NEW ORLEANS

The Queen of the South, New Orleans, is the oldest center of gay and lesbian life in the southern United States. The origins of New Orleans's gay and lesbian communities are linked to its history as a port city and its laissezfaire attitudes toward sexuality. In 1724, for example, Captain Beauchamp of the frigate Bellone was charged with having an affair with his cabin boy. No sooner had the French Superior Council, the colony's ruling assembly, transferred the lad to another ship than Captain Beauchamp rescued the cabin boy and escaped down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

Also in the eighteenth century, prostitution flourished in New Orleans because of the large number of sailors and bachelors in the city. Male and female prostitutes were readily available in the houses on Basin Street at the rear of the French Quarter and on the two-block boulevard of brothels on Gallatin Street, located strategically close to the waterfront. One of the more notorious houses of assignation was the home of Madam Carole and her staff of boys with names like Lady Richard and Miss Big Nellie. In 1897 city fathers attempted to regulate prostitution by creating a restricted vice district dubbed Storyville. Under wartime pressure from the U.S. Navy, Storyville closed in 1917, ending a colorful chapter of New Orleans history.

In contrast to the activities of many sailors and prostitutes, some men and women entered committed relationships with same-sex partners. At the turn of the century, two women living in a committed relationship ran the Little Courtyard Coffee Shoppe on Royal Street. Wild gossip circulated about the pair, and the shop enjoyed a thriving business attracted by the curiosity of tourists and locals alike. New Orleans men had a tradition of keeping mistresses: when the arrangement was with a young male, it was known as an uptown marriage. Typically, the gentleman lived along St. Charles Avenue or in the Garden District with his wife and family while spending his free time in the French Quarter with his male lover.

From the 1920s through World War II

In the 1920s and 1930s, gay New Orleans carved out many of the social spaces that persisted through the end of the twentieth century. The ironic effect of Prohibition in New Orleans was to allow gay bars to develop without harassment from police or public scrutiny. By the time Prohibition ended, mixed and gay bars were a mainstay of Quarter nightlife. An old New Orleans saying declared: "New Orleanians don't care what you do. They just want to know about it, but they don't care." The French Quarter attracted a bohemian community drawn by cheap rents, easy liquor, and its history as a haven for pirates, prostitutes, and artists. Notable gay bohemians lured to New Orleans included Lyle Saxon, William Spratling, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote.

In the 1930s, bars and restaurants continued as important meeting places of the gay community in New Orleans. Early mixed bars included the Old Absinthe House, Pat O'Brien's, and Café Lafitte, which was run by lesbian Mary Collins. Working-class males associated in the less respectable bars of the French Quarter, including the Society Page on Exchange Alley, the Starlight Lounge at Charters and St. Phillip Streets, and the Greek sailor bars on lower Decatur Street. New Orleans also contained numerous restaurants catering to the gay community. Among these, Victor's Café and James Beer Parlor became important gathering places for the gay community.

Although gay New Orleanians were in the process of creating common spaces, lines of race, class, and gender still trumped those of sexual identity. This became especially evident during carnival season, when black New Orleanians claimed their own space, protested racial inequalities, and burlesqued white New Orleans society. Notable among these carnival protests were the parades of the Black Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club. Regular features of the early parades were gangs of female impersonators who followed the rolling floats along the parade route. The leader of one of these groups was Corinne the queen, called "The Gay Cat," crowned Queen of Zulu in 1931. Transvestism demonstrated the uncertainty of multiple identity categories, and in the case of carnival, black cross-dressers challenged not only categories of sex, gender, and sexuality but also categories of race. While confusing male and female, they also brought into question differences between white and black.

In the 1940s cross-dressing for reasons other than carnival became popular parts of New Orleans nightlife. Drag queens performed for tourists at the lakefront's My-Oh-My Club. If one was particularly adventurous, one could cross the color line and visit the Dew Drop Inn, where interracial liaisons were common. In these clubs many cross-dressers found acceptance.

The Postwar Years to 1970

Following World War II, homosexuality became much more visible in New Orleans. City Park, Audubon Park, and Jackson Square were important spaces in the city's sexual geography where men could find quick and indiscriminate sex. The Lee Circle Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the segregated Dryades YMCA were notorious among residents and visitors alike, and in the 1950s and 1960s, several bars, including the Galley House, Café Lafitte In Exile, Dixie's House of Music, Tony Bassina's, Brady's, and Charlene's served a growing gay and lesbian community. Both men and women frequented these clubs and everyone dressed well.

