Two magicians made a Halloween store Shreveport’s secret Gay Pride headquarters.

From 1956 to 1965, the residents of the boom state of Florida were held hostage to a McCarthy-esque investigation with the power to declare anyone who opposed segregation—including Black…

Queer joy dazzles until Brownshirts storm the stage — honey, it was all in "Cabaret"

Harry T. Moore and his wife were blown up in their home.

'Tinderbox' author Robert W. Fieseler on moments of loss and recovery for the queer community — and a stolen bronze monument. The memorial plaque honoring the victims of the Up Stairs Lounge arson attack will be rededicated on June 22.

Skip was the man to beat AIDS. Lesbian activist Charlene Schneider pinned her hopes on him—and in 1986, no less. It was a psychological survival game, a willful delusion of her mind for desperate times. The guy checked all the character boxes to…

The life and legacy of Charlene Schneider

When leather-clad singer Rob Halford of the heavy metal band Judas Priest toured the United States in 1978, he picked up a piece of subversive literature in San Francisco to steer him safely as he sought companionship on the road. The slim, tiny…

Every social movement in American history has a body count. From Wounded Knee to Emmett Till to the children of Uvalde, death inevitably forces us to reckon with violations of our basic liberties. For Native Americans, for the Civil Rights Movement,…

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence…

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven councilmembers. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and…

On June 12, 1983, four female patrons of a New Orleans lesbian bar called Charlene’s stepped outside for some air. It was Lesbian and Gay Pride Month, and the bar’s owner and namesake, Charlene Schneider, had sponsored a well-attended celebration…

Adapted from the forward to Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler by Frank Perez, out Oct. 17 from the University of Mississippi Press. In July 1987, Pope John Paul II touched down in New Orleans on an official papal visit, bringing…

It is late morning as I cross the lawns of Calvary Hill Cemetery in Dallas. Looking for the grave of a twenty-four-year-old man who burned to death in a working-class gay bar nearly half a century ago, I pass an inscription chiseled in stone. It…

Life Iceman and Maverick jetted lifesaving homoeroticism past a generation of conservative parents. This piece is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here. When trailers for Top Gun: Maverick…

ay Carnival traditions began in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans as a gender-bending parody of elite Mardi Gras traditions, particularly the humorless coronation balls of aristocratic, segregated clubs like Rex and the Mistick Krewe of Comus. After…

On the Sunday of August 15, 1971, in Grand Coteau, a rural hamlet of less than two thousand people in the Cajun Prairie, five college-aged white men gathered in a chapel within eyeshot of a newly integrated church. One by one, they stepped forward…

he late journalist and New Orleans resident Roy Reed, who passed away in 2017, is perhaps best known for his enterprising Civil Rights-era coverage in The New York Times, including a March 1965 attack of state troopers on unarmed marchers in Selma,…

Editor’s Note: Warning, this entry contains graphic imagery. The Up Stairs Lounge fire was a criminal arson at a second-story gay bar named the Up Stairs Lounge, in New Orleans’s French Quarter. The conflagration, which began with lighter fluid in a…

Residents who would now identify as “queer” have existed in Louisiana since before its founding, but the political movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights emerged slowly throughout the late twentieth century, as…