November 2024

Founded in 2012, this powerhouse organization works to bring New Orleans’ queer history out of the closet and into the open.

– by Doug Brantley

In 2012, longtime New Orleans gay rights activist Stewart Butler called a handful of community advocates and historians to his Treme neighborhood home, the famed Faerie Playhouse on Esplanade Avenue.

There, he presented them with 30 overstuffed bankers boxes and a challenge: To find a way to properly preserve and maintain the copious papers, meeting notes, flyers, and related ephemera pertaining to his decades of activism. And the greater goal of chronicling the city’s queer history in general. 

So began the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. Since its inception, the group has grown into a statewide collective that has helped locate similar collections (everything from political tracts and posters to gay Carnival krewe costumes) and facilitate their donations to various museums, libraries, and archival repositories, including the Louisiana State Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), and Tulane University, among others.

An invaluable resource for historians, researchers, educators, authors, and documentarians, the Archives Project also serves as a memory bank of sorts for the community at large, through its website, public programming, and other initiatives. 

“Much of queer history remains in the closet,” says cofounder and current executive director Frank Perez, “and that is regrettable, if understandable. New Orleans has this reputation of being so inclusive and friendly and all that, which is great. But it wasn’t always that way for queer people.

“New Orleans was very homophobic for a long time. A lot of queer history remains hidden because people didn’t want to talk about it. To identify as gay or to preserve that history could get you fired, evicted, put in jail or maybe a mental institution. So, it presents a unique set of challenges for people today trying to recover that history.” 

In addition to amassing contributions from individuals, as well as organizations and businesses (such as the Corner Pocket bar, which recently donated 25 years of promotional posters), the Archives Project seeks to identify and illuminate areas that are missing in the LGBT+ historical record.

Perez points to the city’s oft-overlooked and little-documented Black queer community, on which the Archives Project has partnered with the HNOC to commission an in-the-works book. And to Presbyterian minister Carl Schlegel, who in 1907 advocated for homosexual rights from his Claiborne Avenue church pulpit, where the group recently received approval to place a state historical marker.

But perhaps the biggest gap in New Orleans’ LGBT+ timeline is that created by the AIDS epidemic, which all but decimated an entire generation during the 1980s and ’90s and severely set back the advances made by the gay liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s. 

“It’s hard to quantify, but important to consider, all of the people we lost,” notes Perez. “What would they have done? What contributions would they have made—whether it’s artistically, politically, medically, whatever their careers—if they had not died?”

In an effort to fill that void, the Archives Project mounted the New Orleans AIDS Memory Project, a series of monthly events that started in June, from panel discussions to keynote addresses to film screenings, all of which were recorded for prosperity and are available on the organization’s site. 

The program culminates Dec. 1 on World AIDS Day with a dual exhibit at the Dodwell House on Esplanade, where three New Orleans panels from the 50,000-panel NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (representing 110,000 lost lives) will also be on display. The exhibition will be followed by an annual commemorative ceremony at the AIDS Memorial in Washington Square Park.

On loan from the National Stonewall Museum, Archives and Library, the world’s largest LGBT+ repository, “Standing on the Shoulders of Heroes” spotlights pivotal players in the community’s backstory. There’s slain San Francisco city councilman Harvey Milk and boundary-pushing tennis great Billie Jean King, along with playwright/AIDS activist Larry Kramer, trans actress Laverne Cox, and numerous others.

“They risked their careers, their jobs, everything in order to be outspokenly gay,” said Stonewall National Museum executive director Robert Kesten during the exhibits’ October opening. “There are women, people of color, and people you would not necessarily think, like Bayard Rustin.

“Rustin is totally essential. He planned, pretty much single-handedly, the Martin Luther King march on Washington. He’s who brought the passive movement to MLK.”

Kesten went on to explain that despite Rustin’s contributions to King’s civil rights movement, the activist was “thrown under the bus” when it was revealed that he was gay.

The tandem “Never Silent” exhibit, created in conjunction with the national human rights advocacy group PEN America, focuses on the community’s long-fought struggles against censorship, book bans, political complacency, disinformation, and social injustice. 

Sound familiar? Despite the rise in gay visibility and inclusion in recent years and milestone achievements, such as the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, the times they are a-changin’ and, unfortunately, once again, not in an uplifting way.

But as with those early groundbreakers, steps back only strengthen the resolve to push forward and further emphasize the significance of the Archives Project’s efforts.

“One of the questions I get all the time is, ‘Why is history important?’” says Perez. “Well, it’s important because, if you don’t know it, you’re doomed to repeat it. And we see that unfolding before our very eyes. The queer community is terrified right now, especially the trans community, of the dark time we’re entering.

“We cannot remain silent. Our hope is that these two exhibits, along with panels of the AIDS quilt, will help people to remember but also inspire them to persevere and not lose heart.”

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