Know Your LGBT History - Jack Fertig (Sister Boom Boom)

A short while ago, we lost an icon in the gay community:

Jack Fertig, a professional astrologer who became famous as Sister Boom Boom, one of the early members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during San Francisco's gay scene of the 1980s, died Sunday at his San Francisco home.

Mr. Fertig, who was 57, was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2011, said Elias Trevino, his partner of 18 years. He had been in hospice care and returned home only the day before he died.

In his persona as Sister Boom Boom, he was the best known and most flamboyant of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of mostly gay activists whose spoof of Roman Catholic religious women delighted - and outraged - thousands of people in the early flowering of the Castro District as a gay mecca.

In 1982, running as Sister Boom Boom and listing his occupation as "nun of the above," Mr. Fertig got 23,124 votes as a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He came in eighth; the first five were elected. The Sisters said Sister Boom Boom ran "a uniquely San Francisco campaign of radical politics and nun drag."

Sister Boom Boom also tried to run for mayor against Dianne Feinstein, but the supervisors passed an ordinance prohibiting candidates from using assumed names.

Mr. Fertig joined the Sisters not long after they were formed in 1979 and soon became the group's public face. He wore stiletto heels, foam breasts and a fake nun's habit. His name appeared in Herb Caen's Chronicle column regularly, and he was often seen on television. He performed an "exorcism" in Union Square during the 1984 Democratic convention to purge anti-gay elements from the party.

He saw the Sisters as a way "to promulgate joy and expiate guilt," according to Jok Church, who knew him for more than 30 years.

Read more here.

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