SF supe wants street named for drag nun
An apartment at 272 Dolores Street was the birthplace on Easter weekend in 1979 of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Now a nearby alley could be renamed in honor of one of the founders of the internationally beloved drag nun charitable group.Gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Mission Dolores neighborhood, is proposing a ceremonial name change for Alert Alley, which runs between Dolores and Landers streets, so it is also known as "Sister Vish-Knew Way." It is derived from one of the names that founding Sister Kenneth Bunch has gone by over the years.Ordained the group's Grand Mother Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, Bunch shortened it to Sister Vish-Knew so his name wasn't so long or sounded as harsh.
The second half came about from repeatedly being asked if he knew the Sisters would have such longevity when he helped found them so many decades ago."I wanted to soften my image up," Bunch explained in a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter. "People always ask me, 'Did you think the sisterhood would last this long and spread this far?' So I changed my name to Vish-Knew."It is also an homage to the Hindu god Vishnu.
Early on Bunch was called Sister Ady in reference to Ardhanarishvara, which is a form of the Hindu deity Shiva combined with his consort Parvati.
They are usually depicted as half-male and half-female."Before nonbinary became a thing," noted Bunch, who as a 25-year-old gay man first came to San Francisco on vacation in January 1977 and decided to relocate to the City-by-the-Bay permanently from the gay-owned farm he had been living on outside Iowa City."You know that mythical idea of someone who went on vacation and stayed?
