The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Trans Antagonism
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make up an unlikely order of nuns. Self-described as “twenty-first century queer nuns,” the Sisters began in 1979 when three bored gay men donned retired Roman Catholic nuns’ habits and went for a stroll through San Francisco’s gay Castro district. The stunned and delighted responses they received prompted these already-seasoned activists to consider whether the habits might have some use in social justice work, and within a year they had constituted the new order. Today, with more than 83 houses on four different continents, the Sisters offer health outreach, support, and, at times, protest on behalf of queer communities.
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Melissa M. Wilcox is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at UC Riverside specializing in the study of gender, sexuality, and religion in the Global North/Global West. Dr. Wilcox’s books include Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community; Sexuality and the World’s Religions; Queer Women and Religious Individualism; Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives; Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody; Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion; and (with Nina Hoel and Liz Wilson) Religion, the Body, and Sexuality.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I am here today on very short notice because there's a hot news item in the ether that we need to discuss with Dr. Melissa Wilcox, who is a professor in the Department of Religion at the University of California, Riverside, is the department chair there, holds the Holstein Family and Community Chair at the university, is affiliated with the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and has written just so many amazing things.
queer religiosities, an introduction to queer and transgender studies and religion, queer nuns, which we're going to be talking about today, religion, the body and sexuality, an introduction, queer women and religious individualism.
I could go on and on and on.
Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure.
So I like messaged you this afternoon and was like, any chance you got half an hour for me, Because, uh, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are making waves.
I mean, they're not really, it's really the Dodgers who are making the waves, but they're in the news.
They're trending on Twitter.
Here's what's happened.
The Dodgers, the baseball team, are having an LGBTQ plus night and they're giving away community awards and they're inviting various groups to come and participate, to receive an award on the field.
And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were invited.
And then they were disinvited because some conservative Catholic groups got upset.
And then they were re-invited.
And now there's a lot of discussion about who are the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
What do they do?
What is this about?
Should we be upset or not?
What is going on?
So let me start here.
You wrote a book called Queer Nuns where you discuss the Sisters at great length.
Would you give us a two minute primer on them?
Where did this start?
And what do the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence stand for and what do they do?
Yeah.
So my elevator speech on the Sisters is that they are a religiously unaffiliated order of queer and trans, non-celibate nuns.
They take vows for life.
They are very dedicated to their work, serving their communities.
Much of their work is with trans and queer communities, but not all of it.
And they see themselves as nuns just like any other kind of nuns.
There are Roman Catholic nuns, there are Episcopalian nuns, Buddhist nuns, Jain nuns, and there are queer and trans nuns, some of whom are Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
They understand themselves as nuns because, as many of them say, they do the work.
They do the work that they see nuns doing.
They serve communities.
They support communities.
They educate.
They engage in charity.
They fundraise.
They work for social justice.
In fact, they model themselves off of what many of them see as the best of the Roman Catholic sisters' traditions.
So they see themselves as emulating nuns, not as making fun of nuns.
And that's one of the most important first things to understand about the sisters.
They are nuns and they understand themselves as emulating Roman Catholic nuns.
In fact, I've come to, I would say joke, but it's not really a joke.
It's serious.
One of the best ways to make a sister of perpetual indulgence cry, not that you should ever want to do that, is to tell her that Roman Catholic nuns see and respect her work.
And see how similar it is to their own because they are profoundly respected.
The sisters are picking up on a really powerful social justice, social ethics strand of Roman Catholicism that is actually present throughout Christianity and is present throughout Christian history.
So although many of them are not Christian, some of them are, some of them are Catholic, they are at the same time very much in dialogue with some of the most powerful justice-oriented elements of that religion and inspired by those.
Can you give us an indication of where the order started and what were their certain causes or events that led to the beginning of the order?
Yeah, so this is actually a great story.
The backstory of the sisters is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Two of the people who became the founders of the sisters got to know each other in Iowa and were connected to a drag troupe.
That was experimental, doing all kinds of interesting performance things, and they decided that it would be fun to perform in nuns' habits.
So one member of the drag troupe, a cis woman, went to a convent in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, And said, we are doing a performance and we need some retired habits.
Do you have any?
And managed to not mention that it was a drag performance, although that might or might not have made a difference.
