To New Orleans

I will be traveling again in June, to New Orleans where I lived for ten years (83-93). I’m driving and my younger sister Vanessa is coming with me. If any of my three siblings hear I’m going to New Orleans, they are always ready to join me. As it’s a working visit, one is enough this time.

I will be working with Rick DeLaup, again, an old friend. Rick and I joined up last October for several interviews, and before that, he was helping with the LGBT TV Show, Just for the Record.” Our first time together however was recording the “Lords of Leather” Gay Mardi Gras Ball in New Orleans, around 1989 or so.

Both my mother and eldest sister were in the audience, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves! So many people came to say hello and shower them with Mardi Gras beads and trinkets. Having your mother there was a really big deal.

I had my mother wear my tuxedo that night (it was formal and we had no ball gown in the house). She looked great in it and rather liked how she looked herself. I took her to Charlenes, the oldest lesbian bar in town (now gone), after the show. They had a really nice lounge called “Over ‘C’s that was a key club upstairs.

We climbed the stairs and I bellied up to the bar to get an order in. After a few minutes I noticed women gliding through the crowd toward us, well not “us” exactly, more like toward my mother in her snazzy tux. I heard myself whispering “back off - she’s my mother!”

I have three interviews to conduct, including a funeral director, who worked for one of the very few funeral homes that would take the bodies of those who had died from AIDS.

This year I will also be covering a conference for the 50th Anniversary of the fire at the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans. Up until the Pulse nightclub attack, this was the deadliest incident at an LGBT establishment. Thirty-two people perished in the fire.

At the time, local police did not consider the tragedy a top priority. One officer told a reporter, “This was, after all, a queer bar.” No elected official responded publicly to the fire. Archbishop Philip Hannan denied the victims Catholic funerals.