EPISODE 1 - Sister Unity*

Sister Unity is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an organization that helps raise money and provide services for the LGBTQ+ community. Sister Unity is one of the nuns who attended a Los Angeles Dodgers game in June to accept a community service award - but it came with a price…

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Did you ever dream you would begetting the attention you've been getting recently.
I had always hoped I would begetting attention I'm getting recently. I never
expected it after about the tenth orfifteenth year. I've been doing this for
twenty seven years. I'm one ofthe last two remaining of the active founders
of the original Los Angeles House.It of course started in San Francisco forty

(00:22):
four years ago, and I movedto LA right after college in order to
change society for the better using theatricsand entertainment and performance. But Hollywood didn't
work out, and I'm so gladit didn't. But I never in a
million years expected that I would,as an orange Hindu drag nun, would

(00:43):
be placed in this national limelight todo what I had originally set out to
do. I always learned about theaterand art as being married to social change
to improve people's lives, and Ihope that the Sisters were become that when
we started in nineteen ninety five andsix. But pretty quickly it became clear
that it would be different in LAthan San Francisco. LA's a vastly more

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spread out city and you just can'tgain the visibility that you can gain in
a smaller city by being in theneighborhoods in LA and we didn't really pick
up much attention outside of West Hollywoodand Silver Lake for years. So when
this happened, it was the boostthat we'd always hoped would happen but never
expected by I'd say about two thousand, three four or five. I thought,

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Okay, well, this is howit goes. You know, it's
been ten years, this is howit's going to go. And I'm happy
doing the work, and I'm happywith the theater I can get away with
and the people that I've helped.So when this came, when the award
was announced in the first place,we thought, oh, my goodness,
such a big opportunity. We'll havethirty seconds to make an impression. Won't
that be a nice flash in thepan? And then Marco Rubio appeared with

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his tweet, and the Catholic Leagueand Catholic Vote and the entire right wing
media conglomerate sort of swung into action, and Lord Almighty, we had no
idea that it would be blow up. And we thought after Memorial Day weekend,
we thought, surely everyone's going togo picnicking will be yesterday's news.
Things will settle back down, andthat did not happen. It's reverberated until

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the game. It's settled down nowafter the game, as we thought it
might. But fortunately for I meanunfortunately unfortunately, it's a hullabaloo no one
would want in their lives. Butat the same time, we caught it
in our little catcher's mitt and weuse the opportunity as much as we could
to explain who we are in ourwork in hopes that either it would mollify

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some of our detractors, as itusually does with people we meet on the
streets who are smart enough to askus, why do you look that way?
What are you doing? And wetell them about the fundraising we do
for charities, not usually mollifies themin some degree. And it also allowed
us with people who haven't heard ourmessage to be touched. And we've gotten

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feedback people far and near that theirminds have been changed, or even that
they have been encouraged as LGBTQ communitymembers or just as private citizens, that
they've been encouraged that people as wonderfullyweird and creative and openly publicly creative as
we are exist in the world.Has helped them feel like there's more room

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for them to be who they areas they are. Now that you've been
launched and thrust into this international scene, let's go back to the beginning though.
Let's talk about the message. Yousaid you're trying to get your message
out. First of all, whatis the message? Secondly, what does
the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do?So the message there are several messages.

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Some are around safer sex and HIVand AIDS prevention. Some are around getting
people to be active about social issuesin our community, like the three thousand,
excuse me, five thousand to seventhousand homeless children on the streets of
La on any given night. Ijust aggles my mind. People aren't just
dropping work to go out and lookfor them and house them. But they
aren't. There's only three four organizationswith three hundred beds or so to take

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care of these kids, these children. So part of the message is activist
that way, but really it startswith the San Francisco Sisters adage that the
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are here whoexpiate stigmatic guilt and promulgate universal joy,
which means that our community has beenbeaten up, tortured, done unto humiliated

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for centuries by shaming over the factthat we have sex with people of the
same gender, which is really justa lurid stand in for that we love
people of the same gender. Peoplelike to focus on the lurid, so
we give them flashy, colorful thingsto focus on, and we deliver that
message that there's no sense in beingfeeling guilty or shameful about who you are

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and who nature made you. Andthen the joy half is the really important
part, because what do you dowhen you get rid of some thing negative?
You replace it with something positive,And we hopefully have a message of
celebrating your happiness, celebrating your identityand being joyful about it and expressing it
creatively. My personal message is whatyou just heard. If I can be