Who knows?
And the sister said, why, of course, here are some.
And they came home with four habits.
Those four habits got moved to San Francisco when one of the members of the drag troupe moved there.
And in 1979 on Easter Saturday, the two of them that had gotten to know each other in Iowa and two other friends were basically hanging out.
They were bored and they said on a lark, hey, let's put these old men's habits on and go for a stroll.
And so the sister, who's now known as Grandmother Vishnu, talked about the reactions that they got from people on the street as psychological car wrecks.
Huge double takes.
What on earth is that?
They got so much attention that they thought, oh, we're onto something, but we aren't sure what.
They manifested again a different combination of people a little while later in May at a softball game and then decided for a third time to manifest this time at Pride.
Now we're still pretty early.
It was 79.
We're pretty early in the history of Pride.
of the Pride parades, and they decided, okay, but now if we're going to show up as nuns, we need to decide why.
What are we?
What are we doing?
We need to do something with the powerful reactions that we're getting to what we're doing here.
And one of them, whose background is in New Orleans, said, the thing is, people dress up as nuns all the time.
But what would be really new and interesting is if we actually are nuns.
And that's when they first started talking about being nuns.
It took them a few years to sort out more about what that meant.
Were they primarily a spiritual group?
Were they primarily a performance group?
Were they primarily an activist group?
It turned out the answer was yes.
And because, again, of when they were founded, it Didn't take long for their work to end up focusing for a really long time on HIV and AIDS.
The sisters are the authors of the first sex positive safer sex guide for gay men.
It was illustrated by a very prominent, like, cartoonist, political cartoonist from the gay press in Toronto.
There was a house of sisters in Toronto already by that time.
The next two houses to be founded after San Francisco were Toronto and Sydney.
So the order went, and in the opposite order, Sydney and Toronto.
So the order went international very, very quickly as well.
And it's still international.
It's active on four continents to this day.
With their work on HIV and AIDS, the sisters moved pretty heavily into fundraising, but also remained very strongly involved in community advocacy and political activism.
Some folks listening are going to be wondering about things they've heard, things they've seen online.
And I think some of those things are going to be that the sisters are anti-Catholic, that all they're doing is making fun of Catholicism or Christianity.
One of the things I wanted to ask you is, what is it that they do?
I think you've already explained this.
And when I say, what do they do, what I mean is, Religion for me is often about what it does for people.
We can ask about what people believe.
That's great.
We can ask about doctrine, theology.
Okay, yay.
What does it do?
And as I think about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and I'm thinking about the AIDS crisis, the HIV AIDS crisis, I'm thinking about other issues, other vulnerabilities, other aspects of the communities in San Francisco, in Sydney, in Toronto.
What are they doing for their community?
What are they doing in the places they live?
I think the answer to that question in some ways is encapsulated by an image that appears in the frontispiece of my book.
And here I'm, it's a little bit hard that we're doing a podcast and I can't just lift it up and show it to your listeners, but it's a pieta.
People who are familiar with this art form will know The Repetita is traditionally an image of the grieving Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus after he has been or the body has been taken down from the cross after his crucifixion.
In this case, taking the place of the Virgin Mary is a sister of perpetual indulgence in full habit and taking the place of Jesus is someone who actually was also a member of the order who had been diagnosed with AIDS and who did in fact later die of complications of AIDS.
What I find so striking about that image is how it communicates the profound grief and loss and injustice of every death due to HIV and AIDS, of every death in our communities, and how the sisters show up not just to grieve but to care and to support
I want to be clear here that the Sisters are not in and of themselves a religion, although certainly they're members of the Order for whom the Sisters are a religion.
There are many members of the Order, particularly but far from solely in the U.S., who see their work with the Order as being a central part of their spiritual practice.
There are Sisters who are Catholic, as I've said.
But let me address more specifically also this claim.
There have been for many, many years, in fact, claims that the sisters are a hate group, claims that the sisters engage in hate against the Catholic Church.
I think this is a profound misunderstanding of how hate speech and hate-based violence work.
The sisters do critique the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and in that they also take Roman Catholic nuns as their model.
They understand their work as inspired by the best of many religious traditions, including Catholicism, and is pushing back against the injustice that is also created in many religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism.
