Click here to view a video recording of this CLGS Lavender Lunch!

Since their founding in San Francisco in 1979, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have used drag, camp, public joy, and irreverent spirituality as tools for service, protest, and radical care. What began as a small group of queer men in habits has grown into a global order of activist nuns committed to expiating stigmatic guilt and spreading universal joy.

At this Lavender Lunch, Sister Hera Sees Candy offers an introduction to the Sisters’ history, situating the Order within queer religious resistance, AIDS-era mutual aid, and contemporary movements for LGBTQ+ justice. The presentation also explores how humor, spectacle, and devotion operate together as serious spiritual and political practices.

The conversation then shifts to the lived experiences of individual Sisters, focusing on the concept of “calling” and the diverse range of ministries in which Sisters engage today. These include street outreach, fundraising for grassroots organizations, public ritual, grief work, education, and presence in moments of both celebration and crisis.

This session invites participants to consider what happens when queerness, faith, and service refuse respectability, and why the Sisters remain both beloved and controversial more than four decades later.

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Our Presenters

Sister Hera Sees Candy is a fundraising professional, long-time community advocate, and the current Abbess of the San Francisco House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. She was initiated into the Order in 2012 and fully professed in 2014. Her ministry weaves joy, humor, and service, drawing inspiration from sacred clowns, queer spirituality, and drag as spiritual functionary.

Sister Hera has held numerous leadership roles within the Order, including serving as the first Mistress of Prides, chairing three Project Nunways, one of which received a Bay Area Reporter “Bestie” Award, and completing two terms on the board. She has stewarded the Nuns of the Above records, led Dia de los Muertos altar creations and remembrances, delivered blessings for community organizations, and supported a wide range of fundraising and service ministries.

Professionally, Sister Hera works in higher education, focusing on fundraising, development, and alumni relations. She brings training in fine arts, psychology, and spiritual guidance to her work, with a focus on listening, empowerment, and making space for queer joy as a form of resistance and care. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Mr. Sr. Rock Candy.

Sister Mary Media was one of the original members when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence was founded as an Order in 1979. Finding a group of gay men who shared her interest in and commitment to queerness as a spiritual calling and an opportunity for self-discovery and growth proved to be a life-changing experience. In the early years, she served as Mistress of Communication, which gave rise to her Sisterly name. However, the toll of caring for dying friends in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, as well as the departure of Sisters she was closest to in the Order, led her to step away from active participation in the group, a situation she remedied by rejoining the Order in 2014. Since then, she has served several years as Mistress of Grants and is currently a member of the Order’s Board of Directors, serving as Mistress of the SPI Archives, a position to which she feels a passionate commitment.

 

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A CLGS Spring 2026 Lavender Lunch