Today In History, 1958: New Orleans Launches Raids Against Gay Bars

Jim Burroway

July 22nd, 2016

Dixie’s Bar in New Orleans, one of the South’s few openly gay bars in the 1950s.

The Big Easy has long enjoyed a mind-your-own business reputation where personal and public morality is concerned. But that “laissez les bons temps rouler” mindset didn’t extend to the city’s gay citizenry, and much like other major cities across the nation, anti-gay campaigns often heated up ahead of local elections. Mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison had somehow earned a national reputation as a dynamic reformer, despite blocking efforts to reform the city’s notoriously corrupt police department. In 1958, city leaders complained that the police were sitting on their hands while roving bands of homosexuals, allegedly from other cities since, apparently, such a thing was unheard of there, were invading the French Quarter — the city’s storied tolerance for sexual eccentrics in music, literature and the arts notwithstanding. One councilman complained of “men with blondined hair and awful looking people all day and all night in the French Quarter,” and wondered why police had only made 86 arrests in two years on charges of lewd behavior or wearing women’s clothing. Police Superintendent Provosty A. Dayries responded, “You can’t just point to someone and say he or she is a deviate — that is one of the frustrating things about the problem.”

Amid complaints about lax police enforcement and courts that insisted that those arrested should be charged with something specific and based on real evidence, Mayor Morrison appointed his half-brother, Jacob Morrison to head a citizen’s committee to look into the problem. With pressure increasing across all sectors of city government, Supt. Dayries launched a raid against known “deviate bars,” arresting eighteen people (mostly bar employees) on charges of vagrancy, disturbing the peace, and “no visible means of support.” Thirty others were warned to stay away. While most of the charges were dropped the next day, the names and addresses of those arrested were printed in the newspapers. That raid was tiny compared to another “sweeping drive” which resulted in 325 arrested in a single night. One city resident, in a letter to the editor to a local paper, noted the irony of the New Orleans political establishment enforcing morals in the city: “I consider it a piece of unmitigated gall for anyone, be he District Attorney or City Councilman, to tell me what I may see or with whom I may associate without endangering my morals. I must confess that were I to seek guidance in matters of morals, I should not likely turn to politicians.”

[Source: “Dal McIntire” (either Jim Kepner or Don Slater). “Tangents: News and Views.” ONE 6, no. 8 (September 1958): 17-20.]

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