The L.A. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence gained’t be attending Dodgers Delight Night time this 12 months. Not in an official capability anyway.
It’s not a response to the occasions of final 12 months, when the staff’s resolution to honor the satirical efficiency and activist group made up of queer nuns in drag who’re thought of blasphemous by some Christians with its Neighborhood Hero Award erupted right into a nationwide controversy, main to an enormous protest exterior of Dodger Stadium and inflicting concern for the Sisters’ security.
However it’s not directly associated to all of that.
The Sisters merely don’t have time to attend Friday night time’s sport in opposition to the Kansas Metropolis Royals. They’re utterly booked for all of Delight Month this 12 months, one thing they credit score to all of the publicity they acquired a 12 months in the past throughout what founding member Sister Unity refers to as “the Dodgers kerfuffle.”
“A lot of new groups have come to ask us to appear at their events,” she instructed The Occasions in a latest Zoom interview that additionally included Sister Dominia, the president of the L.A. Sisters’ board of administrators, and Sister June Cleavage, the board’s vp. “It’s just been a whole other layer added on to our usual busy Pride season.”
“Much like a lighthouse, we’re a beacon for weirdos,” Sister June added. “People who get it come to us. And all this situation has done has made that light so much brighter. We’ve reached communities that are having their very first Prides and they want us there to support them. Because they know … they now have Sisters to lean back on.”
Final spring, the Dodgers induced an uproar amongst non secular and different teams after they introduced that the L.A. Sisters could be honored as a part of the staff’s Delight Night time festivities — a lot in order that the Dodgers reversed that call in mid-Might.
However days later, after a marathon assembly that included members of the Sisters’ L.A. management, high Dodgers brass, California elected officers and native LGBTQ+ organizations, the staff issued an announcement providing “our sincerest apologies to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, members of the LGBTQ+ community and their friends and families” and re-inviting the Sisters to obtain their award on Delight Night time.
In the identical assertion, the Dodgers wrote: “In the days ahead, we will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family.”
Sister Unity and Sister Dominia instructed The Occasions that their group has not heard from the Dodgers for the reason that occasions of final summer season. Nonetheless, they praised the staff for its ongoing efforts to embrace the LGBTQ+ neighborhood.
“Pride Night this year is continuing, they’re advertising, the presence in our community seems robust, our community seems engaged,” Sister Unity mentioned. “So we don’t really need to be part of that, like, that doesn’t matter so much to us. What matters is that the Dodgers and the L.A. LGBT community are so together … because that’s what this is really about, that’s why there are gay pride parades at all.
“It’s to shore up people who have been pushed down so that they can participate and their gifts can be shared and appreciated as part of the entire community. This is always about making a diverse, colorful and multi-voiced broad community. That’s what L.A. always has been and really always should be.”
The Dodgers declined to remark for this text.
All three sisters agree that the occasions of final 12 months ended up being a blessing in disguise. Whereas the unfavorable reactions towards the group appear to have receded again to the pre-kerfuffle ranges, they mentioned, assist stays at an all-time excessive.
“Our attackers afforded us for free $3 to $5 million worth of publicity. Gratis!” Sister Unity mentioned. “We could not have paid for what they ended up providing us with just by being in the news cycle.”
The Sisters have acquired numerous awards previously 12 months, together with two this month from the Highways efficiency house in Santa Monica and the LGBTQ+ Legal professionals Assn. of Los Angeles. Final week, they spoke at a ceremony on the Kenneth Hahn Corridor of Administration in downtown L.A. The Sisters had been additionally eventually 12 months’s Corridor of Administration Delight occasion, which marked the primary time a Delight flag flew over an L.A. County constructing (the flag will fly day by day at county workplaces in June).
The sisters additionally mentioned that monetary contributions to the group — which it divides and distributes to quite a lot of charities — additionally elevated dramatically following the occasions of final June.
“I think what it did was it made people more aware that we exist,” Sister Dominia mentioned. “And once people started to realize all the hate we were getting, you know the death threats and everything that came in, the community stood up for us. … Because certain things were said in every single article that were just flat out wrong — that we’re anti-Christian, that we’re a hate group, we’re this and that. It was all the same and the people that know us are like, ‘No, that’s not who the Sisters are.’”
Sister Unity added: “There’s a level of inclusion now across the board. I observed that this was a cultural revolution in a small sense in America, where the quote-unquote weirdos were all of a sudden not put to the side so that the assimilated-looking people and the suits and ties could speak for us. We were given the microphone. We were put at the spear point of the movement and allowed to represent what is queer, which was different and wonderful.”
