Nun History, Nun Name

NUN HISTORY, NUN NAME

by Emma Tennier-Stuart

I always perk up when they start talking about the nuns.

“Are there any ghost nuns haunting this place?” a new staff member asks, laughing.

Yes. The answer is yes.

“No,” the woman showing her around says. “I wish.”

I am here, though. And so many of my sisters, too (though they don’t eavesdrop on the convent’s new inhabitants as much as I do).

•••

A more thoughtful staff member one day: “I wonder how the nuns would feel about men tromping through this place every day.”

“Hmph,” her companion says. “I wish more men would come through here.” The women move onto the topic of their love lives, we nuns already forgotten. 

Sometimes, when I hear them speak about these things, I think the sleek civic museum that now occupies my home is as much a convent as it ever was. Almost all of its staff are women and, given how often some of them complain about the lack of men in the industry, that seems unlikely to change.

Not that we nuns ever hoped to see more men around. Sure, there were those sisters who spoke of beaus they’d once almost had before they joined the convent. But I was quite content without men at all. And I daresay that was the truth for a good many of my sisters, for one reason or another.

In fact, I know it was.

•••

A new exhibition is going up, starting just outside where the chapel once was and wrapping down the hallway that used to lead to Sister Mary Evangeline’s austere little room, and gruff Sister Mary Benedict’s before that. They’re pasting a long rainbow on the wall, with dates and photos running down it. “A History of Pride: From the International to the Local,” it says.

Two parallel timelines follow the rainbow. One details the great civil rights movements that took place in cities I’ve never seen. San Francisco, New York City… The other tells the stories of the communities—first furtive, then triumphant—that flourished around this museum. Around my convent. It tells of clubs and bars that stood mere blocks away from this building, of activists and community builders who walked the streets just beyond the convent’s small windows. I never knew such things were happening so near to me. But then, those who lived out there knew so little of our lives within these walls. Even now, this convent is granted no marker on the timeline.

But, “Come on,” the exhibition’s curator is saying. “You know at least some of the nuns were gay.”

Were it not for the tight pants and the metal studding her ears, she might have fit in with us nuns: she’s short-haired, meditatively focused on the things that matter to her, and has never desired the touch of a man. Though would she, who so commandingly owns her identity and her freedom in the world, ever have wanted to join us? We were all women who gave up our names and hid ourselves away from the world.

Her assistant (who, I have observed, does not share her proclivities, but is nonetheless beautifully at ease around her) laughs. “Should we write that in on the timeline?” she asks. “I’m sure I have a Sharpie somewhere.”

The two young women are both laughing now. They would never have made it through one of our multi-day silent retreats, but I cannot resent them for it. They wear their good humour so lightly, perhaps the result of never having had to silence it.

“Yes!” says the curator. “We’ve got to fill in the gap in the timeline.” She mimes writing, speaking as she does: “From the day the convent opened to the day it closed, this building provided an oasis from the world of patriarchal misery for all those women who felt the pull of Sapphic love.”

She snorts with amusement, but she’s not wrong. I can’t avoid feeling some sorrow at what I missed out on, as I read about the marches and the protests and the way the sin of pride was so deliciously embraced. But I also cannot regret the life I led; the community I belonged to, of women apart from the world, invested in each other. We were cautioned away from pride, as from all the sins, but other than that, our lives were not so very different from those of the people who marched on the streets, carving out connections the world would not otherwise have granted us.

The assistant says, “Do you think you’d have been a nun? Back in the day?”

“Oh, for sure,” the curator says. “All those women stuck in one place? They’d have been all over me.” Her grin is wicked, and she pretends to strut.

Hmph. Hardly. The girl isn’t my type at all. I think she would find us a much tougher crowd than she imagines.

But the image still makes me smile.

“It sucks that we’ll never know,” the assistant says. “We’ll never know if the nuns were queer, or if they’d have all identified as women if given the chance. We definitely don’t know if they were sneaking into each other’s cells at night.”

Oh, how some of us perfected the art of sneaking about.

“I know,” the curator says with a sigh. “I mean, queer nuns must have existed. I can’t imagine a world where they didn’t. But there’s no way to prove it.”

•••

Once, Sister Mary Elizabeth told us a story about her niece. The little girl had announced that she knew why nuns were called nuns: because they have “none husbands and none children.”

For a long time, I feared that I was of the order that had none history and none name. For here I’ve been all this time: doomed to haunt this world, never seen, and never quite remembered either. Even as the exhibit celebrates an identity I might finally have the words to claim, I fear there is no place for my story.

But maybe this legacy—this namelessness and historylessness—is not as empty as I once thought it was. As the curator here says, there’s no way for her to be certain we existed. But oh, is it not beautiful that she can envision it now? That we, who never had children, are the imagined ancestors of this startling new generation who name themselves so clearly?