Gay Guide to New Orleans
On 24 June 1973 someone poured lighter fluid down the stairwell of the UpStairs Lounge, a second-floor bar in the French Quarter, and set it alight. Thirty-two people died. It was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States until Pulse in 2016, and what followed was its own kind of wound: churches refused to hold funerals, an Episcopal bishop rebuked the one clergyman who did hold a prayer service, and some of the dead went unclaimed by their own families. The city spent decades not discussing it. That has changed, and the anniversary is now marked properly.
The French Quarter scene turns on one corner, where Bourbon Street meets St Ann. Bourbon Pub Parade and Oz face each other across it and never really stop. A block up, Cafe Lafitte in Exile traces back to 1933 and took its odd name in 1953, when the owners lost their lease and moved the bar down the street rather than lose the crowd; it claims to be the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the country. Good Friends, the Golden Lantern, Corner Pocket, The Crossing and the Silver Fox fill in the surrounding blocks.
The Marigny, just downriver, is where locals go when the Quarter gets to be too much. The Phoenix holds down Elysian Fields, with Big Daddy's, The Friendly Bar and the AllWays Lounge on St Claude nearby, and the Country Club further out for its pool.
Southern Decadence takes Labor Day weekend and effectively becomes a second Mardi Gras. The real Carnival has its own queer lineage: the Krewe of Yuga was raided by police in 1962, and the Krewe of Petronius, founded the year before, is the one that survived and still holds its ball each season.
Most of the lodging here is guesthouses rather than hotels, largely in the Quarter and the Marigny. Bars are not required to close, summer is genuinely punishing, and the city assumes you know both.