The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence show their support at the Los Angeles Pride parade last weekend. Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Aaron Sanford-Weatherell was woken by a flurry of text messages early Sunday morning. His boss at Orlando's Hope and Help Center of Central Florida, where he works as an HIV counselor, was calling to make sure he was OK.
"I woke my husband up, and I told him, 'There's been a shooting at Pulse," he told VICE. "And I think that unfortunately as a society, we've gotten so used to shootings that it didn't seem real. It didn't seem like it was happening here."
When he later learned that the shooting killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at the Orlando gay club, the reality sank in. He'd been to Pulse several times with the Orlando chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to hand out condoms and talk about the importance of getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Pulse was a fitting site for this kind of activism: The club was named to commemorate the heartbeat of its co-founder's brother, who died of AIDS in 1991.
Sanford-Weatherell is better known to the Orlando community as Sister Itza Cameltoe—the drag persona he assumes as president of the Sisters' Orlando chapter. The nonprofit organization has chapters in roughly 40 American cities and 11 countries worldwide, and its members are known for dressing in a drag-version of traditional nun attire. And yes, they give themselves tongue-in-cheek, sometimes raunchy monikers like Sister Itza Cameltoe, who describes the overall aesthetic as a "gender fuck." (Many of the sisters identify as men but take on feminine pronouns while serving the "order of queer nuns.")
During club visits, charity events, festivals, and other public appearances, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make themselves highly visible in garb that looks like a mix between saintly nun and wise-cracking clown. The look is intended to spoof the ultra-conservative Catholic Church, but also to signify the sisters' own nun-like roles as pillars of their community, devoted to charity and social good. "When we're out in the community, people come to us with their issues, and people ask us where to get an HIV test or a hot meal," said Sister Itza Cameltoe. "We're happy to fill that role."
It's a role that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence did not take lightly last weekend, in the aftermath of such an enormous attack on the LGBTQ community.
In Orlando on Sunday night, Sister Cameltoe and her fellow sisters joined more than 200 others at a vigil at the iconic gay bar and hotel Parliament House. In Los Angeles, the local chapter had been planning to celebrate its organization's 20th anniversary at the LA Pride Parade on Sunday, but when they all heard the news of the shooting, they knew their parade appearance could no longer be about themselves. Rather than donning the rainbow-colored habits and dresses that they typically wear for Pride Parades, the sisters wore black robes to commemorate the victims of the shooting. They brought flowers and chalk and created an impromptu shrine on the sidewalk, where they invited passersby to write messages of love and hope to Orlando.
In San Francisco, the flagship Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence chapter joined thousands of others at a candle light vigil in Harvey Milk Plaza on Sunday, before marching nearly two miles to city hall in solidarity with the victims of the Orlando shooting.
"The sisters were spread out among the crowd to help support them," Sister Anni Coque l'Doo, the organization's president, told VICE. She described the march as solemn and peaceful, filled at times with alternating bursts of reflective singing and chants of "We're here, we're queer."
"Some people just need to see us and that brings a smile to their face because we are the people, the faceless members of the community," she said. "We're there for them, whatever their needs are. We are there to support them and help them through this time."
It's not the first time the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have helped their communities grieve and heal. The organization was founded as a protest group in San Francisco in 1979, and in the years that followed, it quickly grew to help spread awareness and education in the face of the spiraling AIDS epidemic that ravaged the gay community.
One of the organization's earliest members, Bobbi Campbell, a registered nurse and HIV activist who appeared on a 1983 Newsweek cover under the headline "Gay America," is credited with producing and distributing one of the first pamphlets on safe sex for gay men, according to Sister Dawn Quiche-Long, the mistress of ink (or secretary) of the LA chapter.
While the organization as a whole remains committed to preaching safe sex and sex education, individual chapters in recent years have tackled a range of other issues both local and national—everything from marriage equality and immigration to healthcare, homelessness, and sex workers' rights.
The organization was originally founded by a group of gay men, but the sisters VICE spoke with stressed that it is no longer a group run solely by and for gay men. Many of the regional "houses," as the chapters are known, include straight men, straight women, lesbians, and bisexual, transgender, and queer people, plus everyone in between.
The sisters see themselves as sacred clowns or comical jesters who seek to bring happiness to the masses—their unofficial mission statement is to "promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt"—even, and especially, during the most incomprehensible tragedies.
Sister Dawn Quiche-Long would argue that that comic relief is needed now more than ever. "I look at things, and I say, 'If I can do this—you know, become this person and publicly, I'm this nun, on a Sunday morning—then you can feel comfortable about who you are, where you are, and why you are when you go to work on Monday," she told VICE. "We're there to say, 'It's OK to be you, and we will not stand in fear. We will stand in solidarity.'"
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