“That you’re a woman far away / is no hindrance to my love: / for the soul, as you well know, / distance and sex don’t count.” It might sound like a queer collab between Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers, but this isn’t the chorus of a yearnful pop song currently topping the charts.

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Instead, these rather daring verses were composed by a Hieronymite nun for her beloved vicereine, the wife of the Spanish king’s representative in New Spain. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga (a rather pompous name that encompassed two major hereditary estates, a principality, a county, a marquisate, and, for a time, a viceroyalty) met in 1680 in Mexico City.

We would be lying if we said we haven’t fantasized that the encounters between the nun and the countess carried the electric charge of the scenes that the 2016 Netflix series Juana Inés imagines for them, but, sadly, the cruel limits of the archive prevent us from reliably fleshing out the details of this hypothetical love affair. Of course, that hasn’t stopped us from whiling away entire nights eating pizza and turning over the slightest hint that might sustain our hope that the much-talked-about “close friendship” between the Hieronymite nun and the countess was, in fact, disguising an intense love story.

On November 30, 1680, a procession of new viceroys made their triumphant entry into Mexico City. María Luisa knew that the appointment of her husband as viceroy, an honor bestowed by King Charles II, would signal a meteoric rise for the couple, elevating them to a sought-after position in New Spain and allowing them to sharpen the blades of their lineage with political influence.

María Luisa was eager to meet Sor Juana, and meet they did.

Accustomed as she was to the discreet goings-on of the Madrid court where she performed her duties as lady-in-waiting to the queen, it is unlikely María could have predicted the extravagance with which their new city would receive them. Not even modern Pride parades enliven cities with as much glittering delirium as that triumphant procession. Every street became part of a vast urban stage designed to dazzle the viceroys: facades and other surfaces were draped in expensive decorations, hordes of horses and riders rounded every bedecked bend, and for the entire duration of the proceedings, artillery salutes thundered at regular intervals, accompanied by the icy blast of trumpets.

By the time María Luisa and her husband reached the cathedral square, she had no doubt that the local dignitaries would treat them with all the refinement that protocol demanded during their six-year stint as viceroyalty. But what truly enraptured the vicereine, and what ultimately convinced her that this new post would prove to be a blessing she would find hard to part with, was a sight that would leave her nostalgic until the end of her life: the spectacular triumphal arch awaiting them by the cathedral.

That towering piece of ephemeral architecture, almost ninety-eight feet high, was an intricate, three-tiered temporary structure, expertly painted to mimic jasper and bronze. The arch framed eight panels adorned with inscriptions and images steeped in obscure mythological references, designed to portray the newly arrived viceroy as a modern-day Neptune of Mexico, and the vicereine as his Minerva. We imagine the arch so hysterically overloaded with columns and figures that it produced the same kitschy shock as the gaudy sight of Disney’s Cinderella Castle.

If at any point María Luisa hesitated, doubtful about the tastefulness of this colossus, those doubts vanished the moment a representative of the city council delivered a witty and audacious explanation of the arch. María Luisa almost felt compelled to get down on her knees as she passed beneath its columns. She immediately wanted to know who had conceived this spectacular piece of architecture and crafted its verses.The final grand surprise of her first day in Mexico came when someone informed her that the creation was the work of a single nun living in the seclusion of the Hieronymite convent of Santa Paula, just a few miles away.

María Luisa was eager to meet Sor Juana, and meet they did. On December 30, 1682, two years after their initial encounter, the vicereine wrote a letter to her cousin, the Duchess of Aveiro, containing her only surviving words about Sor Juana. She could have chosen to write about the strangeness of featherwork art, the cloying sweetness of pineapple, or any other novelty she encountered in the Americas, but instead María Luisa was consumed by one single obsession: “There is nothing more pleasing than the visit of a nun from San Jerónimo. She is an unusual woman, there is no one like her,” and “I tend to go there from time to time. I always have a delightful time, and we spend many hours talking about you.”

What exactly happened between them we will never know, though we suspect it involved much more than spending long hours discussing the vicereine’s cousin. What we do know is that from the day they met, Sor Juana devoted herself to writing ardent lyrical poems dedicated to María Luisa—authentic hits, worthy of any entangled situationship.

We know full well, as will any girl who grew up following the antics of Carrie Bradshaw or Hannah Horvath, that love is sometimes nothing more than the performative game of reproducing the plots and tropes of a TV show to feel like the main character in your own life.

