This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.

中文翻译：

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1980 年代悉尼对同性恋遗物的崇拜和酷儿中世纪主义


本文解释了 1980 年代，一群激进的酷儿修女 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence 是如何在澳大利亚旧金山和悉尼创造同性恋“宗教遗迹”的。姐妹俩的遗物是 20 世纪酷儿历史中被忽视的一部分，反映了城市空间和性文化在当代酷儿身份形成中的作用。它们也代表了保存和纪念酷儿历史的早期努力。姐妹们故意借鉴了古老的中世纪模型，以保存被毁坏的性场所和巡游场所的碎片，这些场所对男同性恋者很重要。在 1980 年代初期，纵火和敌对的公民当局摧毁了这些地方，艾滋病毒/艾滋病的流行开始威胁光顾它们的同性恋社区。在悉尼，修女们还举办了圣物箱展览，通过崇拜流行文化的诡异作品和恢复看似仇视同性恋的宗教话语和概念，来纪念和捍卫同性恋身份和尊严。将中世纪的文物崇拜重塑为酷儿身份和历史的载体，说明了想象中的过去在现在自我的形成中持续的作用，以及从酷儿历史的主流呈现中抹去某些类型的性经验。