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Queering Katrina: Gay Discourses of the Disaster in New Orleans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2010

GARY RICHARDS
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Abstract

Within certain conservative narratives imposed upon the events of 2005, New Orleans has been demonized as a site promoting gay licentiousness and therefore meriting divine retribution. In queer narratives, New Orleans has been valorized as promoting that same licentiousness but lamented for having those hedonistic excesses tempered by the widespread destruction of the city. Especially in the latter scenario, there is a significant degree of nostalgia, an element that also marks other queer understandings of the city that focus not so much on the hedonism as on the day-to-day warp and woof of pre-hurricane gay communities. The main focus of this essay is on how, as gay communities have been reconfigured in the aftermath of the hurricane by temporary and permanent evacuations, job relocations, and other alterations, gay responses have continued to evince a range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, resignation, and optimism. This essay focusses on gay literary production responding directly to the hurricane to examine essays and poems published as Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (2006) and Blanche Survives Katrina in FEMA Trailer Named Desire, Mark Sam Rosenthal's off-Broadway show structured around a parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that, as a result of this structure, faced legal action instigated by the University of the South, owner of the intellectual rights to Williams's literary production. The collection and the play are sustained queer responses to Katrina's flooding of the city that showcase both the energizing and problematic aspects of these responses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3: Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After , August 2010 , pp. 519 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 For details about the history and current manifestations of Southern Decadence see John T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 96–106, 273; www.southerndecadence.net.

2 Michael Marcavage quoted in “Hurricane Katrina Destroys New Orleans Days before ‘Southern Decadence,’” Repent America, 31 Dec. 2005, at www.repentamerica.com/pr_hurricanekatrina.html, accessed 29 Sept. 2009.

3 Hagee quoted in Matt Corley, “Hagee Says Hurricane Katrina Struck New Orleans Because It Was ‘Planning A Sinful’ ‘Homosexual Rally,’” Think Progress, 23 April 2008, at http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/23/hagee-katrina-mccain/, accessed 29 Sept. 2009. See also Terry Gross, “Pastor John Hagee on Christian Zionism, Katrina,” NPR, 18 Sept. 2006.

4 Understandings of New Orleans as a site of (homo)sexual license and licentiousness have a lengthy history, as discussed by, among others, John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14, 15.

5 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 3.

6 Jennifer Liberto, “Latinos Flock to New Orleans,” CNNMoney.com, Cable News Network, 19 Aug. 2009, at money.cnn.com/2009/08/19/news/economy/…/index.htm, accessed 20 Sept. 2009. See also Fussell, Elizabeth, “Hurricane Chasers in New Orleans,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 31 (2009), 375–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laurel E. Fletcher, Phuong Pham, Eric Stover, and Patrick Vinck, “Rebuilding after Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights in New Orleans,” University of California, Berkeley, Jun. 2006, at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1448373, accessed 20 Sept. 2009.

7 Emilie Bahr, “City's Gay Vacation Appeal Drops,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 19 Jan. 2009, n.p.

8 David Paisley quoted in Bahr.

9 Poppy Z. Brite, “Cocksucker Suit,” in Greg Herren and Paul J. Willis, eds., Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (New York: Alyson, 2006), 17.

10 Karissa Kary, “Café Reflections Out of the Blue,” in Love, Bourbon Street, 27, original emphasis.

11 Victoria A. Brownworth, “Living in Desire: A New Orleans Memory,” in Love, Bourbon Street, 53.

12 Toni Amato and Amie M. Evans, “A Home Away from Home,” in Love, Bourbon Street, 132; Greg Herren and Paul J. Willis, Introduction, in Love, Bourbon Street, xv; Patricia Nell Warren, “A Westerner Ponders New Orleans,” in Love, Bourbon Street, xxiv.

13 Classic texts within this scholarship include George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1992); idem, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Howard; and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). For pointed fictional critiques of New Orleans gay communities see, for instance, Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and Jim Grimsley, Boulevard (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2002).

14 Paul J. Willis, “Fur Chaps and the Candyman,” in Love, Bourbon Street, 148, 149.

15 Willis, 145; Herren, “I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet,” in Love, Bourbon Street, 166.

16 Herren, 169; Warren, xxii.

17 Herren, 152, 154.

18 Ibid., 183.

19 George Levine, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in David H. Richter, ed., Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edn (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 379, emphasis added.

20 Michael Bérubé, “Aesthetics and the Literal Imagination,” in Richter, 393.

21 Brite, 17.

22 Ibid., 17–18, original emphasis.

23 Ibid., 19.

24 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.

25 See, in particular, Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: Norton, 1960), 111–37.

26 For trailers, reviews, and other information associated with the production see www.blanchesurviveskatrina.com.

27 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet, 1951), 142.

28 Critchley, 17.

29 Anita Gates, “No Kindness from Strangers at the Superdome? Tsk, Tsk,” New York Times, 29 Jan. 2009, at theater.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/theater/reviews/29blan.html.

30 Ibid.

31 See Patrick Healy, “One Man's Blanche Is a University's Infringement,” New York Times, 4 Feb. 2009.