Who are the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? Get to know the nuns of drag

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Though the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international order of drag nuns, has existed since 1979, the group has recently regained public notoriety for their decades of community activism and their Catholic critics who accuse them of religious mockery.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have played an interesting and vital role in LGBTQ+ culture, with a dramatic history of direct activism that exemplifies their playful, queer countercultural spirit as well as their devotion to marginalized communities that continues to the present day.

The spirit of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is rooted in San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture movement, which embraced sexual positivity, mind-expanding drug use, and poking fun at mainstream culture. As more gay men migrated to the city throughout the 1970s, this spirit met a queer artistic sensibility that used drag and non-traditional spirituality to affirm queer lives while rejecting the anti-LGBTQ+ gender conformity of the newly emerging Christian “moral majority.”

On Easter weekend 1979, three men — Ken Bunch (known as Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch), Fred Brungard (Sister Missionary Position), and Baruch Golden — wore full, traditional nuns’ habits on Castro Street, and later at a nude beach and local softball game where they performed an attention-grabbing pompom routine. After sharing their vision of sisterhood with others at the first International Radical Faerie gathering in Arizona’s Sonoran desert in 1979, the two aforementioned Sisters and two others formally founded the group, choosing its official name and defining its mission statement: to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/06/who-are-the-sisters-of-perpetual-indulgence-get-to-know-the-nuns-of-drag/