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The Iron Lattice is a New Orleans-based print publication that takes an in-depth look at issues facing our region. Subscribe to have print volumes sent quarterly to your home.
In 1972, a group of New Orleanians, both gay and straight, held a party where guests were to come dressed as their favorite decadent Southerner. Today the house party has exploded into a six day bacchanalia attended by hundreds of thousands who rove the streets of the Quarter late into the night under the eerie glow of LED street lamps. The dazzling display of queer love and sexual liberation is set against a backdrop of police surveillance, piles of waste, and bodily exploitation. It is the domain of queer culture, and by extension Southern Decadence, to own these contradictions in the midst of what might be the age of our own demise.
With a two-century gap separating us from the invention of the camera, it’s hard to process the awe that it inspired in its first witnesses. At this distance, it gets easier to view photos as ordinary. But with the beginning of photography, for the first time ever, you could make a record of a single moment instantly—and as the 20th century picked up speed, American artists were still not yet inured to the magic of that fact.
Today, there are only a few remaining movie theaters in New Orleans. But just a few decades ago, downtown movie palaces like the Joy and Saenger competed for audiences with neighborhood cinemas from the Marigny to Carrollton. What's less remembered is a brief period mostly in the 1970s when mainstream and art house theaters began switching to a new type of entertainment: pornography.
Living as we do in trying times, Dean has been pondering poetry’s purposes, as Far Flung, his new poetry collection from Portal’s Press can attest. Throughout the volume he asks and answers the question, what can poetry do for a world that appears to be bleeding out anywhere you look? “This country is collapsing from within, it seems,” he says. “Poetry may be the lie that tells the truth, but what difference does it make?” When I ask him what difference it’s made for him, he dreamily returns to his lifetime of adventures. “A friend of mine in Brazil—he has something like a Brazilian Rick’s Cafe—set up a table where people would come up and I’d write them poetry on the spot,” he says.
