A few months after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in August 2005, Jenna Jordan went on a search for other queer women. She was looking for camaraderie with people like herself who had returned to New Orleans after the storm. Some neighborhoods with sizable gay populations such as the French Quarter were largely spared from flooding, but areas with queer people of color and lesbians, such as Mid-City, weren’t as fortunate.
On a Tuesday night in February 2006, Jordan and a few other graduate students from Loyola University New Orleans and Tulane University hosted a meetup for queer women at a dive bar called St Joe’s in the Uptown neighborhood. The gathering was spread via word of mouth and only about 20 people showed up the first time, but within five years it grew into a big dance party with hundreds of people. Grrlspot, a monthly pop-up event for queer women in New Orleans that still exists today, was born.
“It was trying to find out who’s back and catch up with people and maybe meet new people,” Jordan said. “I don’t think that that would have happened without Katrina. There would have been no reason for that to happen.”
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Lesbian bars around the US are quickly dwindling. After a heyday in the 1980s when there were more than 200 lesbian bars throughout the nation, only 38 remain today, according to the Lesbian Bar Project, an initiative that documents and highlights lesbian nightlife spaces throughout the nation. The last lesbian bar in New Orleans, Rubyfruit Jungle, closed in 2012. After Hurricane Katrina hit and many people lacked the financial resources to return to the city and rebuild, there were fewer spaces for queer women to gather as the community dwindled. Grrlspot fills that gap through four annual parties – Mardi Gras, Pride, Southern Decadence and Halloween – at various bars throughout the city, where upwards of 600 queer women have gathered and celebrated at each event.
For New Orleans resident Charlotte D’Ooge, Grrlspot has been so popular because there hasn’t been a large enough population or financial backing to support the existence of a new lesbian bar. “After Katrina, there was a real housing issue … it became extremely expensive,” said D’Ooge, who researched the impact of the storm on queer women for Tulane University in 2008. “The wages were not going up here in New Orleans, but expenses were. So that certainly was a deterrent for a lot of folks to be able to even return home and return to their communities.”
Jordan seeks to create a safe space where lesbians and trans women feel they can express their joy. The pop-up events are like a large celebration, Jordan said, “just really good energy”.
A citywide event that she looks forward to every year is New Orleans’s Southern Decadence, an LGBTQ+ festival started by a few people in 1972. It has since grown to a multi-day festival featuring a parade, street parties and drag performances that draw hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world. “The best way to describe it is like gay Mardi Gras,” Jordan said of the festivities. Grrlspot will hold its next event during Southern Decadence on 30 August at Toulouse Theatre in New Orleans.
‘We still care about the community’
After a Mardi Gras parade this past February, patrons filed into the Toulouse Theatre to watch burlesque and a drag king performance at Grrlspot’s Mardi Gras party. A crowd of women in colorful costumes undulated their limbs under strobe lights as a DJ spun top 40 hits and hip-hop. Acrobats twisted their bodies during floor routines, and go-go dancers flitted through the space.
Everyone is invited to join the festivities, said Jordan, with the exception of unescorted cis men. “It heartens me when I see trans women there, because I don’t think that trans women feel comfortable in a lot of ‘lesbian spaces’,” Jordan said. “That’s a space that I don’t know that there ever really was much of before.”
She advertises the events on Instagram, Eventbrite, Facebook, Gambit and in local publications. While other lesbian pop-up events have cropped up throughout the years, they have eventually petered out, Jordan said, with Grrlspot being the only one with a through line to rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
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After the storm, many lesbians started hosting more gatherings in their home, said Misti Gaither, who has produced lesbian and queer events in New Orleans for two decades. Up until last year, Gaither and her wife had hosted an annual fundraiser and event called Winter Wonderland for 14 years where they would raise funds for two non-profits. They had performers and handed out awards to lesbians who positively contributed to the local community.
“There may not be a true lesbian bar in New Orleans, but it doesn’t mean that there are not lesbians out there. We still care about the community and there are still lesbians who fundraise to help causes,” Gaither said. “Just because there is no central place, it hasn’t dulled people’s desire in movement.”
While the bar scene is an important aspect of queer networking, she said that the absence of one in New Orleans shouldn’t deter lesbians from gathering. And Grrlspot is one avenue for queer women to do that, she said. Lesbians shouldn’t “lose that desire to make things better”, Gaither said, “and maybe one day there will be a resurgence of lesbian bars”.