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Queer Medievalism & the Cult of Gay Relics: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Australia and the United States (Barbezat & Pattenden)

  • Writer: mmapodcast1
    mmapodcast1
  • Jun 25
  • 2 min read
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In this episode, Michael D. Barbezat (Australian Catholic University) and Miles Pattenden (Oxford University) explore the "queer medievalism" of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the early 1980s. They discuss the Sisters' creation of "gay relics" in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, highlighting how the Sisters' drew on the intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity to repurpose remnants of destroyed urban spaces as holy relics. They emphasize how the Sisters explained and justified the preservation of "cruising grounds" (public spaces where men had sex with men) through concepts like "sacred theft" which they had encountered in school and at seminary. 


Michael Barbezat is a historian of medieval religious, intellectual, and cultural history. He is the author of Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages (Cornell 2018) and numerous articles and chapters exploring histories of persecution, belief, doubt, sexuality, and gender. His current work explores contemporary receptions and adaptations of the European Middle Ages by queer communities. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University.


Miles Pattenden is Programme Director at the Europaeum, Oxford. He is the author ofElecting the Pope in Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of the Papacy (3 vols, Cambridge, 2025). His work explores Catholic Church politics and the uses of Catholic culture in diverse historical settings and contexts.


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