RON HENGGELER |
April 20, 2022
A hodgepodge of photos from April 15th to Easter Sunday in Dolores Park
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI) is a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirizes issues of gender and morality. At their inception in 1979, a small group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing the attire of nuns in visible situations using camp to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District. The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, and South America, and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors.
Respectfully taken from: Wikipedia
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence® are a leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns.
They believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty.
Since their first appearance in San Francisco on Easter Sunday, 1979, the Sisters have devoted themselves to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.
To learn more about the Sisters, visit:
thesisters.org
Photos of the Sister's 40 year Anniversary in 2019
2017 Sister's Stilettos for Shanghai for Chechnya at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco
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Easter Sunday in Dolores Park |
San Francisco is unique . . . a thing without a parallel, one that admits of no comparisons, for there is nothing like it in the histories of cities.
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More views from my window in the round room |
(left) Sister Bella de BallThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Sister Golda Lox |
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Jim |
San Francisco is the genius of American cities. It is the wild-eyed, all-fired, hard-boiled, tender-hearted, white-haired boy of the American family of cities. It is the prodigal son. The city which does everything and is always forgiven, because of its great heart, its gentle smile, its roaring laughter, its mysterious and magnificent personality. There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco, pleasantly, beautifully, and with the romance of living in everything. Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare. Drink any kind of wine you like. Go to the opera. The symphony. The concert. Go to a movie or a stage play. Loaf around in the high-toned bars, or in the honky-tonks. Sail the bay. If you are alive you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.(circa 1891) |
Easter SundayDolores Park in San Francisco |
I fell in love with the most cordial sociable city in the Union.After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was paradise to me.Mark Twain |
Easter SundayDolores Park in San FranciscoThere's just no doubt about it. Sanfransensual it is.Herb Caen |
The city is like a snake, shedding its skin, changing constantly, moving about in unexpected directions. However, if it is a great city, which San Francisco forever is, it retains its basic qualities---a sense of adventure, a delight in its own history, an air of freedom and a rare tolerance for divergent views and actions. The city dances on its hills and unashamedly enjoys its own beauty, which has survived many a long night of excesses, both joyous and tragic.
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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Easter SundayDolores Park in San FranciscoIf you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.William Saroyan |
Stephen |
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Sister Celine Dionysus, DBSCThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Bus stop on Church Street at Duboce AvenueMy home . . . It is my retreat and resting place from wars, I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside, as I do another corner in my soul.Michel de Montaigne |
Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!Sitting Bull |
self-portrait |
Sister Hera Sees CandyThe Sisters of Perpetual IndulgenceFor all its contradictions. . . San Francisco remains a beacon, always with that dangerous streak of insanity, built in at birth.Herb Caen |
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.H.L. Mencken |
Sister Lourdes Mae ShepherdThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Jim |
The Sisters of Perpetual IndulgenceSan Francisco was not just a wide open town. It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward–spreading puritan tradition . . .
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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.Doris Lessing |
More views from my window in the round room |
(center) Sister Sorenda da Booty(right) Sister Stella Believin MagickThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
East is East, and West is San Francisco.O. Henry |
Alice (in Wonderland) |
Brother Sin |
San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.Benjamin F. Taylor |
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Easter SundayDolores Park in San Francisco |
Peeps Jesus |
People will sooner aid a sick dog lying on the sidewalk than to try to find shelter for a sick person.It’s too much to deal with.Michael ZaslowMore photos of the homeless |
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Sister Mary MediaThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Sister Golda LoxThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
It is a good thing the early settlers landed on the East Coast; if they’d landed in San Francisco first, the rest of the country would still be uninhabited.Herbert Mye |
Stephen |
Sister Bella de BallThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Sister Beatrix UppersleeveThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
The Sisters of Perpetual IndulgenceIf you’re going to San Francisco,
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"It's like Paris — it's soft, the breeze blows, the city may swelter but the hillers do fly — over the bay is Oakland (ah me Hart Crane Melville and all ye assorted brother poets of the American night that once I thought would be my sacrificial altar and now it is but who's to care, know, and I lost love because of it — drunkard, dullard, poet) . . .Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans |
The Jars Project: the 40 year work in progress |
Sister Hermanita Loose ClaritaThe Sisters of Perpetual IndulgenceLos Angeles |
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
