Founded in the summer of 1972 by a few friends as a modest celebration, the Southern Decadence festival has since grown into one of New Orleans’s largest annual tourist events. The multiday extravaganza features street parties, drag contests, dancing, drinking, and bead tosses, culminating with a boisterous parade through the French Quarter. With over 200,000 participants―predominantly LGBT+―these unbridled, pre–Labor Day festivities now generate millions of dollars in revenue. Howard Philips Smith and Frank Perez’s Southern Decadence in New Orleans brings together an astounding array of materials to provide the first comprehensive, historical look at Southern Decadence. In an engaging account spanning five decades, the authors combine a trove of rare memorabilia from the event’s founders, early photographs and film stills, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews with longtime participants, a list of all the parades and grand marshals, as well as reproductions of early Southern Decadence invitations. Throughout, the authors explore the pivotal moments and public perceptions related to the festival―including the myths and conjecture that often inaccurately characterized it―and provide an in-depth narrative detailing how a small party in the Faubourg Tremé grew into a worldwide destination predominantly for gay men. Lauded by city leaders as the second-most profitable festival in New Orleans (outshone only by Mardi Gras), Southern Decadence emanates an air of frivolity that masks its enormous impact on the culture and economy of the Crescent City. But with such growth comes the challenge of maintaining the original spirit of camaraderie while managing expanding administrative and logistical responsibilities. Southern Decadence in New Orleans serves as a historical record that helps ensure the future of the celebration remains forever linked to the joyous impulse of its humble beginnings.

Southern Decadence in New Orleans

History

Smith, Howard Philips

Perez, Frank

Americas

LSU Press

Raul Julia

Narrates the life and career of the Puerto Rican born actor whose versatility was evident throughout thirty years of performances in the theater, movies, and television.

Raul Julia (Contemporary Hispanic Americans)

Children's Books

Weil, Ann

Biographies

Steck-Vaughn Co.

Heinemann/Raintree

Treasures of the Vieux Carré is not only a collection of ten self-guided walking tours of New Orleans' French Quarter, it is also an insider's look, in full color, at America's most unique neighborhood. French Quarter resident and professional tour guide Frank Perez draws upon his years of experience living in the Vieux Carre to offer visitors and locals alike an in-depth exploration of the hidden treasures throughout Bienville's ancient La Nouvelle Orleans.
Each tour contains step by step directions, detailed maps, color photos, a brief introductory essay, a recommended reading list, and engaging vignettes about multiple points of interest.
Whether you're interested in where Tennessee Williams used to drink or where Oysters Rockefeller was born or perhaps even where the Sicilian Mafia in America began, this guide will lead you familiar landmarks such as Café du Monde and Jackson Square but also to little known locations such as the balcony Elvis Presley sang from in the film King Creole and the oldest gay bar in the United States. Along the way, you'll meet pirates and voodoo priestesses, explore Creole culture, learn why the French Quarter is the most haunted neighborhood in America, and take in the montage of architectural styles that characterizes the modern day French Quarter.
Tour topics include: General French Quarter African-American Heritage Architecture and Historic Homes Culinary Scene LGBT+ Historical Interest Ghosts and Spirits Hollywood South Jazz and Musical Heritage Literary History Vice and Crime

Treasures of the Vieux Carre: Ten Self-Guided Walking Tours of the French Quarter

Travel

United States

LL-Publications

Review\nThis is a work of tremendous scholarship and keen insight into New Orleans gay history. -- Scott S. Ellis, author of Madame Vieux Carré: The French Quarter in the Twentieth Century and The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History\nThere is simply no way of understanding queer Louisiana in the late twentieth century and the queer American South in the same period, more broadly, without understanding the legacy of this one gay hippie. Political Animal represents the first and only work of scholarship to address this gap in public knowledge by revealing the groundwork of how a major human rights movement unfolded regionally, through coalitions assembled by an unlikely citizen powerbroker. -- from the foreword by Robert W. Fieseler\nDuring Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle―a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco. Their relationship was an improbable love story that changed the course of LGBTQ+ history. With Doolittle’s money, Butler was able to retire and devote his life to political activism in the cause of queer liberation. A survivor of the horrific Up Stairs Lounge arson, Butler was a founding member of the first statewide lesbian and gay rights organization in Louisiana and an early champion for transgender rights, playing a key role in the eight-year struggle to persuade PFLAG to become the first national LGBTQ+ organization to include trans people in its mission statement.\nIn Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler, author Frank Perez traces Butler’s amazing life from his early childhood in Depression-era New Orleans, his adolescence at Carville where his father worked, his first unsuccessful attempt at college, his time in the army as a closeted gay man, his adventures in Alaska, his transformation into a hippie in the 1960s, his love affair with Doolittle, his decades as a gay rights advocate, and ultimately, his twilight years as an elder statesman.\nBased on Butler's own personal papers, including hundreds of letters, and dozens of interviews, Political Animal paints an intimate portrait of a legendary figure in gay politics and the times in which he lived.

Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Gay Bar is the first comprehensive treatment of the history of gay New Orleans. Drawn primarily on the recollections of dozens of gay men and women, Frank Perez and Jeffrey Palmquist weave a fascinating narrative of how gay New Orleans evolved throughout the twentieth century. In addition to showing the incredible and previously unrecognized contributions gay people have made to New Orleans culture, In Exile also illuminates the darkness in which ordinary gay people lived secret double-lives for decades and chronicles the social forces which ultimately enabled gay New Orleanians to live openly and honestly. Written with graceful insight and thoughtful perception, In Exile is not only a captivating history book, it is also a beautiful meditation on the intersection of place and identity.

In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Bar (NoLa Gay)

Palmquist, Jeffrey

Rewriting the Ink: Before, Behind, and Beyond Bars

Willis, Leslie A

Avina, Jesse

Lucero, Michael

Scheinuck, Joseph

Memoirs

Independently published

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Books by Perez, Frank