I recently completed the LGBT History of New Orleans course at Loyola University, taught by Frank Perez. This class was an amazing telling of the recent history of some of the most influential people in this city’s history from the first hand perspective of Frank who was either there for the stories he told or heard them first hand from the people who were.

He made an observation in one of the classes about memory and how fallible it is. How we know eye witness accounts are not reliable and memory is even less so. How hard it is to discern the Truth from the myth in a world where humans are reporting the “facts”…As a journalist by training, I ponder the idea of Truth a lot.

When Herbert Asbury was writing The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, he made a similar observation on his research. “…Asbury preferred to use the files of old papers because he had learned from experience that people do not remember accurately, and will usually substitute imagination for facts in the weak spots.” Tour guides are certainly known to claim that we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story…

Frank also mentioned a book called The Mysteries of New Orleans in one of the lectures¹. It’s a compilation of newspaper articles written in German by Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein in the 1850s while he was living in New Orleans. One is provocatively titled “Lesbian Love” in which he describes a colony of lesbians living near the lake and along the New Basin Canal. At the time, the use of the word lesbian would have referred to someone from the island of Lesbos. However, his articles were translated to English in 2002, well after the use of lesbian as a homosexual woman was part of our parlance.

I learned in my studies of Voodoo near the lake and New Basin Canal is also commonly reported as the location where the Voodoo queens resided. I’ve learned since that “lewd and abandoned women” were relegated to The Swamp, an area near the New Basin Canal in the Lorette Laws of 1857. Is this all a coincidence or were these the same colonies of women fulfilling all of these roles for the imaginations of male writers?

Of course, I immediately got in line to borrow The Mysteries of New Orleans from the library. It’s about 700 pages long, so I’m working through it. In his review just after Hurricane Katrina, Christopher Capozzola writes²:

“A tender romance between Claudine and Orleana makes up one of the novel’s many subplots. The love scenes are tame by modern standards–“How sweet and supple your waist is!” is about as sultry as the pillow talk gets–but the author’s sympathetic portrayal of their love is striking. “Lesbian ladies,” he noted, “are not as bad as most, and they are as decent and well mannered as the rest of the world of women, after their fashion.” Equally astonishing is his insistence that their love was common in New Orleans in the 1850’s. “We find them,” he writes, “in clubs of twelve to fifteen on the Hercules Quay, along the Pensacola Landing, and all along the entire left side of the New Basin.” In the rest of the novel, Von Reizenstein depicted real people and locations to give his work credibility; it’s not out of the question to think that these same-sex communities existed too.”

So maybe New Orleans is the birthplace of lesbian romance along with so many other things. Maybe this is yet another layer of the matriarchy of New Orleans. Maybe it was just a made up rumor like so many tour guides have perpetuated.

Did you know that sometimes the Court of Two Sisters is reported as a cover for lesbians in tour guide stories? Here’s the true story of the two sisters.

I hope you’re having a wonderful Southern Decadence!

Sources

1. Perez, Frank, “Queer Arts and Letters.” LGBT+ History of New Orleans, Loyola University of New Orleans, June 12, 2024. ↩︎
2. Capozzola, Christopher. “New Orleans: birthplace of lesbian romance?” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2006, p. 40. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A140547843/LitRC?u=tulane&sid=googleScholar&xid=1ac5d4f3. Accessed 13 June 2024. ↩︎

Klotz, Sarah. “Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Contagious Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2, 2012, pp. 231–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467184. Accessed 13 June 2024.