"Zoom out. What’s the big picture here? Although the tour is run through a company called No Secrets, it soon becomes clear that it runs on a highly personal and well-researched script, written and represented by guide Tylyn. She runs the tour three times a week (though you can also book private group tours), and though I’ve chosen a quiet day where it’s just myself, she says that the average group size is around four people, so it always feels intimate and personal. We meet in the middle of the historic French Quarter, just a block or two from Jackson Square.
Tell us about your fellow tourees. I chatted to Tylyn about the usual make-up of the group, and she said it was mainly members of the LGBTQ community, but that it can be a cross-section of allies, people interested in local history, and people who just want a change and a fresh perspective from the regular ghost tours and the like. The tour is on foot and lasts around two and half hours with a bar break, though there are no long stretches and the stops are close to each other, so as long as that’s comfortable for guests, they should be fine.
How are the guides? Tylyn’s tour was incredibly well put together. She not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of the queer history of New Orleans, but she was also able to weave that history into its relevant context, politically and socially, with what was going on both here and across the country at any given time. It’s a queer history, but it’s also a social history of civil rights and changing attitudes in the city and in the United States. It was coherent, engaging, and even for relatively well-informed residents such as myself, there were a lot of interesting new facts, nuggets of political intrigue and trivia.
Anything you’ll be remembering weeks or months or years from now? The locations and stories are pinned around various seismic events that shaped the LGBTQ culture in what has always been a relatively bohemian city. Although the Stonewall riots and the like are rightly remembered as flash points, there were protests and tragedies in New Orleans that motivated change. A strong theme of the tour is ‘the closet’ as a Southern phenomenon, whereby people’s lifestyles were often tolerated as long as they weren’t publicly discussed, but the need for equality and rights often made this a point of tension. Tylyn has a wealth of stories regarding local politicians and queer community leaders that illustrate this situation.
So: money, time—how can we make the most of both? Anyone with an interest in LGBTQ history, civil rights, and a side of city history that puts a lot of things in context, will find the tour rewarding. The tour is not at all salacious, though there are fun sections of course, but it’s mostly a serious and engaging look at queer culture in New Orleans, its public origins in Mardi Gras and the tragedies and victories that have resulted in one of the most queer-friendly cities in the United States." - Paul Oswell
