Community hasn’t been killed by the pandemic for this drag sisterhood – community is what has made it possible to survive 2020
On an unusually hot autumn day in San Francisco, an order of nuns in long wimples, black gowns and drag makeup handed out more than 1,000 face masks in Mission Dolores park. Among them, Sister Roma – brushing seven feet in heels and a wimple garnished with a mane of blue feathers – laughed from behind her bejeweled face mask. “One bright side about wearing a mask is that you don’t need to paint your entire face,” says Roma, who claims, quite plausibly, to be the most photographed nun in the world. “You can skip doing your lips.”
For more than 40 years, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer and transgender nuns, have pursued their mission to “to promulgate universal joy and to expiate stigmatic guilt”. Although the San Francisco-based charity organization – in no way affiliated with the Catholic church – is best known for their effervescent street drag shows, their ministry is anything but a performance. The Sisters fundraise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for under-served grassroots organizations; in 2020 they made grants to legal aid clinics serving LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, an alliance empowering deaf queer people, and a community safe house for Black and Indigenous trans people, just to name a few.
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