Because their history centers around these Roman Catholic nuns habits, because they were, of the four founders, all of them had profound, had and have, profoundly spiritual lives.
Two of them were raised Roman Catholic.
One of them was headed for seminary until he was outed.
So there is actually a profound connection to and knowledge of the Roman Catholic tradition.
Another thing that people tend not to be aware of about the sisters is how much thought went into their name.
So people may or may not be aware that the word indulgence is a pun on the Roman Catholic concept that one can be granted or at certain times in certain parts of Catholic history can be sold.
Indulgence that essentially frees one from one's current sins.
This is something that is much easier to obtain in certain understandings of Protestant Christianity than it is in Roman Catholicism.
And the sisters have taken for, since the beginning, since they first articulated a mission statement, they have taken as their mission, the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt.
The perpetual indulgence is a granting of a perpetual release from a sense, from an accusation that queer and trans bodies and lives and sexualities are an enactment of sin.
So yes, of course, it's a pun on being self-indulgent.
Of course, it's playful.
And one of the questions that I think the sisters really invite us joyfully to ask is why we think religion always has to be serious.
If the sisters are engaging in parody, if the sisters are engaging in humor, if the sisters are playful and beautiful and fabulous, why on earth can't that be religious?
Especially in a community that recognizes playfulness and beauty and fabulousness as, in many ways, the core of the community.
That's how nuns are recognizable as a part of queer and trans communities.
Is that fabulousness?
Is that sense of play?
They wouldn't speak to our communities in the same way if they weren't that way.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
Just as somebody who spent a long time in his life studying medieval mystics, it just brings to mind for me so many of the male mystics or assumed to be male identifying mystics who commented on the Song of Songs and did so in a way where they played what is it just brings to mind for me so many of the male mystics or assumed to be male identifying mystics who commented on the Song of Songs and did so in a way where they played what is
If folks are interested in that, I'm happy to provide more resources.
But as you were speaking, that's what came into my mind.
We're talking about dress.
We're talking about garb.
Is there a sense in which the garb, the habit that the sisters wear is a part of doing the work that they do?
I bring that up because I want to highlight the fact that the way that we present ourselves in the world often opens up avenues for not only identity, but for what we want to be and what we want to do in the world.
And so I'm wondering if that pertains to this case.
It does.
The sisters speak about manifesting and getting in face, particularly the parts of the order that wear makeup, which is the majority these days, but not all of them.
Another thing that your listeners may not know is that the Sisters are a part-time volunteer order.
So when we speak generally of nuns, we're accustomed to thinking about people who have dedicated their entire lives 24-7 to the order that they're a part of.
The Sisters do dedicate their entire lives.
As I mentioned, they take vows for life, but this is not their day job.
For the vast majority of Sisters, they have Um, some of them have day jobs, some of them are unemployed, some of them looking, some of them on disability, some of them are students.
Sisters come from all walks of life.
And so when they manifest, they are becoming that sister.
Sisters speak about their secular lives and their sisterly lives.
And it's also important to mention here that an important part of the guard, of the order as well, are the guards.
So guards tend to take a bit more of a backseat.
They originated as a way to bring members of the leather community into the order to allow them to serve, to give them spaces in which to serve if they didn't want to get in habit.
When one manifests as a sister or as a guard, one is manifesting a particular aspect of one's personality.
Many of the sisters are Anonymous.
So you know them as a sister, but you don't necessarily know what their given name is.
You don't know who their, what their secular persona is.
For many people, although there are, you know, there are stories and, you know, some of them even show up in documentaries, they're not true about reasons why the sisters might want to hide their identity.
For many people, it's because they understand That people are responding to the sister or to the guard.
They're responding to this figure in a way that they're not going to respond to the secular person.
People who do similar work in their secular lives and as sisters, so for instance, people who are HIV and AIDS counselors, people who are suicide prevention counselors, there's lots of both of those in the order.
We'll point that out, that people interact with their secular persona very, very differently than how they interact with the sister or the guard persona.
So the habit is a part of becoming that persona.
Some people have a ritual process through which they do that, even if it's as simple as in a house that uses the white face makeup, even if it's as simple as drawing a sacred pattern with the white face before they fill it in.