In Sor Juana’s verses, the vicereine is a cruel creature who never reciprocates. Hopelessly devoted, the nun claims that the harsh treatment she receives from the vicereine is so enjoyable that it manages to “make pain lovable and torment glorious,” and she cries out, kneeling, “let no one pity me for being bound, for I would trade being Queen to become a Slave.”

Even when her verses boldly wander into blush-inducing territory—“Your fingers are alabaster dates / springing in abundance from your palms, / frigid if the eye beholds them, / torrid if the soul should touch them”—critics and historians have insisted on extinguishing their glaring passion and denying any romantic involvement, arguing that the Hieronymite nun was merely appropriating the literary codes of courtly love as a gesture of vassalage toward the vicereine.

This argument has never quite convinced us. We know full well, as will any girl who grew up following the antics of Carrie Bradshaw or Hannah Horvath, that love is sometimes nothing more than the performative game of reproducing the plots and tropes of a TV show to feel like the main character in your own life.

But the truth is, even we sometimes struggle to imagine Sor Juana truly consumed by the pangs of love—not because we believe she was simply adhering to an innocent courtly rhetoric that, according to critics, wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows among her contemporaries. (A fact often forgotten is that her publishers had to include a disclaimer in the compilation of these poems to reassure readers that the relationship between the writer and the vicereine was “pure” and free of any untoward behaviors.)

If we ever doubt a consummated romance between the nun and the vicereine, it is because we think Sor Juana, perpetually absorbed by the highest philosophical pursuits and always engaged in composing her next, more convoluted hyperbaton, was quite capable of rejecting a night of passion to retreat to her cell and tinker with her astrolabe. Still, the stubborn insistence of so many to deny the possibility that a seventeenth-century nun could have been a lesbian has always baffled us, and the vehemence with which they defend their stance quickly began to affect us as well.

In the summer of 2022, the Prado Museum asked us to live stream a video from their Instagram account so that we could comment on some of our favorite paintings. Within minutes, we were deluged in an avalanche of furious comments. None of them had anything to do with a chronological slip or a mistaken attribution—the hostility was reserved for our brief references to the existence of lesbianism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century convents (the fact that one of us was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message I WAS A LESBIAN CHILD on the day of the recording probably didn’t help much either).

More than 110,000 people have watched that video so far, and to this day, a stray commenter still occasionally sees fit to leave a snide remark. We have been accused of twisting history, fabricating scandalous facts to suit our own agenda, and we even received a threat of legal action from the Association of Christian Lawyers. The conservative backlash isn’t surprising, but we were still left genuinely puzzled by the unshakable belief that a lesbian nun is as far-fetched a notion as a flying elephant. In fact, our otherwise beloved Saint Teresa already acknowledged the dangerous possibility of “particular friendships” emerging among her nuns back in 1567, warning of the issues that arose when nuns were allowed to visit each other from cell to cell.

Fortunately, when you are in the throes of self-deception, there will always be a seventeenth-century religious treatise that can rescue you.

In her Constitutions, Teresa is very explicit in her prohibition: “No sister may enter another’s cell without the prioress’s permission, under the penalty of a grave fault.” She goes on to say that the tranquility and very life of the convents depended on ensuring that “no sister embraces another, nor touches her face or hands, nor forms private friendships, but that they all love each other generally…This loving each other generally and not in particular is very important.” In 1567, Teresa understood the risks of intimacy better than that friend of yours who is convinced she can maturely handle a close friendship with her emotionally unavailable crush.

When we met in 2016, one of us already knew absolutely everything about the havoc that going from cell to cell inevitably spawns and could stroll around Brown’s main green with the poise of a veteran, wearing the I WAS A LESBIAN CHILD T-shirt that would cause us problems later.

The other, however, was still pretending to live oblivious to “particular friendships,” silently restless within her young heterosexual marriage. That her friends, coincidentally, were increasingly lesbians, that the stories of their passionate ups and downs enthralled her infinitely more than her own life, and that the few hours of freedom granted by her PhD were spent secretly binge-watching episodes of The L Word were all pretty clear signs of the inevitable outcome, but a willful blindness prolonged that ordeal for a few more years.

Fortunately, when you are in the throes of self-deception, there will always be a seventeenth-century religious treatise that can rescue you.

In 2021, with the podcast already underway, we decided to record what is probably our most cherished episode to date: “What’s a Lesbian Like You Doing in a Convent Like This?” While we were researching our script, we came across The Bride of Christ (1635), a didactic treatise for nuns in which a Jesuit moralist, Bernardino de Villegas, included a chapter that immediately caught our attention: “On the Seven Inconveniences of Particular Friendships Between Women.”

