“Where their grandparents had settled is now water.” Each census shows fewer French-speaking households. “They recognize that the Cajun culture is literally washing away,” Stockley said. Joshua Stockley, a political-science professor who taught in the adjacent town of Thibodaux, thinks the locals’ wariness is born of a sense of constant threat-the loss of livelihoods in shrimp and sugarcane, and the loss of the land itself. Back in 2009, the Drama Club murder was noted only by the local paper and a couple of gay blogs. Stagnant, insular, and stubbornly Cajun, it is fixed in place only by grit and the work of the Army Corps of Engineers. Houma, Louisiana, population 34,000, sits at the heart of the Atchafalaya Basin-that part of the state where the Gulf of Mexico and the land and the swamp are so evenly matched that on a map, it looks like a fingerprint.
The sole body left on the checkerboard floor was LeCompte’s, sprawled out and bloody, dead from 13 stab wounds to the neck, shoulders, and chest. The party ended early, and by 2:15 Christmas morning, no guests remained. That night, they were there to celebrate Robert and let off steam before heading to their real homes, where trimmed trees might strain against trailer ceilings and a grandmother would look askance if she knew where you’d been. It provided safety, solidarity, and sex to a motley social universe. Like many gay bars outside of big cities, it was a place where people who would never deign to cross paths in the larger world could find a home for themselves. It wasn’t just a Christmas party, but also a birthday party for Robert LeCompte, the Drama Club’s beloved bartender and manager. From the plaster walls painted to look like brick to the lights clamped on black pipes overhead, the place had an improvised, high-school-theater feel to it, and the gay men, lesbians, and friends who danced and smoked there that night were especially close and relaxed.Ĭhristmas, and its attendant family time, can be complicated for gays and lesbians in the South, and people were happy for an excuse to get out of the house.
On Christmas Eve 2009, the disco ball at the Drama Club spun over a packed house.
0 kommentar(er)
