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

Café 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. Café 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 Café Lafitte.

In 1953, in an era of aggressive anti-gay crackdowns, Café 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, Café Lafitte in Exile is a vivid portrait of Café 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.

Author: Frank Perez,Jeffrey Palmquist
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 03/09/2026
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.38w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9780807185841

About the Author

Frank Perez is the executive director of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. He is the editor of Ambush magazine, the founder of the Krewe de la Rue Royale Revelers, and author of several books and hundreds of articles on New Orleans's queer history. He also served as co-Southern Decadence Grand Marshal XLIV.

Jeffrey Palmquist is a twenty-five-year resident of New Orleans and the French Quarter and a former bartender at Café Lafitte. He was co-Southern Decadence Grand Marshal XLII and Grand Reveler I. Originally from South Dakota and a graduate of Dakota Wesleyan University, Palmquist found his home in New Orleans, where he fell in love with the history, architecture, and soul of the city.