Growing up in San Mateo County, Sister T’aint A Virgin never saw a Pride celebration.
“Everyone assumes that the Bay Area (is) super liberal, it’s super welcoming, but under that shiny veneer, there was still a lot of issues and a lot of unspoken unease,” Sister T’aint A Virgin said.
That made participating in Redwood City’s Progress Pride flag raising on June 3 especially meaningful.
“There was never any Pride celebrations in any of San Mateo County when I was growing up, so my inner queer child being able to be part of … the city raising the Progress flag was so incredible,” she said.
Sister T’aint A Virgin is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a global order of drag nuns who use performance, community service and activism to support LGBTQ+ communities.
“Our mission is to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt,” said Novice Sister Epiphany Fever Dream. “So (it’s about) spreading some joy, some queer joy throughout the city, throughout the world, actually, … and helping break down those institutions and roadblocks to being true, authentic and happy.
A lot of times that is some (systemic) challenges or some (systemic) problems that we encounter,” she added.
On Easter Sunday in 1979, three men walked through San Francisco, donning traditional nuns’ habits in an act that would become what is now the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Months later, the founders chose the name after others expressed interest in joining the group.
Within the community service, social activism and non-denominational spiritual enlightenment that the sisters work on, each member brings a specific cause they are most passionate about to engage in as a sister.
“We as a house started off as a kind of group of troublemakers going out in drag, and this was all at the very start of the AIDS epidemic,” Sister T’aint A Virgin said. “It quickly became an opportunity to turn this fun costume into an actual act of service.
“We were very quickly thrust into a role of, how do we show up for community, we’re not just acting like nuns, we are actually living out vows as nuns,” she added.
The Sisters began sharing information about HIV care in what Sister T’aint A Virgin called a “very sex-positive, very joyful” way. That work quickly turned into fundraising that would eventually become the Sisters’ grant program.
“A lot of our early fundraising was for Cuban refugees, for HIV care and services,” said Sister T’aint A Virgin. “Now you have everything from supporting queer, trans youth, trans healthcare services that are most notably under attack, immigration rights, supporting our immigrant communities, anything to do with the arts (and) anything to do with queer joy.”
The grant program supports small, underfunded organizations and projects providing direct services to underserved communities, according to the order’s website. Recipients primarily receive little to no government or major institutional funding, and the grants are typically $250 to $1,000.
In 2025, the Sisters gave to 22 organizations ranging from zines working to preserve LGBTQ+ history to harm reduction collectives.
Sister T’aint A Virgin stressed the importance of safeguarding LGBTQ+ history, and how the order does so in two main ways: the chapters’ own archives and financially supporting other organizations doing similar archival work.
“Whenever sisters come to San Francisco from other houses they always love to come and see the archive to actually see and learn our history,” Sister T’aint A Virgin said.
One way the order engages in preserving parts of the community’s history is through language. Polari is a language that was used within the gay community in the 1960s as a way of communicating at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
Used both as slang and as a complex language, Polari was relied on less into the ’70s and the ’80s as decriminalization was underway. In the 1990s, the London House started reclaiming the language, implementing Polari in their ceremonies and, in 2003, translating the King James Bible into Polari.
“Safeguarding queer history in and of itself is essential, especially given where everything is these days, and the attempt at complete and total erasure,” Sister T’aint A Virgin said. “In the London house, this archive was actually a ton of documents from San Francisco, but included in that was a sister-written Polari dictionary that included lessons on how to learn it, and translate it in a way (that applies to the sisterhood).”
For Novice Sister Epiphany Fever Dream, who is interviewing early members and documenting their histories, the archives played an important role in her initiation into the sisterhood.
Sister T’aint A Virgin said she has seen conservative rhetoric used to try to erase LGBTQ+ people and write them out of history.
“We’re seeing loss of health care access, loss of housing access, loss of kind of human rights, but I also think there’s (a) more insidious nature to this that is not going to have immediate repercussions,” she said.
Novice Sister Epiphany Fever Dream worked in higher education for most of her career, and noted that the sisters are an important “lightning rod” for youth “so they can have someone that we may not have had when we were younger,” she said.
Both sisters said the order’s public presence and preservation feel especially important amid a time when the LGBTQ+ community is under political and social attack.
“It’s all the more important for us to continue to stand up and to take back the narrative, … and see that queer joy is resistance,” Sister T’aint A Virgin said.