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this silly and flamboyant in public,hopefully that sends the message that there's room
in the world for you to bewho you are as you are, free
from shame about it, and withjoy for your own life. So who
we are and what do we do? Well? I always say manifesting his
job one we dress up as dragnuns, Now that's just a template,

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and the quasi religious image really boilsdown to the thing you wear on your
head. Some people go all theway with it, and like Sister Dominu,
who you may have seen at theDodgers game next to me, she
was in a much more what wecall high nun factor outfit. She grew
up Catholic. It was a greatpart of her acculturation as a child,

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so she does something that Hugh's closerto a religious look figure. I was
brought up atheist. I practice Hinduism, so I go with things that are
orange and floral, and I wearsories and things that are less like a
recognizable western style none. And it'sthat template given every single one of us,
in all fifty six houses in fiftysix cities in North America and eleven

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countries around the world interprets this intheir own creative way. So you'll have
people Sister Phyllis Stein made a dressout of carrots once, So you have
people interpreting it in wonderfully weird,creative ways. And then what do we
do with that? Because it's flashy, it gets people's attention. We give
the messages that I told you aboutand we ask for money, and in

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Los Angeles we're very strict about asmuch as many dimes as we collect must
go to the charities we retain.Some where we have special fundraisers where we
make our overheads so we can produceour events, but the vast majority of
money that people give us goes tocharity. And if you go to our
website La drag Nuns dot org andyou click on the resources menu and then

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the beneficiaries menu, you'll see along list of the people to whom we
have and continue to contribute, andthat's at least fifty percent of our work.
Sometimes more is the charitable fundraising.How many members in the LA chapter
I think on paper we'd probably bebetween thirty and thirty five, but active
at any given time at events,you'll see anywhere from three to Like the

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Dodgers game, we had eleven pride, we get up to around fifteen or
fifteen to eighteen. How regular doyou meet? We meet once a month.
We are a California nonprofit agency,and so we're required by law to
have monthly board meetings, which wedo. Our board meetings are also our
general meetings for the entire membership andthen we have some adjunct meetings just to

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run run our business. We havequarterly meetings about membership and for people who
are new and training, and thenwe have committee work. We have an
event calling coming up called the MisterSister Leather Contest. It's an annual event.
It raised money for often for BeingAlive or Life Group LA, which
are HIV AID service agencies, andwe try to fund lesser funded agencies.

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The big ones like APLA are doingpretty well, so we try to aim
our money for the stragglers. Sothat coming up, so we'll have committee
meetings, probably about four or fiveover the next couple of months to prepare
for that. So it's like that. And then so are all of your
fundraising efforts focused in the LGBTQ communityor do you do you give funding to

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anything outside of that? Well,we don't really fund weasel wrestling. They're
doing pretty well on their own.And then there's cage matches. I think
I'm right here on the East Coaston vacation and I've just discussed with a
seafood restaurant that they might have clamwrestling in there. In a cage match,
you just put the clams down onthe ground and wait for something to
happen a lot of money. Willyou make sure you live stream it?

(09:01):
That'll that's where you'll get your clicksand money. It's gripping. It's really
great. I mean, if peoplecan watch tennis, I'm just saying yeah,
but no. You to answer yourquestion, the majority are but no.
I remember walking around the track inWest Hollywood Park when there was a
track right next to Valerie Harper,the now deceased actress, and we were
raising money for breast cancer for Cityof Hope. So we and in our

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activism we overlap into issues in likefeeding the poor. We worked with the
Burrito Project, which made burritos andpassed them out with socks and underwear to
homeless people in downtown. Sister Vidavegana our mistress of propaganda, meaning she
runs our social media. She isa vegan, and she brought us to
do animal rescue work and that's anon specific to the LGBT community. We

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didn't bother to ask the dogs andcats who they fell in love with.
We just helped them be rescued.Okay, so those are all the positives.
I mean, those are all thegreat things that your group does.
And those are all the things thatmaybe a lot of people don't know about
it. But let's talk about someof the other things that people assume about
We are awful people. We pickour nails. It's terrible. Yeah.
So, I mean, you've beenasked the question a bunch already, and

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I you know, I'm kind ofreticent to even do it. But for
the sake of this, what isyour answer to all of this criticism out
there? Why nuns, why Catholicnuns? Why you know what you're doing
is blasphemous, and I mean thewhole host of things. But what do
you make of all of that inthe general sense? What do you make

