Posts - Page 10 of 18 - From the Deep

Lesbians in 19th Century New Orleans

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…

January 15, 1936, New Orleans States, New Orleans, Louisiana, Page 22

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

Perez, Frank, “Queer Arts and Letters.” LGBT+ History of New Orleans, Loyola University of New Orleans, June 12, 2024. ↩︎
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.

Museum Review: Flooded House Museum

That annual ritual of acknowledging the disaster and flood of Hurricane Katrina. Here we are. I spent the first 18 years after Katrina avoiding any media related to it. Now, guests regularly ask me about it on tours. It’s always a different question, but Katrina is the still one of most significant events in New Orleans history, especially recent memory. My recommendation for paying homage is the Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.

I live in Gentilly, one of the neighborhoods that the levee failure completely destroyed. We bought our home in 2013, eight years after Katrina flooded the neighborhood. It felt like a lifetime ago already then, but half the houses on our block were either still blighted or were just empty lots. We still have never repaired our garage, so it still has the the rust mark showing us exactly how high the water was. Our house only flooded once in its nearly 100 years of history.

In Gentilly, levees.org converted one of the destroyed homes into the Flooded House Museum and Levee Exhibit. It sits at the site of the one of the levee failures, the one that flooded my home. You look through the windows of the house to see the scene a family would have returned to after the disaster. There is also an exhibit that explains exactly what happened, why it happened, and what’s been done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

This museum is quite literally in the middle of a middle class New Orleans neighborhood, and it’s an extremely heavy topic. So it’s a different kind of experience than I typically recommend in New Orleans. A deep New Orleans experience. If you’re interested in learning more about both the human impact and the science behind the levees, I highly recommend the free Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.

Museum Review: Historic New Orleans Collection – Captive State

If you only have time for one museum in New Orleans, my recommendation will always be the Historic New Orleans Collection. In the center of the French Quarter, in a historic location with a public courtyard, well-curated, free, and most importantly air conditioned, it is a necessary New Orleans experience. If you want to understand Louisiana on a deeper level, do not miss the current exhibit Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration running until January 19, 2025.

They offer a guided tour of the exhibit a few times a week. I did the tour on a Friday. My guide, Kurt, was thoughtful, calm, and engaging. Our group of five included two New Orleanians, one person from Montreal, another from Toronto via London, and a fifth who was late and didn’t introduce himself. Kurt pointed out some of the finer points the exhibit is trying to make.

Incarceration Rates: Louisiana Compared to Major Countries — The exhibit opens with this startling graph.

The central thesis is clear: mass incarceration and slavery are linked, intrinsically. Using laws, the state constitution, and data about the prison and jail populations, the historians have painted a very clear and irrefutable picture of how we got to be the most incarcerated place on earth through regulations around leasing enslaved people for profit which evolved into leasing incarcerated people for profit. The incarcerated people in Louisiana and New Orleans are disproportionately Black; there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison or jail than make up the population. This fact isn’t just true in Louisiana as the Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that 38.8 percent of the prison population is Black while the Census Bureau reports that only 13.7 percent of the population is Black.

Enslaved people and incarcerated people have built and maintained every aspect of New Orleans since the 1700s, including levee repair, city waste and drainage, street cleaning and maintenance, pothole repair, building the Carondelet canal, and cemetery maintenance.

New Orleans is the most American city for many reasons, in my opinion, and one of them is the prominent role of the American institution of race-based slavery. Another is that Louisiana is the most incarcerated place in the most incarcerated nation. We are in a Captive State. We are the Captive State. The America we know was shaped by hundreds of years of oppression, and New Orleans sits at the epicenter of that oppression to this day. The most American city is not necessarily a good title to hold.

We look in horror on the truths of slavery in the United States from centuries ago, yet tend to look away from the horror happening in front of us now. This is largely because incarceration has been increasingly hidden from public view even as they build and maintain the infrastructure we rely on. Everyone who drove into New Orleans from the airport passed the notorious Orleans Parish Prison on the interstate. Yet, very few realize what they see.

Orleans Parish Prison

The historians at the Historic New Orleans Collection are working to shine a bright, glaring light on the American problem of mass incarceration in Louisiana in particular, and how easily we draw a direct line from slavery to mass incarceration. The tour guide expressly stated his objective was to get more people talking about this problem in a respectful way. I hope to expand the scope of their bright light by encouraging as many people as possible to see the exhibit for yourself.

Truth in advertising alert: I had to return for a second visit about a week later to see the second floor. Here you’ll find images of people in hospice care while incarcerated. It was too much to take in at once. Every room of the exhibit includes a content warning before you begin. I hope you will take the time to see this exhibit and share what you learn with those you love.