Note: For those of you that do not really know me beyond the blog, from 2007-2015ish, I was on the board of IndyPride in Indianapolis, and I planned pride festivals and was president of the board for three of those years. I am coming at this post with a specific knowledge set on the challenges of organizing pride festivals, the involvement of corporate dollars, and the frequent problems attendees have with these events (i.e. why is the headliner from 1985?). I know it is very hard to please everyone, but I also know that we as a community need to try harder to be inclusive and not exclusive.
I am taking a little swerve from my usual travel blogging to make a comment on something that has really been bothering me for a while. As I begin to write this, I am sitting in the Louis Armstrong International Airport (MSY) waiting to return home after a fun visit for the 54th Annual Southern Decadence festival, which happens over Labor Day weekend and is ostensibly the “last” Pride festival of the summer, though there are some cities like Atlanta and Palm Springs that have theirs in later months due to the extreme heat. New Orleans has its own Pride in June, too, but Southern Decadence still stands as one of the better festivals that attracts a lot of people who travel to it on a yearly basis.
My love affair with New Orleans began back in 2009, when I came for my first Southern Decadence with friends from Indianapolis. I have been to three or four more over the years, with the most recent before this being a diabolical plan in 2023 made over cocktails the night before that had me booking a flight at 2 AM for an 8 AM flight on a Thursday to really just spend a little time in New Orleans, see friends, and I was back in Chicago by Saturday.
All of this is to establish that I am a seasoned traveler to New Orleans, and even though I have not been doing Southern Decadence fully for a while, I was struck with how much the festival has changed, which is actually pretty endemic to how Pride festivals have changed in the last couple decades across the country and the world.
What used to be a community coming together to celebrate and reinvigorate their resolve to fight for better representation and equal rights for all, has now become fragmented to the point that most of the “events” that people are traveling to attend are from outside promotors and corporate entities, which take away the seas of people that used to overrun the local establishments and safe spaces that are fighting the good fight on the ground throughout the year.
I will not be making judgements on the purpose of these parties, because that would go deeper than I want to go into the intricacies of “circuit” parties and other type/aesthetic segregation that has typified such events. Of course, events like these have a place, too, but instead of us congregating in the streets as one, it has become more about coming together to separate into our own parties that also just happen to come at fairly high ticket price if you want any enjoyment out of the festivities themselves. This creates an elites vs. normies divide that has frankly sucked the energy out of Pride events.
When I came to my first Southern Decadence, I was definitely more of a tourist hitting the main drag of Bourbon St. gay bars from the intersection of St. Anne & Bourbon with the Bourbon Pub & Parade and Oz clubs, down to the intersection of St. Philip & Bourbon with Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shoppe, which you can forgive me for thinking was a gay bar because it was (and still is) the traditional first stop for many and has a massive street party during Decadence. Pretty much that entire two block area was FILLED with drinking and dancing revelers culminating in a stage with performers at St. Anne. Then to the north on St. Anne was another concentration of bars, which tended to be the ones the local folks hit and didn’t have any sort of cover or anything attached to it. What I am trying to say is that this was a BUSY area of the Quarter where you didn’t even need to go into the bars to have a good a time. It was so packed, that I fully realized I would never survive a Mardi Gras.
While I have mostly abandoned the Bourbon St. bars for places like my favorite, the Golden Lantern, which happens to be the home of Southern Decadence and where the Sunday parade kicks off, when we went into the Bourbon St. area, I was struck with just how few people there actually were. Of course, the heat or overriding economic factors could be a part of this, but to hear my local friends tell it, it has been something that has been happening for a while. Even the last time I was there with a group from Indy, I was aware of other events happening out there, but we were still there to enjoy the city experience.
The opposite is happening now.
The outside events are now the reason people are there, like Horse Meet Disco, Furball, and various other events catering to all the tastes of people out there. Again, there are a lot of specific reasons things like this have happened, everything from limits on sexual freedom down to to the preponderance of straight women in the bars, but festivals like Southern Decadence and Market Days in Chicago were primarily created as celebrations of the local community, which happened to become destination events for people who could travel to such things. These tourists were coming in and supporting local businesses with their dollars flowing back into the community and invigorating the local economy. Now, these parties are actively taking the tourist dollars out of community and into the pockets of the promotors and event planners. I am sure several of these parties do give something back, but when you witness just how light the crowds were for the local bars, then you have to wonder how some of these establishments are surviving without this yearly influx.
One way is to charge admission and raise prices on cocktails, and while I don’t begrudge a business trying to make money where they can, when you’re paying $14 for a weak drink in a tiny cup after paying $10 to get in, of course, maybe you’re going to consider taking your business elsewhere.
When I first came to Decadence, from what I remember, nearly all of the bars had no cover charge. There were VIP packages that allowed for no lines and other perks, but I could bounce into Oz, the Pub, and Good Friends without any issues, but the opposite is true now. While there was no cover during the day, after a certain time, you had to pay a cover to get into most of them. Again, the bars are in a bit of a Catch-22, because if they are losing audiences to outside events with VIP areas and other perks, they both need to compete with those events and still also make money off of a smaller audience.
There is also a no small issue of the ownership of some of these establishments supporting Republican causes. I struggle with this one because while I certainly don’t want my money going to support Republicans, I also don’t want to see bars and safe spaces close or become non-LGBTQ+ establishments, which is what is happening in a lot of the red and even blue states. On the flip side, this is also the point of this whole post. Pride is supposed to be about community, and if you are traveling thousands of miles to not support the community and just go to an exclusive party, then we have completely lost of the plot.
I don’t really have a good solution for it. Having organized pride festivals before, I know how much of a struggle it is to juggle corporate dollars and local expectations, and there just simply isn’t a good way to please everyone. Plus, if these exclusive parties didn’t exist, how many of these folks would be traveling to New Orleans in the first place? While they might not be supporting all the local LGBTQ+ establishments, they are supporting the local economy in other ways.
I am not too aware of the struggles of the local organizations that put Southern Decadence events together, but from what I can tell, they abandoned the stage entertainment a few years ago. Even if the acts were not exactly god tier, the loss of that part of the festival was felt walking around on Sunday after the parade. There was nothing centralizing the community energy. What likely needs to happen is the community, both activist and business, need to come together to plan a more cohesive event that is accessible to everyone like the stage entertainment of old, but additionally, there needs to be some sort of buy-in from these third party event planners trying to piggyback off of the event itself. I don’t know what form that takes, but I think if you’re going to plan an event that happens the same weekend, there should be some sort of process of approval and payment that allows it to happen. Of course, that would likely lead to some sort of litigation, but if you’re throwing a Southern Decadence party, at the very least, a portion of your profit needs to be donated back to the community Southern Decadence was created to support.
I fully realize the LGBTQ+ community is very diverse, and it is difficult to put together a festival for everyone and make everyone happy in the process, and I understand I may just sound like an aging Gen Xer reminiscing about the good ole days. However, we have taken so many steps backwards in the last few years compared to the heady days of the marriage equality fight. The fact that we cannot even count on Pride and similar festivals anymore for the community to come together means we are not equipped anymore to fight the forces that want to strip us of our most basic human rights.
If I want to tie this up in a bow, if your main inclination is to travel to another city, state, or country for a Pride festival, then it is up to you to make sure you are there to support the community putting on the event. Traveling to just take yourself to events created for people that look just like you (or have the same socioeconomic status as you), is not what any of this should be about. Of course, party, be gay, have an amazing time, but let us all not forget the struggles that our forebears fought hard to overcome that gave you the privilege to do such things.
