“The French Quarter’s Rainbow Heritage.” Gallier Gatherings, New Orleans, LA 2021. “OUT Traveler’s Get Back OUT There with Will and James.” YouTube Video, 2021. “The Children of Yuga: A Brief History of the Birth of Gay Carnival.” Making Mardi Gras Symposium, The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2022. Charlette, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2018. “The LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana: A Community Organizing Success Story.” In Queering Education in the Deep South. “A Night to Remember: A Review of Upstairs Inferno.” In The Gay and Lesbian Review. “ Moments in Gay New Orleans History.” Regular column in Ambush Magazine. “ Rainbow History.” Regular column in French Quarter Journal. (with Jeffrey Palmquist) Bedford, TX: LL Publications, 2012. In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Gay Bar. Treasures of the Vieux Carre: Ten Self-Guided Walking Tours of the French Quarter. (with Jeffrey Palmquist) Bedford, TX: LL Publications, 2016. My Gay New Orleans: 28 Personal Reminiscences on LGBT+ Life in New Orleans, Editor. Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler (Forthcoming from the University of Mississippi Press). Preparing to lead the 2018 Southern Decadence parade. Gay Appreciation Award for Best LGBT Business. Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame. Member, New Orleans LGBT Hospitality Alliance Member, Gulf Coast LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce To book The Rainbow Fleur de Lis Walking Tour or schedule a public speaking engagement, email me at or call 50.Ĭo-founder, LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana We have such a rich LGBT+ history in New Orleans that it is challenging to fit it all into one tour.
There is so much ground to cover–bar culture, trans history, lesbian activism, gay Carnival, racial divisions, Southern Decadence, drag history, legendary bars, sex work, the queer literary scene, Pride, to say nothing of dozens of eccentric characters. I generally try to customize the tour according to guests’ interests. The tour has evolved since then as I have written several more books and hundreds of articles. Bubbly is known to pinch guests’ bottoms from time to time, though his origins are dubious at best.The tour grew out of the research I conducted while writing In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Gay Bar.
They’re not the only spirits around: An entity named Mr. Notable writers from Truman Capote to Tennessee Williams became frequent customers, and their ghosts are said to make appearances to this day. The grand reopening party was a masquerade, where patrons dressed up as their favorite exiles from history, from Oscar Wilde to Dante Alighieri to Napoleon Bonaparte. When a new landlord forced the bar owners to vacate the location, they took “Café Lafitte” and its trappings up the street, where in 1953 they reopened as Café Lafitte in Exile. While it couldn’t have been fairly termed a “gay bar” in the 1930s, it was as gay-friendly as an establishment could have been at the time. It’s one of the oldest buildings in New Orleans.
It’s a comforting balance in a city where you’re likely to lose your footing once or twice.īefore its exile, the original Café Lafitte occupied Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, the former headquarters of a pirate whose life of crime was pardoned for assisting the Americans in the War of 1812. It seems only fitting that a few short blocks away from the oldest Roman Catholic convent in the United States, what now claims to be the country’s oldest continuously-operated gay bar opened in 1933.