New Orleans: birthplace of lesbian romance?

Capozzola, Christopher

PEOPLE who love books know there is more to cherish about queer New Orleans than the raucous annual festivities of Mardi Gras or Southern decadence. In the Crescent City, Walt Whitman composed poetry under the live oaks, Tennessee Williams traveled on a streetcar named Desire, and, more recently, a density of souls populated Christopher Rice's gothic tales. But how many remember New Orleans as the setting for the first lesbian romance in American literature?

The story, which is no more than a few chapters tucked in the middle of a popular mystery novel, has been easy to overlook; in fact, for decades, The Mysteries of New Orleans was completely forgotten. Penned by the immigrant writer Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein and published in 1854 in serial installments in a German-language newspaper, the novel promised readers it would reveal the city's secret underside. And if, as the Baron wrote, New Orleans was a "tree with forbidden fruit," it yielded quite a harvest: prostitution, miscegenation, necrophilia, and a cross-dressing drama queen.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A tender romance between Claudine and Orleana makes up one of the novel's many subplots. The love scenes are tame by modern standards--"How sweet and supple your waist is!" is about as sultry as the pillow talk gets--but the author's sympathetic portrayal of their love is striking. "Lesbian ladies," he noted, "are not as bad as most, and they are as decent and well mannered as the rest of the world of women, after their fashion." Equally astonishing is his insistence that their love was common in New Orleans in the 1850's. "We find them," he writes, "in clubs of twelve to fifteen on the Hercules Quay, along the Pensacola Landing, and all along the entire left side of the New Basin." In the rest of the novel, Von Reizenstein depicted real people and locations to give his work credibility; it's not out of the question to think that these same-sex communities existed too.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Critics have noted that The Mysteries of New Orleans isn't really lesbian literature at all, and may well have more in common with straight male fantasy than anything Djuna Barnes or Dorothy Allison might have written. But what should keep us from dismissing the novel is not only how unprecedented or sympathetic the lesbian characters are, but how political their love is. Repeatedly describing and defending their independence from men, Von Reizenstein endows these women's love with defiance. "Revolution--the women of Lesbos would storm, if we were to rebuke their love." And he calls not for voyeurism but tolerance. "It is certainly no crime to lift the veil from this image--no sin against the holy of holies of femininity to contemplate it; it is certainly no sin against the Holy Spirit to enter this cathedral of love."

Well, in 1854, that was a little much, even for New Orleans. The novel's publication stirred up city residents, some of whom felt it inappropriate for "innocent souls." They may not have been the only ones to object. In a later installment, Von Reizenstein published a letter that he claimed had been sent from the "headquarters of the lesbian women," asking him not to reveal the location of their gatherings "because we would be exposed to danger of being attacked by raw intruders." More strenuously, the letter writers refuted the Baron's lurid depiction of their community as a den of sexual iniquity. "[W]e live in pairs," they insisted, "keeping our households just as the majority of society live together as man and wife. In the eyes of the world, when one of us has chosen a life-companion, we are just good friends, sisters, or simply persons who deeply esteem each other's qualities." Did a real person write this letter, or did Von Reizenstein conjure it out of his imagination? We'll never know. But even making up such a text has to be one of the more audacious acts of American literature.

In later decades, even as the city's sexual audacity endured, The Mysteries of New Orleans would not. Only a few scholars knew of its existence, and most thought it not worth reading; none mentioned its lesbian theme until historian Steven Rowan painstakingly reconstructed the book, translated it, and published it with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002. It has since taken its place as a founding text for a city whose open and tolerant atmosphere was no longer any mystery at all.

In the weeks since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Claudine and Orleana's world seems gone forever--and until the damage can be fully ascertained, we do not even know if Reizenstein's manuscripts have survived. But on its opening page. The Mysteries of New Orleans suggests a reason to be hopeful: "Although common sense rebels against all that is fabulous and mysterious, extraordinary events often give us the key to the unbelievable, and what is most improbable becomes true." Right now, probably nothing seems more improbable or unbelievable than the recovery of New Orleans. And yet nothing would be more fabulous.

Christopher Capozzola teaches American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This piece was first published in Boston's Bay Windows, 10/6/05.