Siri Sunde (born 1958)

Few have had to weather a storm as fierce as the one Siri Sunde faced. When she accepted a permanent position as a priest in Torpa, Nordre Land, in 1996, she was still living alone. But soon came the desire to enter into a registered partnership with her partner Eleanor—and that’s when the storm broke.

The Siri Sunde case became a major test for the Bishops’ Conference of the Church of Norway, raising the question of whether openly gay clergy could be accepted.

Queer Archives met with Sunde in the summer of 2016, where she spoke about the battle she had to fight in order to reconcile her love for Eleanor with her calling to serve as a priest.