, genders and sexualities are welcome. Members are promised community, but some sisters also find real spiritual enlightenment in this congregation of friendly jesters.
“I’ve always been fascinated by this whole holiness about being queer,” Sister Tilda NextTime of San Francisco told the Smithsonian’s Folklife Magazine last year. “Our religion is basically just making people realize that you are important. You are loved and you are necessary to this world. And you should flaunt this in front of everyone.”
While the Sisters were founded in San Francisco, the roots of the movement — its activist spirit, unapologetically queer attitude, even the original headwear — trace back to Iowa.
Kicked out of Catholic seminary for being gay, Fred Brungard came to Iowa City as an out, ex-Catholic graduate student in the UI film program. There, he met Iowa native, anti-war activist and former Mennonite Ken Bunch, another newly out and proud gay man. During the pair’s tenure as co-chairs of the UI’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF) chapter, Pride became a regular presence on campus, from homecoming to the first Midwest Pride Conferences to film screenings of seminal ’70s queer classics Tricia’s Wedding and Pink Flamingos.
When not busy with work or activism, Bunch, Brungard and their friends Sue Gilbert, Tracy Bjorgum, Michael Salinas and Lisa formed a drag troupe called the Sugar Plum Fairies. They experimented with caked-on, Cabaret-inspired makeup looks. Soon, they got in the habit of wearing habits in performances, originally acquired by Gilbert from her former Catholic school teacher in Cedar Rapids.
“We performed at the few gay bars across the state of Iowa,” Bunch says in his online recounting of SPI “sistory.” “Most drag shows at the time consisted of classic diva tributes. (Diana Ross, Judy Garland, etc.) Queens weren’t ready for the iconoclasm about to engulf them! When we hit the stage doing a pom-pom routine to the U of I ‘Fight Song,’ the audience erupted into pandemonium!”
“Our first experiences in those Iowa nuns habits in 1979 were the flame that became a roaring bonfire blazing across the world to this very day.”
Ken Bunch, a.k.a. Sister Vicious PHB
Bunch moved to San Francisco’s Castro District in 1977, and Brungard followed shortly after. They found the center of U.S. gay culture beset by masculine conformity, “Castro clones” roaming the streets in jeans and muscle shirts. By 1979, Bunch was ready to shake up the neighborhood — only, he’d left all his drag in Iowa. Everything but the nun habits, at least, which he’d considered too special to abandon.
“It is amazing that history can turn on a small moment and an instant decision,” Bunch recalled in 2021. “I decided they would be the ONLY drag I would keep ‘in case one day I get bored.’”
On Easter weekend of 1979, Bunch, Brungard and their friend Baruch Golden donned the habits and strolled in and around the Castro and a nearby nude beach. The reaction from the public was “electric,” Bunch said, “like someone had lit a stick of dynamite!”
The genderfucking nuns reappeared at a Gay Softball League game, stealing the show with their creative cheerleading routine. Soon, the group decided to take their silly pastime a little more seriously.
“The general consensus between us was that we should form a group, making use of the intense energy this iconic symbol seemed to evoke, not only in the general public, but also in ourselves,” said Bunch, who took the title Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch. “Maybe we could use this as a tool for social activism and have some fun as well.”
The Sisters brightened up protests against nuclear armament, hosted a popular Bingo fundraiser for gay Cuban refugees and handed out playful and plain-speaking informational material on safe sex and STDs. In June 1982, musician Jane Dornacker and actor Shirley MacLaine teamed up with the org for an early HIV/AIDS fundraiser. The Sisters also led the first candlelight vigil for AIDS awareness in 1983, hoisting a banner that read, “Fighting for our Lives.”
“We do a lot of work in the community that originally would have been done by a religious order,” Sisters member Guard HOOOO?! told Folklife. “During the AIDS crisis, so many people were being turned away by their churches, turned away by their families. They could not be open to anybody about their spirituality because they were gay. And they were excommunicated.”
“It was a question of whether to ‘accept’ gay people, or whether gay people should reject their own identities in order to conform to the religious vision of what a good person looks like,” she continued. “So we presented ourselves as religious figures.”
From the start, angry calls and letters to the editor have flowed in from conservative critics of the Sisters, mostly to their delight. In 1987, when Pope John Paul II visited San Francisco, the Sisters rolled out a red carpet in Union Square and held a full-on exorcism in protest of the pope’s “prejudice and ignorance.” They were proud to discover they’d made the official Papal List of Heretics.
The order continued to grow, tackling a range of issues facing their queer and marginalized congregants and earning media coverage in the process. While still most active in California, the Sisters have grown to include autonomous chapters in major cities worldwide such as Montreal, Berlin, Zürich and Seccional, Colombia. Des Moines gained a chapter in 2022 called Priory of The Wilde Rose, overseen by Prioress Sister Ada Boufeit, a Sister since 2002. Two others — Sister Phoebe-Milk, a self-described former Catholic monk, and Sister NoVow OPoverty, a self-described “recovering Catholic” — helm a burgeoning a chapter in Iowa City, bringing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence full circle.
“Our first experiences in those Iowa nuns habits in 1979 were the flame that became a roaring bonfire blazing across the world to this very day,” Bunch concludes in his sistorical record. “If only those Catholic nuns and Mother Superior in Cedar Rapids, Iowa knew what their habits had ignited!!!”
Emma McClatchey co-authored this article, originally published in Little Village’s February 2024 issue. That version mistakenly credited the Iowa City Sisters founders with starting the Des Moines chapter rather than Sister Ada Boufeit; Little Village regrets this error.
