Abstract: I cannot remember the first time I saw a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence.On the day in 1979 when three gay men stepped out into the Castro wearing retired Roman Catholic nuns' habits, I was coloring Easter eggs some twenty miles away.No doubt my father, a dedicated Herb Caen fan, read that famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist's bemused report on the Sisters' upcoming fundraiser for gay Cuban refugees in October 1980.He and my mother might even have discussed other Chronicle articles on the Sisters at the dining table over the years; certainly they recall being aware of the group long before I began my research.Yet I have no memory of such conversations.My first conscious memory of seeing the Sisters is at the 1995 Los Angeles Pride parade, the year before that city's house came into existence.The Sisters I saw were probably from San Francisco, which may explain why they were so familiar to me.I recall knowing already who they were, and cheering so loudly that they grinned and came over to me on the curb.Most likely I knew of them from earlier Pride parades in San Francisco, but they have been a part of my life for so long that the origins of our first encounter are lost to memory.Having grown up in the Bay Area and come out on a college campus where the LGBT student group was a chapter of Queer Nation, I was perhaps more likely than most scholars to be drawn to write a book about the Sisters.But having seen even in my undergraduate days the rich potential of connecting queer studies with the study of religion, and having done my doctoral work as part of a research group that encouraged the study of religion in unexpected places, also primed me to see in the Sisters a fascinating opportunity to think about religion, sexuality, gender, embodiment, and activism in complex ways that reflect the equally complex communities in which the Sisters work and from which they draw their members.Such reflections on complexity are a key theme of this book, focused through the analytical concept of serious parody.