But the habit is also, as you say, very much a part of identity.
Every house has a different coronet.
That's the sort of firm structure underneath the veil that they wear on their heads.
And again, these are funny stories.
One of the earliest houses in Australia, their coronet was an ice cream tub turned upside down.
Another house that I worked very closely with, their coronet is like a veterinary e-collar.
Only they had to adapt it a lot because it's very heavy and those narrow sides press down on your head and give you headaches.
And you'll see a lot of them with their coronets off relatively quickly because no matter how much you pad it, it still hurts.
But they're identified house by house.
They're identifiable based on the coronets.
And the makeup styles also are sister by sister and become very meaningful.
So there are sisters, for example, who draw on their own ancestral traditions in designing the makeup.
So Latinx sisters for whom the makeup becomes a sugar skull.
There's one sister who was a longtime part of the San Francisco house and is also an artist Who felt like the white pancake makeup whitewashed her and she's Filipina.
And so she put on what she called a lattice face where you could see the brown skin along with the whiteness and both aspects of her identity.
Whiteness is the wrong word there.
Along with the white makeup and both aspects of her identity come through.
There are sisters of Japanese ancestry for whom the makeup is a callback to Kabuki theater.
So And that's not even to mention the various designs that people might choose to put on their faces.
A lot of this is so carefully thought through and becomes a signature, not just in the way that a particular form of makeup or a particular kind of dress might also be a signature for a drag queen, anybody who's watched RuPaul's Drag Race knows all about this these days, but also becomes a part of their message.
They're sisters who wear a mirror.
There's a really interesting backstory that I won't take the time to tell here to that mirror that has to do with a mirror falling off of a VW bus back in the day.
But sisters who wear the mirror, wear it as a way of communicating that their commitment in the order is to mirror the beauty of their own community back at them.
So you run into a sister like that, and she's trying to mirror your own beauty as a trans person, as a queer person, as a human being, regardless of whether you're trans or queer, back to you.
That's the kind of service, again, that the sisters do.
You're talking, we're talking about garb, we're talking about dress, we're talking about drag.
You mentioned RuPaul's Drag Race.
So here the sisters are, invited to Dodger Stadium along with a number of other groups, and there's some Discussion is one word.
Uh, controversy might be another word.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Um, just in a sort of thick of things here, uh, which word to use.
We are in a time when drag is being talked about every day.
Uh, when Drag Queen Story Hour, uh, when, um, people in drag just in general are being discussed, uh, unfortunately in many parts of the country as a threat to children, as groomers, as this and that.
Is this a moment with the sisters and with Dodger Stadium and this seemingly nationwide discussion of drag that is significant?
You, if anyone, are an expert.
You are somebody who's just more researched and informed on these issues than most people I can think of.
What does this mean, if anything?
I think it's really important to say loudly and clearly this is trans antagonism.
This is a part, the anti-drag laws, in my opinion, are profoundly about transphobia.
They are a part of the widespread and very aggressive and frankly very violent attempt to legislate trans people literally out of existence.
There Let me say it differently.
These laws are not new.
There were anti-drag laws instituted across much of the U.S.
starting in the latter part of the 19th century.
There are complicated reasons for that, but the main, the short explanation is that this is when The concept of, I'm going to use a very clinical word here, so content notice for those listening, the concept of homosexuality and heterosexuality, by the way, had just been invented.
Not, you know, that there weren't people having sex with the same sex and people having sex with different sex people before then.
We all know that they were, but there's a particular cultural way of Ascribing meaning to those desires that started in among European sexologists a little bit after the middle of the 19th century and made its way into popular awareness and popular understanding in the global West by the late 19th century.
That particular concept tied same-sex desire To gender identity and explained people who were who today we would call cisgender and who were attracted to people of the same sex as if they were cisgender men as sort of basically having kinky tastes or racy tastes if they were cisgender women as being essentially seduced.
by the the sort of quote-unquote true homosexual that is actually the language that was used and they understood the quote-unquote true homosexual as being a person who was also gender non-conforming.
In understanding same-sex desire this way, they essentially made it into heterosexuality.
Because if you have one person in a, let's say, you know, same-sex coupling, right?
