Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics hosted Dr. Melissa M. Wilcox, author of “Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody,” as the first speaker in the new lecture series “Reverent Irreverence: Parody, Religion, and Contemporary Politics,” Jan. 18.

Wilcox is a professor and chair of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside who has published books and research on the intersection between queer identity and religion. She grew up in San Francisco, where the first House of the Sisters was created in 1979. Her lecture focused on the same subject as her book, the history of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a global order of queer and trans nuns.

The Sisters, who are majority gay men, but include transgender women and people of many other queer identities, have been in the national news many times since the 1980s. They made headlines most recently in June 2023 when the Los Angeles Dodgers nominated the Sisters for the Community Hero Award.

Willcox explained how Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote a letter criticizing the team’s decision to consider the Sisters for the award, claiming that honoring them would be alienating and offensive to Catholics because some see the Sisters to be mocking the Catholic religion.

The President of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, said the sisters promote hate speech and even compared the Sisters to blackface performers.

Wilcox described how the Sisters’ commitment to service distinguishes them from other instances of people dressing as nuns, such as during Mardi Gras or Halloween.

“Unlike people who wear sexy nun costumes for Halloween, they’re organized and promoting the public good,” she said.

Examples she gave of the Sisters’ community service were their significant contributions to AIDS/HIV awareness, including the creation of the first-ever safer-sex guide for gay men, “Play Fair!” by Sister Roz Erection. Wilcox also discussed how the AIDS activism of the Sisters was a transition from the intense anger present in the activism of groups like ACT-UP.

“Several people have told me that they came to the Sisters because they burned out on the rage and they found the joy that the Sisters brought to their activism much more sustainable,” she said. “Rage is a powerful driver of activism, but pairing that with the joy and caring that comes along with parody and laughter allows people to lighten up and thrive.”

Wilcox argued that the negative reaction the Sisters receive is not from people misunderstanding what the Sisters are doing, but from viewing their actions as mockery intended to offend, rather than viewing it as the Sisters emulating nuns for their own causes.

“This misunderstanding happens both on the right and the left, so whether you respond to it by gleefully saying, ‘Yes! They’re mocking the Church!’ or by being appalled as they’re mocking the church, it’s still that refusal to accept that the Sisters might be emulating,” she said.

Wilcox mentioned coverage of a vigil the Sisters had in the early 1980s. The vigil was in response to the presence of evangelical protesters in the Castro district, an area of San Francisco she called the “gay-borhood.”

“[The protestors] were shaming the people that were walking by them, telling them that they should give up the sin of homosexuality and come to God as though you can’t do both,” she said.

She described how the coverage of the vigil details the Sisters singing songs to help the protestors see themselves in a different light and how they prayed to be relieved of the sins of the protestors’ homophobia. What was notable to Wilcox wasn’t just the vigil itself but the way the reporter covered it.

“What was really interesting about that coverage is the number of scare quotes,” she said, referencing the reporter’s overuse of sarcastic quotation marks. “It’s littered with scare quotes. ‘Nuns,’ ‘Sisters,’ they held a ‘vigil,’ a ‘parade’, they had ‘hymns.’ Everything is in scare quotes like it isn’t real. It looks to me, reading that article, that the reporter had no idea what he was looking at.”

Similar to the coverage from the 1980s, the fault of reporters to understand how the Sisters are different from someone dressed as a sexy nun for Halloween is what Wilcox attributes to the failure of press coverage surrounding the Dodgers.

“This is neither a sports story nor culture war story, and almost all of the press coverage about this story focused on it in one way or another,” she said.

She cited the historical divorce of sex and religion, as well as the notion that queer people and gender variance are inherently sexual, as reasons why people see the nuns as offensive.

Sophomore Nicole Caruso said that the history behind the categorization of queer people as inherently sexual was one of the things that stood out to her about the lecture.

“I’d never really considered thinking about that,” Caruso said.”It’s making me want to go down a rabbit hole and further research about the ways we started categorizing things.”

Two Sisters attended the event, dressed in habit with makeup and painted white faces.
An audience member asked Wilcox a question about why the Sisters chose to incorporate makeup into their uniform, and Wilcox referred to one of the Sisters for a response.

The Sister spoke about the relationship between the beauty of Catholic iconography, like in paintings, discussing how makeup bridges Catholic iconography and the gay community.

“Playing with makeup just brings joy. It’s a transformative element,” the Sister said.

Johari Hunt, a visitor to WashU for the event, attended because of his interest in working in queer and trans communities, especially to make other forms of religiosity outside of mainstream religion visible. He talked about Wilcox’s exploration of the unique spaces serious parody creates for the communities involved.

“Part of it’s fun, but [it] is also supposed to be read as a form of seriousness, explaining the different points in which it becomes a real engagement as far as a ministry and community engagement,” Hunt noted.

Wilcox’s next book is titled “Devotions: Spirituality and Religion in LGBTQ Leather and BDSM Communities.”

The next event in the Reverent Irreverence series, “Earthalujah! Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping: A Conversation with William Talen and Savitri D,” is scheduled for Feb. 6.