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Three Populations A rtists found material aplenty in the Quarter’s picturesque architecture and the nearby waterfronts and cypress swamps, while writers were taken with Louisiana’s fascinating cultural gumbo, but the presence of subject matter is not sufficient to explain why a Bohemian community was created in New Orleans, or why one was not created elsewhere in the South. That story is much more complicated. In part, it has to do with the presence and numbers in New Orleans of three groups that were smaller and more marginalized in every other Southern city. Gay men and Jews were disproportionately likely to be sympathetic observers and supporters of Bohemia, if not actually Bohemians themselves, and the Quarter’s Italian community—although it contributed few if any members of the social circle—created an easygoing environment that nurtured the Bohemian life. Gay Men Gay men are usually overrepresented in literary and artistic circles, and they clearly were in this one. Most had come from elsewhere, attracted to a city where “the milieu enabled them to indulge their sexual oddities,” as Oliver La Farge put it, obliquely. University of New Orleans professor Kenneth Holditch reports “an old saying” that his fellow New Orleanians “don’t care what you do. They want to know about it, but they don’t care.” In 1927 New Orleans Life magazine had a two-part feature on “Popular Bachelors of New Orleans.” Seven were Famous Creoles, and three or four of those—Spratling, Weeks Hall, Sam Gilmore, and probably one other— 68 Three Populations | 69 were homosexual, or at least not exclusively heterosexual. The same could be said of Lyle Saxon, Cicero Odiorne, and Pops Whitesell—at least a halfdozen Famous Creoles altogether. It’s true that some—Spratling and Saxon, for instance—were very discreet. (Weeks Hall and Sam Gilmore were another matter.) When Spratling’s frequent date Esther DuPuy was told later of his proclivities, she said that she’d never been given cause to believe it, and Harold Levy found it hard to credit, exclaiming “Anyone who sleeps with as many women as he does!” But Spratling’s “artful and crafty” sketches of Saxon and Gilmore in Famous Creoles suggest a familiarity and comfort with the gay scene that would be more typical of someone in the closet than someone in denial. The same sort of sly innuendo seems to have been one of Saxon’s specialties. Surely he knew exactly what he was saying when he wrote that preservationist William Ratcliffe Irby had been “the good-fairy of Frenchtown,” or when he referred in a review to the “peculiar virility” of Weeks Hall’s paintings. (In 1941, when Saxon received a jocular letter from Hall complaining that “miasmas” were causing “yaws among our new Negroes ,” he replied, “As for the miasmas rising from the Teche, I cannot bring myself to think that the effluvia does aught save stir indiscreet thoughts, and, alas, perhaps indiscreet actions as well. I remember in my own case, on certain summer evenings . . . but why speak of our gaudy youth, dear Coz, as we approach Life’s Sunset?”) Anyway, if you take these six or seven and throw in a couple of the “confirmed bachelors,” roughly a third of the male artists, writers, and musicians among the Famous Creoles seem to have been homosexual or bisexual, even if we assume that everyone else was not, which is of course a shaky, even improbable , assumption. When an artistic and socially well-connected young man is described in a document as the “intimate friend” of another, for instance , are they just close friends? Both were husbands and fathers, but was this code for what some New Orleanians call an “uptown marriage”? (Holditch describes that “not-uncommon union” as one in which “a gay man, born into New Orleans society, marries an appropriate debutante from his own class and fathers children by her but keeps an apartment in the Quarter for liaisons with male companions.”) Obviously, there’s often simply no way to know the inclination of an individual or the nature of a particular relationship , but fortunately any single instance is immaterial to the general point that Huey Long was trying to make when he observed a few years later, “I tell you that this town is aswarm and alive and criss-crossed with perverts.” That applied a fortiori, of course, to the artistic and literary scene, where 70 | The World of the Famous Creoles gay men made at least two...

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