In New Orleans, Easter draws LGBTQ community and tourists | Entertainment/Life

If you ask any bartender in New Orleans which day of the year they love to work most, Toby Lefort says they’ll likely have a quick answer.

After 13 years tending bar at Bourbon Pub and Parade, a popular gay bar in the French Quarter, Lefort’s is surprising.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “my favorite day to work here is Easter Sunday.”

It’s not that hard to imagine once you’ve experienced an Easter in the French Quarter, where you’ll find bunny ears as far as the eye can see and outfits that elaborately exaggerate the holiday theme with eggs, chicks, spring flowers and more. It’s a thumping street party akin to Mardi Gras — except bathed in pastel.

There’s only one place in the world where you’re as likely to find drag queens parading through town via horse-drawn carriages on Easter Sunday as you are to find kids on the hunt for eggs and processions of locals headed to church for Mass. Only in New Orleans will you find bartenders who complain annually that bonnets are impossible to work in and tourists who visit specifically to celebrate Easter.

“I’m really amazed with the amount that Easter has attracted people now,” Lefort said. “Easter has become a destination weekend for the city.”

In the 25 years since its inception, the Gay Easter Parade has become a staple among the Crescent City’s many eccentric celebrations, drawing visitors from out of town, spawning days of spinoff events at gay bars across the city and emerging as one of the biggest events of the year for the local LGBTQ community — bigger to some than Christmas and even Pride and Decadence.

Even this year’s dreary weather couldn’t stop festivities, as hordes of revelers braved the rain Sunday to don floppy hats overflowing with colorful eggs and watch the short-but-sweet parade in the late afternoon, the third and final procession to roll through the French Quarter each Easter.

Tony Leggio, a board member for the Gay Easter Parade and who has been involved with the event for the past two decades, said it’s been heartwarming to watch his hometown embrace the unexpected celebration of such a holy day.

“It’s been wonderful to watch how the community has accepted this parade and made it one of their favorites,” Leggio said. “And I think it’s a testament to the people in the parade and the organizers of the parade since its inception in 2000.”

Advocacy, but make it fashion

Like so many things in New Orleans, the Gay Easter Parade is ultimately about costuming.

“It’s all about dressing up, being flamboyant, being colorful,” Leggio said, “which kind of falls under the gay purview a lot.”

Leggio said the parade was originally founded simply as a way to showcase family-friendly Easter fashion and costumes. When else might you wear a vintage tweed suit or giant plastic egg purse?

Costuming was the forefront of the parade’s mission when the late Rip and Marsha Naquin-Delain, editors at local LGBTQ publication Ambush Magazine, took the reins early on. But as its popularity has grown, the event has also come to mean so much more to so many.

The annual procession is the public face of a yearround fundraising effort on behalf of Crescent Care’s Food for Friends program, which makes hot meals available to people living with HIV. Leggio said the Easter Parade’s charitable events — annual cocktail receptions, drag shows and other soirees — have contributed a total of $400,000 to the cause over the years.

And at it’s core, the Gay Easter Parade has become a way for people who have historically been left out of traditional religious Easter festivities to enjoy the spring holiday.

“A lot of the gay community doesn’t really have family that they hang out with,” Leggio said. “So this is, for the community, a wonderful opportunity to be around our chosen family.”

It’s also a boon for business in the French Quarter each year between crowded Carnival and spring festival weekends. Attendees often arrive early in the morning for Mass or the Chris Owens parade and stay out all day until the Gay Easter Parade.

Sunday’s crowd included all different types of people — young and old, tourists and locals, religious and not — all intermingling to cheer for rubber duckies and candy throws from the parade. Children played catch with a rainbow football on St. Ann Street as crowds of drunken carrots and geese and Peeps danced outside Good Friends Bar just a few feet away, and the colorful costumes brightened the gloomy day.

Dressed head to toe in rainbow colors and handing out rainbow flags and stickers to giddy passersby, Meaghan Dorn said she’s been coming to New Orleans for Gay Easter for the past four years, ever since she and her husband stumbled on the event while visiting for their April wedding anniversary.

“Where we are in rural Pennsylvania, you don’t have this,” she said.

They come back every year around this time, both to enjoy all the food and culture the city has to offer and to salute Easter the New Orleans way.

“You can just be yourself down here,” she said.

Good friends and good strangers

Inflatable eggs were already hanging from the ceiling of Good Friends on Dauphine Street the Wednesday afternoon before Easter weekend, but days of intermittent rain had foiled manager Kory Poole’s plans for house bunny-themed decor outside the bar.

Poole said he’d been preparing for the onslaught of Easter revelers — which he described as a “St. Ann situation” — for days, putting up decorations and planning events and staff costumes.

“It gets bigger every year,” Poole said with a tinge of weariness in his voice, as “I’m Just Ken” blared through the mostly empty bar.

ADVERTISEMENT

Still, Poole was clearly excited, pulling up photos of Easters past and the cropped polo shirts his staff planned to pair with fluffy bunny ears, tails and cuff links on Sunday. He hired drag queen Lexis Redd D’Ville to host the bar’s annual bonnet contest, which brings crowds of paradegoers to Good Friends shortly after the main event.

By Sunday, the exterior design plan and staff costumes had both come to fruition and all was well at the packed neighborhood bar.

Poole said this year is his first Easter back in New Orleans since the COVID-19 pandemic, when he moved back home to Texas to help take care of his family. His eyes welled up with tears as he described the joy he feels watching people of different backgrounds and beliefs blend in the French Quarter on Easter.

It’s a happy and supportive day in New Orleans, one that he missed dearly while he was away.

“I grew up in Houston, and they have nothing like this. Nothing like this whatsoever,” he said. “… I think this city is just full of different avenues — I think it’s awesome.”