(10:30):
of all the criticism? Completely fairquestion, And let me just tell you.
I was here in my vacation.I was showing some old friends some
of the news news coverage, andwe watched a video about the protest outside
the Dodgers game, and the thingthat really impressed me was that so many
of the protesters were very sincere,heartfelt people. You could tell that their
religion meant the world to their heart. And I feel that in my heart

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when I see them, I hearthe honesty in their words. And the
sincerity in their voices. We wouldnever want to offend that, or to
offend the profound intimacy that anyone hasin their spiritual path. Many of our
own members are religious. I'm Hindu. We have Catholic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
We have Sister Candy, our founderis still Christian, Protestant Christian,

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but Christian. She went to Azusa. I think it's a Zusa Pacific,
the Christian University in the San GabrielValley and is a practicing Christian. So
it's as we feel, it's amisunderstanding, and we get why people think
we're mocking because yes it's gay satire. Yes it's a nun joke. And
certainly the San Francisco Order a legallyseparate organization, but affiliated. They do

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that Hunky Jesus contest and the FoxyMary Contest every Easter. To understand that,
you have to understand history and thehistory of the LGBT community. You
have to understand that so many ofour people came from very damaging relationships both
with their family and with the churchesin their childhood. And not every church

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is this way. Certainly, notevery family is this way. But there
are unfortunately plenty of people who followeda very rigid form of their religion and
used it. I mean, youeven find it in Hinduism certainly as well.
They use the religion and religious namesand imagery to sort of shape their
children into their thought of what achild should be, how a child should

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behave, And it did not includebeing transgender. It did not include being
gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, and as we all know, the
stories that can get very hot.I wish I had a dollar for every
time that I have met a teenageror a twenty year old who is thrown
out onto the streets of la bya family who is rigid in thinking,

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any member, I'm so sorry,go ahead. So one of the things
that happens with that is that peoplestart to use satire to relieve themselves of
the sense of guilt and the senseof oppression. They laugh at their oppressors,
if you will. Now, Ido not mean to say that Jesus
oppressed anyone, Absolutely not, Butthere are people who use the name and

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image of Jesus to oppress our people, to damage them, to tell them
you have to remain sell it,I asked one guy at the a's life
cycle. They have a candlelight vigilin Ventura Beach the night before the cyclists
will ride into Los Angeles. AndI said, he said to me,
oh, the sisters, I loveyou. I go to the Dolores Park
in San Francisco every Easter. AndI said, so you've seen the Hunky

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Jesus Contest and he said yes.And I said, can I just ask
you, because I'm getting this questiona lot, what is that for you?
Why do you enjoy that? Andhe said, I grew up religious
and I was in the closet throughcollege, very religious, and my church
told me that I couldn't be gay, and that if I were, if
I couldn't get rid of it,then I had to be celibate for the

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remainder of my life. He said. I finally came out of the closet,
and I should have unburdened myself ofall of what they put on me
and part of the Hunky Jesus contest. I said, what did that do
for you? Specifically? He said, the humor of it helps me slide
all of that impression, all ofthat oppression off of my mind and allows

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me to laugh and be free.About things that had been weighed down on
me, very heavily and very witha lot of damage. So I take
it from the words of the peoplethemselves. I have no relationship really to
Christianity myself. I grew up withoutit, and so I wanted to ask.
And that's what I learned with respectto kids in school. First of

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all, are any the members ofyour order in Los Angeles parents? Sister
Dulcie de Leche now lives out inPalm Springs, and I think she manifests
sometimes with the Palm Springs Sisters.And she definitely she has a son.
I think by now he must almostbe college age. Delightful kid, absolutely

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delightful. Imagine it of kid.And the only reason I ask is because
I just wondered if you had anopinion or if your organization had had a
view on some of these protests latelyin front of like the Glendale School District
in LAUSD and others where these parentsare very upset because they feel like their
children are being indoctrinated into your lifestyle, and they get very upset and they're

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very I mean, I can't believeviolence is erupted in some of these protests.
Now, and I just wondered ifyou guys had any view on that.
There's a lot to unpack there.It's a really ripe, unfortunate example
of what's going on in our society. And you have, Yes, our
society is changing. Yes, gaypeople, transgender people are making themselves known
and having their equal slice of thepie as any American does. It's the

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fourteenth Amendment, as the Supreme Courtcase a burghfel that made the same sex
mayor's legal said, everyone is equallyprotected under the law. And there's people
for whom this is still new.It's weird to them. They don't like
it, and to be visible forthem is some kind of intrusion of something
offensive. That argument will continue onfor years. But then you have outside

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agitators. We know that the ProudBoys were present at that mixed in with
the crowd, the anti LGBT crowdin Glendale. We know that there was
a white supremacist, I believe,a Proud Boy who spoke at the protests
organized by the Catholic organizations outside ofthe Dodgers game. He was a known
white supremacist. So these folks areusing that movement and coming into that movement

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like I said, with very sincerepeople who are believing the dogma that they're
being handed from the people higher up. There was the head of the Catholic
League who is helped start all ofthis kerfuffle around the Dodgers. It just
so happens to be coming out witha book at the same time. And
so you get a mixture of peoplefor whom this cultural change is difficult and

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unpleasant, and mixed in with leaderswho have agendas, and you get,
unfortunately, what happened in Glendale inmy opinion, really, you know,
it's in America, and we hadwe went through social upheaval in the sixties
and seventies, remember, and byseventy five, as I recall, by
seventy five, everyone had had enoughof arguing, from the archie bunkers to

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the hippies that had enough of theargument, and they just settled down into
this ethos of you know what,we really disagree, but we're going to
live and let live. And thenwe sailed on for the rest of the
seventies, to the eighties and tothe nineties on live and let live.
I hope I feel that we willreach that point again. You know,

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the only difference between that journey youjust spoke of and now is social media.
Yes, that's very true, andwe'll probably argue more and longer because
we have it. Yeah, Imean, and the thing is now is
it allows people anonymously to drop bombs, verbal bombs, without any context or

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you know, any setup and whatsoever, any facts or any science or whatever
the case is. I'm just sayingthat. I think one of the reasons
why there's a lot of consternation now, regardless of what your point of view
is, is because social media hashelped to exacerbate and it has helped to
really propagate. That's That's the thingthat I struggle with a lot too,
is because I'm trying to cut throughthe noise here and try you know,

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I'm trying to effort myself to getto the truth. And sometimes it's difficult.
When you've got forty seven points ofview on one topic. You're absolutely
right, but at the same timeand you've just said it, you are
doing the solution. It cuts bothways. And because it's new, people
still are very hot. You rememberwhen people used to flame and flamers,
we're part of the vernacular. Well, you don't see them so much now,

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because we've been around each other onsocial media long enough to know that
that doesn't really work well. Andas long as there are people who are
patient like you, and if Imade me continuing to add to the dialogue
with truth and with good information,I think over time it can swing the
other way. It can swing towardswe'll go back to knowing what we knew
before social media, which is,don't believe everything. You research it,

(19:00):
poke it, find out for yourselfwhat's true. And I think you are
doing the exact right thing. You'reparticipating in it and you're infusing it with
real investigation, and that's what peopleneed. They need to decide for themselves,
but they need multiple sources. I'mgonna wrap this up because I want
you to be able to enjoy therest of your day on the East Coast,
and I will ask you this finalquestion, if you could summarize in

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one or two lines, what isit that you want people to know.
I mean, at the end ofthe day, before someone rests their head
on their pillow, what is ityou want everyone to think about with respect
to what's going on, not onlythe Sisters, but the LGBTQ plus communities.
What is the one thing you wisheveryone would just understand. There's two

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elements to it, and the firstpart is about the community, and that
is in order to understand some ofthe things that people find repulsive or offensive,
you have to understand the experience ofGBTQ people. You have to know
the history. For thousand thousand years, we were tortured, We were hanged,
we were burned alive at the state, we were called witches and imprisoned

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and hanged and burned. And inAmerica in more recent history, we were
erased. We were invisible. Theword homosexual wasn't even invented into the late
nineteenth century. People don't want tosee us, they don't want to know
us. So finally we got atoe hole. We formed our own communities
in La San Francisco and New Yorkin the twenties, and then in the

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sixties we spilled out into society.And you have to know that even as
we have a merchant of society,people are taking like children, teenagers are
put through conversion therapy to make themnot who nature made them. So if
you can understand that that's the background, that that torturous background has propelled people
into very colorful ways of finding theirown freedom. Then you can understand some

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of the things that you might finda stranger objectionable. And with the sisters,
I hope that you can apply thatunderstanding and know or remember that we
are the absolutely ridiculous, flamboyantly colorful, silly clowns who are trying to help
people get along, help people whoare hurt, and make people smile about
being alive. He said, SheSaid? They Said. Is a production

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of the KFI News Department for iHeartMedia, Los Angeles and is produced by Steve
Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez. The associateproducer is Nick Paliocchini and the filled engineer
is Tony Sorrentino.