(left) Sister Freda Desire(right) Sister Tooty Too Too SweetThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
San FranciscoThat City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.Robert Louis Stevenson |
Sleeping on the sideway across from San Francisco's City Hall.Where thou art, that is home.Emily DickinsonIt’s the indescribable conglomeration of beauty and ugliness that makes San Francisco a poem without meter, a symphony without harmony, a painting without reason---a city without an equal.Herb CaenMore photos of the homeless |
Sister Tooty Too Too SweetThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Sister Stella Believin MagickThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
I like the way the wind whips your skirts when you go by cable car up Nob Hill. I like the salt spray in your face when the surf breaks on the rocks at Fort Point. I like the white waves the ferry boats leave as they ply the bay, to the Oakland mole. I like the seals barking on the rocks at the Cliff House. I like the fog rolling over St. Francis Wood. I like the trolleys racing each other down Market Street’s four tracks. I like the Irish cops and the Italian flower vendors. I just like San Francisco, I guess.Rita Hayworth |
Jim |
Sister Tilda NexTimeThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
self- portrait |
Sister Bella de BallThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
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NoviceThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
San Francisco's City Hall is a world-class architectural masterpiece. The design is by Arthur Brown Jr. who was a student of Bernard Maybeck and a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He took his ideas from the Church of Les Invalides in Paris, which was built in the seventeenth century and later became Napoleon's tomb. The 308-foot-high dome was designed so that it would be taller by about a dozen feet than the capitol dome in Washington D.C. The building suffered considerable damage on October 17, 1989 during the Loma Preita Earthquake. |
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Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.Georges Pompidou |
A rain-soaked eveningApril 15, 2022Queen of the Pacific Coast!Fair city whose changing skies for half the year shower down mist and rain, and the other half sunbeams of molten brass! Metropolis of alternate sticky mud and blinding dust! In spite of these and more thou art a city of my heart, O Ciudad de San Francisco!
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The Jars Project: the 40 year work in progress |
Alice (in Wonderland) |
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(left) Sister Blanche DavidianThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
My wild-knight neon twinkle fate there, ah, and then finally at dawn of a Sunday and they did call me, the immense girders of Oakland Bay still haunting me and all that eternity too much to swallow and not knowing who I am at all.Jack Kerouac |
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.Maya AngelouThree things that San Francisco is widely known for. |
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More photos from the round room window upstairs . . . |
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A rain-soaked eveningApril 15, 2022 |
Thank God we’re all living in San Francisco. I’d hate to be this annoyed anywhere else.Herb CaenMore photos of the homeless |
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Sister PansiesThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
More photos from the round room window upstairs . . . |
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NoviceThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
San Francisco beats the world for novelties; but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised as a specialty. . . Controversy is our forte.
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(left) Sister Selma SoulThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
Stephen |
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It’s a town that is forever grabbing you by the throat and saying, 'Look around, see what’s going on, feel it, experience it.
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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence |
A rain-soaked eveningApril 15, 2022 First in rapture
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Sister Hermanita Loose ClaritaThe Sisters of Perpetual IndulgenceLos Angeles |
'the coming of Spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age'Henry David Thoreau |
A rain-soaked eveningApril 15, 2022 |
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art.Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal.William Saroyan |
(right) Sister Mary Ralph . . .That CuntThe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence ® |
To a traveler paying his first visit, San Francisco has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.Friz Hugh Ludlow |
San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane |
There is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper.Its the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.Dave Eggers, A Heartbeaking Work of Staggering Genius |
. . . this marvelous city. Bazaar of all the nations of the globe, (compares) with the fantastic creations of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’.
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San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it's my kind of politics. It's like being Jewish in front of Jewish people.Elayne Boosler |
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The air has an indefinable softness and sweetness—a tonic quality that braces the nerves to a joyous tension, making the very sense of existence a delight.Scribner's Monthly |
A rain-soaked eveningApril 15, 2022 |
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Stephen |
The PopeAs the years went by, San Francisco became not only my city but also my way of life. From the time I was a boy, I wanted to live in a place like my father's theater world, a magic box filled with lavishly made-up women, extravagant gay men, and other larger-than-life characters. I wanted a world that could encompass all worlds. I found something close to it in this soft-lit city in the ocean mists.David Talbot, Season of the Witch |
It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.Oscar Wilde |
Solidarity |
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