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Madame John Dodt's Legacy #26...
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

The old story is that when a party got too tiresome for words that Tallulah Bankhead would simply peel off her clothes to add some piquancy and liveliness to the proceedings; her old pal, the bug-eyed and stern-faced eccentric actress Estelle Winwood scolded her for this predictably unpredictable shenanigan, "Why do you do that, Tallulah? You have such lovely frocks."

That's sort of the way I feel about our glorious NOPD frittering their time and our money away just before Southern Decadence (a holy day of obligation for which older readers of this column will know I feel no particular reverence) by busting a bunch of people at the Phoenix on Underwear Night. I presume that even the most genteel of cops behaving in the most gentlemanly of ways to a bunch of sex-crazed "preverts" over on Elysian Fields may give some sort of secret depraved thrill to Pennington's Porkers, but it's a shame that the ultimate science fiction scenarios that could have or should result from same won't happen-say, if they'd found one of the Mayor's little (or big) proteges in his Joe Boxers or Fredericks of Hollywood's, what would they have done? But no, the Mayor's proteges allegedly are out committing more wholesome crimes like sexual assault (with a Cyclopean blind eye turned on that petite affaire by both our august daily paper and, of course, Richard-I'm Only Staying Here For The Food-Pennington). Also, it would be perfectly swell if the Word Got Out, the jungle drums started beating and the wires started humming and every quean in this great country of ours heard about this and just decided next year to try Austin or Pensacola or Rehoboth Beach or Detroit for Decadence Day and down the glistening drains of New Orleans would go All That Faggot Revenue which we were informed by Keith Darce, the delicious and sloe-eyed ace-Money-section reporter for the T-P in a big story, comes pouring into our city like warm September rain. How great it would be if every aspiring drag with two sequins or ostrich plumes to rub together was making her travel plans, say, next May or June, and when the mere idea of New Orleans and Decadence presented itself, there was just a mass chorus of "Fuggedaboudit!" from coast to coast. Of course, in that case, we'd probably just have more finessing of our property taxes in order to defray the cost of such essential absurdities on the city's budget as Carl Galmon's salary.

Despite the fact that the Current Recumbent in the White House maintains that fellatio is not sex-sometimes a cigar is only a cigar-and so, by current political usage, no one should have been booked at the Phoenix, the raid brought back Those Bad Old Days of the cops' sidewalk surfing in front of Jewel's and Charlene's, as well as such watershed-but-hitherto-undocumented events as the Great Cabrini Playground Massacre and the Halloween raid on The Loft of happy memory, which left dozens of people high and dry with their names and addresses (and ages, the greatest indignity!) printed in the dailies for all the world to see. (Not to mention the famous and fabulous Quorum Club raid in 1964 in which 74 commies, homos, and integrationists were popped, among other things, for "having intellectual discussions without a point," and in which two undercover cops recited extemporaneous beatnik poetry which was "well received." Those were, indeed, different times. How many closet poets protect and serve on the NOPD these days?) As a reminder of regression and repression, it could not be bettered. There was a time (but now it's all gone by, as Jenny tells Mackie in The Threepenny Opera) when certain prophets and pundits bandied about the idea that public sex was the most revolutionary act of all-that no one would take us seriously until we were f**king and sucking in the streets for our own, and ultimately everyone else's, salvation (see, for example, John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw for a coherent, if not convincing, elaboration of this, ahem, position).

But cooler heads and a certain virus prevailed, and by the time that the Supreme Court heard the Bowers v. Hardwick case (in which a young man was arrested in his own little bedroom, for heaven's sake, the ultimate sex-gestapo nightmare, or fantasy for some) and made its infamous ruling upon it, there was so much confusion and panic and misinformation in what passes for the public mind, that sex in the open wasn't much of an issue anymore. (It was the issue in the Cabrini Playground sweeps, even though said sweeps took place under cover of darkness and hardly at a time when the jungle-gym, which lent itself to all sorts of interesting taffy-pulling and pretzel-bending, would be crowded with screaming children or when the few certifiable heterosexuals in the French Quarter would be slinging frisbees at their chocolate Labs.) The retreat from public sex has been dramatic-and by public, we presumably have to include bar-rooms as well as green spaces-and part of the reason is the ubiquity of pornography; you couldn't see pornography everywhere and anytime when I was a debutante. It still had the thrill of the forbidden-those plain-brown wrappers in the mail, the whispered advice to run over to Gilmore's and pick up a copy of Song of the Loon, etc. It was years before slick Gay magazines--it was well into the early Seventies-would run a picture, even romanticized with all the softness and expertise at the photographer's disposal, of the male organ of generation in its mildest and least threatening state. (As a great fan and devotee of smut, I think that far from inducing impressionable young people to rush out and try everything they see therein-they probably already have, unless it's a snuff film-it actually keeps them home at nights and off the streets which may not be an unmixed blessing, but there you are.)

I'm less interested in What Really Happened at the raid-since I go back far enough to that more innocent geologic era when the vice marched in and arrested men for dancing together or busted ladies for wearing apparel that was too, uh, mannish, or when a certain famous opera-later-Broadway-musical singer got popped in the Men's Room at a certain downtown department store and had to be bailed out of the jug in time for the evening's performance (how many notes do you want to bet he cracked after that unscheduled matinee in the john?)-than I am in why. On the day of the Recent Deluge, I bumped, if that verb applies, into the luscious Councilor Rawls at the counter of the Verti-Marte ("Well, I still look like a lawyer from the waist up!" was his effusive greeting-whether he just looked like a wet prairie hen from the waist down is something I'm just too polite and refined a person to go into) and I asked him about the rumors that were flying about town like raindrops. It was not, he told me, a certain Bar Baronet legendary and notorious for such nickel-dropping (and whose own establishments have often been the sites of orgiastic goings-on) who made the initial complaint, but someone disgruntled at the idea of unsafe sex anywhere, anytime-someone like H.L. Mencken's famous definition of a puritan. Someone, as a matter of fact, whose recent diagnosis had only recently made him aware of the dangers of unsafe sex. Curious, thought I. In the meantime, the cops have apologized, no charges are preferred against the Phoenix Fo'teen, God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. All well and good. But am I the only one who finds this whole affair slightly ominous? That all these soberly expressed good intentions are not the end, so much as a mere lull?

To give you an idea of the sort of ideas that circulate about among our friends and neighbors, I submit this. An old and valued friend of mine who works in a fancy law firm in the CBD was having a conversation about the Phoenix raid with his secretary, and he was astonished at her knowledge of the whole thing until she began to describe the upstairs of the bar-I presume, not having met the young lady that she is a good, staunch family person from one of The Parishes-she described, in detail that would shame DeSade or Pauline Reage, fixtures in the wall about waist-high and about the size of a fist upon which patrons could...oh, you get the picture, and bar-stools which had been cunningly re-formed with a butt-plug in the center of each one. "A butt-plug?" asked my lawyer friend with the straightest of faces, "What is a butt-plug?" A torrent of graphic details followed. (My only visit to the upstairs of the Phoenix was many years ago, when all of you were still being bounced on your mother's knee, and it was in broad daylight soon after the Men's Room was completed; Miss Letson and I went up there and had a fast drink or three with, of all people, Joyce Dugas and the Reverend Yetta and Jamie Temple. My memory is failing somewhat but I am sure I would remember such extraordinary fixtures and furnishings; I haven't become that jaded writing this column.) So you see the sort of insanity that rages like a Mexican brush fire in the dim knowledge-bumps of the mass of people when something like the Phoenix raid happens. In the immortal words of the philosopher and historian Eva Gabor, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to reweave it.

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