Café Lafitte in Exile: Queer New Orleans and the Story of America's Oldest Gay Bar

Caf?Lafitte in Exile tells the story of queer New Orleans through the lens of its most legendary gay bar. The bar has held a central place in New Orleans's queer scene for many years, with a profuse mythology entwining its history. Caf?Lafitte in Exile endeavors to set the record straight.

The story begins long before the founding of gay bars, with an exploration of Indigenous sexual and gender roles, colonial views on queerness, and the notable gay writers, musicians, and activists of nineteenth-century New Orleans. Queer men played a crucial role in the preservation of the French Quarter in the early twentieth century, and the resulting "French Quarter Renaissance" deeply informed the establishment of Caf?Lafitte.

In 1953, in an era of aggressive anti-gay crackdowns, Caf?Lafitte moved to its present location. Later, in the midst of the burgeoning gay liberation movement in the 1970s, the bar was sold to Tom Wood, under whose ownership it has sometimes failed to live up to its potential as a diverse, inclusive gathering place. Still, the bar has remained a crucial locus of queer New Orleans culture through the HIV/AIDS crisis and into the present era of more widespread acceptance.

Drawing on oral histories and newspaper accounts, as well as personal recollections, Caf?Lafitte in Exile is a vivid portrait of Caf?Lafitte and the queer community that sustains it. It's a history of joy, a chronicle of struggle, and a reclamation of the history of southern queerness.