Melissa M. Wilcox - Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

QUEER NUNS

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

Judith Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

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Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

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Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

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Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Excesses of the Sixties: Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left

Malik Gaines

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Untitled ( AIDS Piet ), by David Edwards (Sister Mary Dazie Chain), featuring Mother Inferior and Barry Lewis.

Queer Nuns

Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2018 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilcox, Melissa M., 1972 author.

Title: Queer nuns : religion, activism, and serious parody / Melissa M. Wilcox.

Description: New York : NYU Press, 2018. | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034141 | ISBN 9781479864133 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479820368 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: HomosexualityPolitical aspectsChristianity. | Gay activists. | Gay liberation movement. | Parody.

Classification: LCC BR 115. H 6 W 5425 2018 | DDC 306.76/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034141

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Also available as an ebook

This book is dedicated to the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt.

It is written in memory of those study participants who joined the Nuns of the Above during the course of my research:

Sister Karma Za Betch, The Abbey of St. Joan (Seattle, Washington)

Father Oh, Mary!, Abbey of the Big Red Wood (Eureka, California)

All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I cannot remember the first time I saw a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. On the day in 1979 when three gay men stepped out into the Castro wearing retired Roman Catholic nuns habits, I was coloring Easter eggs some twenty miles away. No doubt my father, a dedicated Herb Caen fan, read that famed San Francisco Chronicle columnists bemused report on the Sisters upcoming fundraiser for gay Cuban refugees in October 1980. He and my mother might even have discussed other Chronicle articles on the Sisters at the dining table over the years; certainly they recall being aware of the group long before I began my research. Yet I have no memory of such conversations.

My first conscious memory of seeing the Sisters is at the 1995 Los Angeles Pride parade, the year before that citys house came into existence. The Sisters I saw were probably from San Francisco, which may explain why they were so familiar to me. I recall knowing already who they were, and cheering so loudly that they grinned and came over to me on the curb. Most likely I knew of them from earlier Pride parades in San Francisco, but they have been a part of my life for so long that the origins of our first encounter are lost to memory. Having grown up in the Bay Area and come out on a college campus where the LGBT student group was a chapter of Queer Nation, I was perhaps more likely than most scholars to be drawn to write a book about the Sisters.

But having seen even in my undergraduate days the rich potential of connecting queer studies with the study of religion, and having done my doctoral work as part of a research group that encouraged the study of religion in unexpected places, also primed me to see in the Sisters a fascinating opportunity to think about religion, sexuality, gender, embodiment, and activism in complex ways that reflect the equally complex communities in which the Sisters work and from which they draw their members. Such reflections on complexity are a key theme of this book, focused through the analytical concept of serious parody.