Two people, you know, have the hots for each other, decide to get in bed together, and, you know, they're both assigned female at birth, let's say.
But one of them is cisgender, and one of, so one of them is understood as a, again, I'm going to use clinical Um, medicalizing terminology that is not considered acceptable terminology today.
I'm using it to talk about this history.
So if one of them is considered a quote-unquote true woman and the other one is considered really a man, right, or a man in a woman's body, that is where we get that language, which is very offensive to most trans people today.
Then what you've done is you've said, actually, it's a man and a woman in bed.
They just have one of, you know, they have different bodies than you expect them to.
It completely erases same-sex desire as same-sex desire.
But that linkage that essentially was created in order to erase same-sex desire as really existing, that linkage travels to us across the 20th century.
It's where the stereotypes of gay men and lesbians come from.
It starts to get pulled apart both with the growth of the trans movement and with a particular gay and lesbian assimilationist politics that pushes gender nonconformity away from itself and says basically, we're just like you except for who we sleep with.
It is this linkage From same-sex desire to gender non-conforming presentations lives to at the time in the late 19th and early 20th century to psychological aberration which then gets linked over the course of the 20th century and and hat tip to my friend and colleague Heather White who's done fantastic work on this
Which then gets linked to sinfulness.
It takes a while for Christianity to care about any of this.
And by the time it cares, the liberals who made it care are like, whoa, whoa, nevermind.
We didn't mean it.
And the conservatives are like, oh no, no, actually we think you were onto something.
We're going to pick this up and run with it.
A, this part is new.
The anti-drag laws are not.
But the idea that Christianity should and does care That's new.
Yeah.
But the Bible has been interpreted sort of retroactively to sort of have always been homophobic and transphobic.
It's not the vast majority of biblical scholars will tell you that.
And so the objections to the sisters, even the sort of hate language around the sisters, I think are profoundly tied to the fact that these are None's in drag.
Regardless of the body underneath, drag is also about over-the-top performances.
And this is something else that RuPaul has been so good at helping the broader community in the U.S.
and around the world to understand.
The objection to the sisters has always been At its core, an objection to drag, an objection to the association that the sexologist gifted us with between drag and sexual aberrance or sexual impropriety.
That has taken homophobic forms in the early years of the sisters.
But as the politics have shifted and where we assign gender nonconformity politically has changed, The laser sights have shifted to focus almost entirely on the trans community.
So the anti-drag laws in the late 19th and early 20th century, which were used as an excuse for profound police violence against trans and queer communities throughout the 20th century until very recently,
As some of those anti-drag laws were finally lifted just a few decades ago, those are getting put back in place to continue to justify violence against queer and trans communities.
And right now there is no way that we can avoid or refuse seeing These as profoundly anti-trans trans antagonistic laws as part and parcel of the effort to legislate trans people out of existence.
One of the main points I took away from what you just said, and just guiding us through 120 years, 150 years of history so concisely, is that it's a matter of where and how you can assign the aberration.
So is the aberration the same-sex desire?
And as you say, the politics have changed over the last decade.
We have Oberfell, and it feels as if, and we've said this on this show many times, it feels as if Going against the very middle-class gay couple on Modern Family, two gay men who coach their daughter's soccer team, may not win you the kind of political battles you want.
So can you find the aberration in drag and in the trans community and in trans people and then make some real hay going to the school board meeting and yelling about it, going to the library and protesting Drag Queen Story Hour?
And so all of that just seems out in the open now.
Absolutely, as you say, terrifying and horrifying, and will be an ongoing set of, I think, issues, battles, and fights for survival in the coming years.
Should time and energy be spent elsewhere when it comes to trans activism, trans visibility, protecting trans people, advocating for trans people?
Or is it actually, okay, yeah, it's nice, the Dodgers are going to let the Sisters come, and that's a win.
How do you see that?
I think every one of these battles matters right now because people are dying.
People are dying.
And I want to just circle back for a minute to what you were saying.
I want to point out that the real aberration, historically and globally, is the transphobia and the homophobia.
That is the aberration, just as the bumper sticker decades ago said that homophobia is a social disease, not homosexuality.
Yes, yes.
What I think this is, is not so much pointing out the aberration, but catching people off guard where, and now I'm really talking about cis people, catching cisgender people who could potentially be allies off guard in a place where they don't know enough.
