Tell us something about your favorite club and email us to be put into the clubs memories archives.Įxample: See what Brian & Horst wrote about “The Wedgewood” Now we need the community’s help & WELCOME your in put! MC Film & Friends have put together this list of “Bars That Were” The next day, Lunden found the court overflowing with men and women brought in from other bars in the city.“Today is going to be the future’s good old days!” John D’Emilio, who made passing reference to this particular raid in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, writes, “In New Orleans in 1953, vice officers packed Doris Lunden and sixty-three other women into vans after clearing them from a lesbian bar in the French Quarter. Historian James Sears notes, “Then there was also the Goldenrod-whose front area for straight men served as a cover for a back-room lesbian bar-where one Saturday night in 1953 forty-three women were booked for disturbing the peace and being ‘loud and boisterous’.”
43 women were arrested at the Goldenrod Inn on Frenchmen Street alone. One of the most sweeping police raids occurred in 1953 when officers descended upon several gay and lesbian bars throughout the French Quarter and Marigny. Dayrides publicly proclaimed that homosexuals were the city’s “Number One vice problem,” adding “They are the ones we want to get rid of most.”
‘It almost seems as if youngsters who develop homosexual tendencies in other Southern cities are put on a train and sent to New Orleans,’ he said.”Īnd in 1955, Police Superintendent Provosty A. The homosexuals are, he said, ‘continuously recruiting’ and there at least four ‘places’ in the Quarter which cater to almost no one but homosexuals. ‘High school boys and girls enticed into places habituated by homosexuals often see an obscene show or something of that nature as a starter,’ he added. ‘In several instances, parents have come to police begging them to save their children,’ he asserted. For that reason, he said, the homosexual problem is one of the city’s most serious. Foster, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on the Vieux Carre, in an address before the Civic Council of New Orleans. “A warning that homosexuals in the French Quarter are at work corrupting high school boys and girls was made Friday by Richard R. As early as 1951, this sensational headline graced the pages of the Times-Picayune: “Curb Advocated on Homosexuals: Crackdown to Save Young Persons Demanded.” The Committee suggested the city adopt a “Climate of Hostility” toward homosexuals.
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For example, it revoked the Starlet Lounge’s liquor license and it arrested the staff of Tony Bacino’s multiple times. In 1958, Mayor Chep Morrison established a special “Committee on the Problem of Sex Deviates.” The committee harassed gay bars in the French Quarter. So the attitude among the powers-that-be toward our community was to encourage them to “tone it down.”Īnd just how did they do that? With the big stick of the law. The queer tourist market was still in the closet. Back then, the tourist market was primarily white, straight male conventioneers. Just as the tourism industry began to blossom in the years after WW II, many business leaders and politicians at City Hall felt that gay visibility would frighten away straight tourist dollars. The New Orleans Police Department was still raiding gay bars as recently as the 1980s. It wasn’t too long ago that rainbow flags on Rampart Street and Mayoral proclamations for Pride and Southern Decadence would have been inconceivable. There have always been queer people in New Orleans, and while the city currently looks favorably upon us, it wasn’t always so.