The gaydar of a founding mother and a Jesuit moralist will always be far more attuned than the intuition of a mob of reactionary haters.

With such a heading, one might think they were about to read a list of conventual disturbances caused by a failed group dynamic, but what Villegas actually gives us are the seven infallible clues for detecting a lesbian in the convent—or, for that matter, anywhere else.

We like to imagine the seventeenth-century novices reading Villegas’s treatise with open palms and hearts pounding, ready to put their fingers down as they recognized themselves in each of the Jesuit’s clues, much like someone today might open TikTok and have the epiphany of their life in a video that says: “Put a finger down if you often dream about your best friend. Put a finger down if you’ve always thought that all women are attracted to other women. Put a finger down if…”

At least one of us read Villegas’s seven infallible clues this way (and perhaps now you will do the same). The clues are as follows:

1. The Perpetual Meta-Chat or, in Jesuit terms: “the conversations between those who are fond of each other, which are filled entirely with little stories, jokes and laughter, with the main course of their discussions always being how much they love one another.”
2. The Suspiciously Clingy Friendship or, in Jesuit terms: “the affection with which those who love each other gaze at one another on every occasion. They always want to be together, one leaning on the other, unable to part even for a moment.”
3. The Toxic Anxious Attachment or, in Jesuit terms: “the 110 Convent Wisdom restless mind and the heart’s unease when one does not know what the loved person is doing . . . the nun may be in the choir praying with her body here, but her soul is in her friend’s cell, eagerly waiting for the prayer to end so they can be together.”
4. The Jealousy Attack or, in Jesuit terms: “the impatience that overtakes the person who loves deeply when they see their friend gazing at someone else.”
5. The Big Couple Argument or, in Jesuit terms: “the anger and turmoil that sometimes occur between those who love each other, when the slightest offense causes them to hate each other with the same disorder they once had in loving each other.”
6. The Affective Bribery or, in Jesuit terms: “the improper presents and trinkets, childish things, and sweet nothings shared between them.”
7. The Amorous Nepotism or, in Jesuit terms: “the improper concealment with which one covers the faults of the other, each exonerating their friend from offenses that are harmful to the community.”

Perhaps Villegas’s assessment more accurately describes a toxic relationship than a true lesbian romance, but we know his list was the catalyst for at least one belated coming-out. In the twenty-first century, the Jesuit moralist’s identification protocol is a paradoxical exercise in normalization. Villegas’s hunch—shared by Teresa and even the Inquisition itself—that, without proper vigilance, a female community would inevitably lead to romantic bonds between women, inverts the presumption of heterosexuality that weighs just as heavily today on those of us living outside the convent as it does on those who lived within it during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The gaydar of a founding mother and a Jesuit moralist will always be far more attuned than the intuition of a mob of reactionary haters.

Of course, the path to a particular friendship is never easy. Sor Juana’s verses confirm that venturing into the dating pool is always like stepping into a dark abyss.

Love begins with unease,
longing, burning desire and sleeplessness;
it grows with encounters, risks and suspicion, and is sustained by weeping and begging.
It learns coldness and indifference, and persists under deceitful veils, until, with grievances or jealousy,
it extinguishes its fire with its own tears.

Her love verses to Luisa are the only ones in which you can sense some calm. For the most part, Sor Juana comes across like that friend who, destroyed after a catastrophic stint on a dating app, drinks half the bar dry, and writes a ballad entitled “In Which the Irrational Effects of Love Are Rationally Described,” only to mumble, with the clarity that comes in the lowest moments: “To make fancy come true / my poor heart strains / but, thwarting desire, / only gloom remains.”

When the viceroys finished their six-year term, they resisted leaving Mexico for two more years, but in 1688 Sor Juana and Luisa finally had to say goodbye forever. During our nighttime emotional assemblies, whenever Sor Juana’s pessimism about love seemed to lead us by the hand toward a vow of chastity, we would cling to the fact that when Luisa set foot in Madrid again in 1688, she carried Sor Juana’s manuscript under her arm, ready to publish it and transform her “special friend” into the most famous nun of the seventeenth century.

The path could be tortuous and deceitful, but the situationship between Sor Juana and the vicereine convinced us—even if they themselves wavered—that the encounters, risks, and suspicions of love are among the best ways to keep life interesting.

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From Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life. Used with the permission of the publisher, Avid Reader Press. Copyright © 2025 by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita