How LA’s drag nuns took centre stage in the culture wars
IT IS not your average group of nuns. In fact, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not nuns at all. They are transgender and queer drag queens dressed in technicolour—or sometimes leather—habits, who raise money for local charities. The sisters’ fame grew last month when the Los Angeles Dodgers invited, uninvited and then re-invited them to the club’s annual gay-pride night game. The baseball team suddenly found itself caught between conservatives who consider the drag nuns an anti-Catholic group and liberals outraged that the team capitulated to appease the conservatives. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is filling Los Angeles’s airwaves with radio ads urging the faithful to boycott the game. Attendance on June 16th will reveal whether LA’s religious baseball fans feel the need to stop worshipping at Dodger Stadium.
As absurd as the fight over the sisters has become, it is just one of many political skirmishes over gay-pride events this year. In Glendale, a city next to Los Angeles, a brawl erupted outside a school-board meeting in which officials were deciding whether to recognise June as LGBTQ pride month for the fifth year running. Parents protested against a pride assembly at an elementary school in North Hollywood. Nor is the backlash limited to California. Conservatives called for the boycott of Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Target, The North Face and other brands that recognise pride month, work with transgender influencers or hawk rainbow-flecked merchandise.
Bill Clinton first declared June to be national “gay and lesbian pride month” back in 1999. So why, more than 20 years later, has pride become controversial? Two connected trends explain it. First, the scope of pride has changed over the years, perhaps faster than public opinion. During their presidencies Barack Obama and Joe Biden expanded their pride declarations to include more people of different…
2023-06-15 08:20:26
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