How the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence went from a drag show to a queer movement

The world has a Roman Catholic convent to thank for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In 1976, a group of Iowa nuns lent their habits to what they thought was a production of The Sound of Music. In actuality, it was a drag show. These holy garments found their way to the West Coast in the care of one of these borrowers, Ken Bunch. In 1979, Bunch, along with friends Fred Brungard and Baruch Golden, dusted off the habits for a march through the streets of San Francisco on Easter weekend. Their goal was to break up the conformity of the “Castro Clone” era — in which gay men adopted a blue-collar uniform of Levi’s jeans and plaid shirts. What they did was spark the beginning of a movement.Later that year, Bunch (Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch), Brungard (Sister Missionary Position), Edmund Garron (Hysterectoria), and Bill Graham (Reverend Mother) founded the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag advocacy and charity group with the mission “to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt,” as its website now attests. Still shot from Hunky JesusA new documentary, Hunky Jesus, chronicles the story of the Sisterhood’s unlikely beginnings, its lifesaving work of providing care and distributing safer-sex pamphlets during the AIDS crisis, its headline-making confrontation of Pope Jean Paul II during this era, and its activism in the modern-day LGBTQ+ movement.At Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, the film’s director, Jennifer M. Kroot (To Be Takei), shared that she had always wanted to make a project about the Sisters. As a Bay Area native, she long admired the countercultural spirit embodied by the organization. Kroot found an opportunity to tell this story through filming Hunky Jesus. “My secret plan was to interweave it with the history of the Sisters,” she shared onstage at S.F.’s storied Castro Theatre before the screening. Hunky Jesus director Jennifer M. KrootHunky JesusStarted by the Sisters in 1995, H