Culture
Keeping the Legacy of New Orleans' Lesbian Bars Alive
The spaces have all shuttered, but an oral history project is creating a new community through retelling stories from the 1980s bar scene.
Groups of women gathered around small round tables, drinking. Some were shooting a game of pool; others hung out by the jukebox. In was January 2016, but inside New Orleans’ Theater at St. Claude, the lesbian bar scene of the 1980s came back to life.
For three days in January, the performance of Alleged Lesbian Activities ran at the theater. The show was a combination of oral histories and staged reenactments of the bygone bar scene; the run in January was a work-in-progress production in preparation for the a three-week run in September. After the shows, the directors solicited input from the women in the audience, some of whom were born after the last bars closed, and some of whom had lived through everything described in the show.