Police harassment accompanied the emergence of a visible homosexual community. On a single night in 1953, the New Orleans Police Department raided several gay and lesbian bars. At the Golden Rod, forty-three women and one man were arrested for obscenity. In September 1962 the vice squad arrested twenty-nine individuals in four raids, and from 1959 to 1961 a single bar was raided seventy-eight times. Following these arrests, the arrestees' names appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as did the charges and the incidentals of the arrests. Such revelations often resulted in job loss and eviction. Some committed suicide rather than face the devastating consequences to both self and family of public exposure. The most notorious case of harassment occurred between 1967 and 1969, when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison targeted respected businessman Clay Shaw as a conspirator in the John F. Kennedy assassination because of Shaw's open homosexuality. The once-wealthy Shaw died in 1974 after suffering financial and physical distress.

Growing Political Activism

In the 1970s, New Orleans reached the height of its gay political activism. In the 1960s, the homophile movement had attracted a small following in the city, which resulted in marches through the Quarter. In January 1970, New Orleans's first militant gay political organization, the New Orleans Gay Liberation Front (GLF), campaigned for six days in front of City Hall to protest police harassment. The GLF was soon succeeded by other groups, including the Metropolitan Community Church, the Daughters Of Bilitis, the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the Crescent City Coalition, and the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus.

Increasing political activism in New Orleans coincided with the Upstairs Lounge tragedy. On the evening of 24 June 1973, an arsonist ignited a fire in the stairwell of the second-floor Upstairs Bar. For protection, the lounge had installed bars on its windows, and in the ensuing blaze, thirty-two men and women lost their lives. Memorial services were held at St. Marks United Methodist Church, where mourners proudly exited to the glare of local television cameras.

In the spring of 1977, Human Equal Rights for Everyone (HERE) organized a political march for 18 June to protest Anita Bryant's first public appearance since the repeal of a Florida ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation nine days earlier. The planned march attracted hundreds on the day of Bryant's performance and represented the pinnacle of popular activism in New Orleans.

Celebration and Tragedy

Traditionally, political issues in New Orleans have found expression in social activity. As the homophile movement spread across America in the 1950s and 1960s, New Orleanians formed the first gay carnival krewes (social clubs dedicated to the celebration of Mardi Gras). The earliest, the Krewe of Yuga, debuted in 1959 and folded in 1962 when police raided the krewe's carnival ball and arrested ninety-six participants. The longest-running krewe is Petronius, which held its first ball in 1962 and is the largest gay krewe in New Orleans. At the height of gay Mardi Gras in 1984, eleven krewes held balls. However, in the 1980s New Orleans's gay community endured the onslaught of AIDS. As an epicenter for the disease, New Orleans suffered devastating losses among the gay male population, and by the mid-1990s only four krewes remained, including Petronius, Amon Ra, Armenius, and the Lords of Leather. An important part of gay carnival is the Bourbon Street Awards, hosted since the early 1960s at various locations on either Bourbon or St. Ann Streets and showcasing the costumes and tableaux painstakingly created by New Orleanians. In the 1990s Southern Decadence became the center of New Orleans Labor Day revelries and has come to rival Mardi Gras as the gay carnival. The celebration began as a private party in 1972 and has evolved to attract visitors from around the world. The third major festival in New Orleans is Gay Halloween. Like Southern Decadence, Halloween New Orleans began as a small gathering of friends in 1984 and evolved into a major event in the 1990s. Since 1987, the proceeds from Halloween New Orleans have benefited Lazarus House, a hospice established in response to the AIDS epidemic.

Bibliography

Coyle, Katy, and Nadiene Van Dyke. "Sex, Smashing, and Storyville in Turn-of-the-Century New Orleans: Reexamining the Continuum of Lesbian Sexuality. In Carryin' on in the Lesbian and Gay South. Edited by John Howard. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Holditch, W. Kenneth. "William Spratling, William Faulkner, and Other Famous Creoles." Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 423–434.

——. "The Last Frontier of Bohemia: Tennessee Williams in New Orleans, 1938–1983." The Southern Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 1–37.

Kirkwood, James. American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison Affair in the City of New Orleans. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

Mitchell, Reid. All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Thomas, James W. Lyle Saxon: A Critical Biography. Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 1991.

Richard D. H. Clark

see alsocapote; truman; dunbar-nelson, alice; gentrification; williams, tennessee.