And they may have watched RuPaul's Drag Race, right?
But they don't know, they don't understand drag.
They don't understand its complicated relationship to transness and to trans identities.
And it is complicated.
They don't understand the complicated relationship of drag and Transness to queer communities and the relationship between all three of them.
So yeah, like there may be okay with the middle-aged cis gay guys who have the white picket fence and the family van with the kids, but they don't know what to do when somebody says drag is really sexual and it shouldn't be shown in front of children.
When my partner and I approached a very progressive preschool about having our toddler in preschool and we asked, will our queer and genderqueer family and our children who were raising non-binary until they are old enough to tell us more about who they are, Will our family be respected?
Can you talk to us about how you handle questions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom?
The first response was, well, those are topics for the elementary level.
So essentially, your family is not appropriate for children.
Now, I've been told that ever since I came out.
For one reason or another, I am a danger to children.
I am not appropriate for children.
People shouldn't talk about who I am around children.
And that's fear mongering.
And, and it kills and it destroys children and it destroys children's lives.
So I think that our next step is podcasts like this is whatever things we can all put out there to help people educate themselves.
Cause it's not the job of trans people to educate cisgender people.
To help people educate themselves about trans lives, to help people educate themselves about contemporary treatment for trans children, about how trans identity develops, and about drag, and about all of those relationships, and how trans and queer communities are so much bigger Than the couple on Modern Family.
As important as that show has been, as important as Will & Grace was, as important as Ellen DeGeneres has been, as important as RuPaul has been, there is so much more to our community.
And as soon as somebody starts yelling, danger to children, a lot of people want to err on the side of protecting the children and they forget That implicitly, the children that we're supposedly protecting are only the cis kids.
I'd like kids, I'd like people to want to protect my kids too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do think that what happened with the Dodgers matters.
It matters so much that there was an enormous public outcry about what happened.
Um, do I think that the Dodgers pride night in general is sort of earth shattering?
No, I do think that it's a corporate move and it's great for increasing revenue.
And I, perhaps this is cynical, but I think that's why the Dodgers do it.
And I also think that that's why when they got Hit out of the blue from left field, not to punch, with all of these objections to the sisters coming from out of state, largely from non-Dodgers fans, with this big organizing that was a small group of people with a very loud voice, I think that they've actually said, they've used the word panicked.
They panicked and they did a lot of damage and it has taken quite a bit of integrity as well as attention to the bottom line as one by one by one trans and queer organizations pulled out of Pride Night.
But it did, I want to also give them the credit for being more than about the bottom line.
I think it took some serious integrity to have a conversation with the sisters.
And they actually, I can't resist the puns because, you know, the sisters do it too.
They had the balls to apologize.
And for a corporation to apologize in the contemporary U.S., that's actually really big.
They don't usually do that because the minute you apologize, all the lawyers scream liability and go running from their room.
I saw a tweet just before we started recording about how there's this fear on the anti-trans and anti-queer side of the country's politics that the corporate capital will find itself in support of these communities.
And that's one of the biggest fears, is that if we lose the capital, Then we will lose the game because if we can't convince the Dodgers or if we can't convince Target to do what we want because we screamed and yelled on the telephone and email and on TikTok, then we will lose.
Anyway, that's what came to mind as you were speaking.
You need to go.
I've kept you way too long.
So I just want to say first, thank you for all of your wisdom and insight.
for your research and for your life.
Can you tell people where to link up with you if they'd like to read one of your many books or find you and your ongoing work?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm pretty findable as Melissa M. Wilcox.
I'm at UC Riverside, so if you put in whatever search engine is your favorite, put Melissa M. Wilcox UCR, you'll find me.
Queer Nuns is published through New York University Press, so you can also Google Queer Nuns NYU Press and you'll find the book.
You should read Queer Nuns.
I read it.
I had a student do a whole senior thesis on this topic.
Dr. Wilcox was the most cited person throughout that thesis, and it was just delightful.
So go read Queer Nuns.
All right.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Brad the Onishi.
Can always use your help.
We're an indie show.
Find all of that in our link tree.
Other than that, we'll be back later this week with our usual programming.
