If there’s one good thing about living in south Louisiana (and there are many, certainly more than one, it’s not quite the sinkhole it is sometimes accused of being), living in driving proximity to New Orleans would be it.

New Orleans is a really terrific city. The best way to describe the place is rich; it’s rich with history, with music, with food, with experience. It’s a city that effuses itself everywhere you turn, and in the years since Hurricane Katrina, the city’s rebirth has amped up that feeling, adding a resilience to the richness, and the place’s exuberance is steelier.

And every Labor Day weekend, Southern Decadence takes place in New Orleans. It’s, in short, a gay Mardi Gras, a weekend-long gay block party in the French Quarter. People from all over the country come down for Decadence, and as the name suggests, there’s a lot of vice running down Bourbon Street, because if New Orleans is good for anything, it’s good for giving people an excuse for excess.

I’ve lived in Louisiana all my life, but I’ve never been to Southern Decadence. It’s never been my speed (I’m a word nerd, more comfortable at Barnes and Noble than a gay bar), and even though in my early 20s I had my share of, um, extracurricular activities, now in my late early 30s — a guy’s got to hold on to youth in any way he can — the idea of decadence doesn’t seem quite so useful anymore, it’s lost a good bit of its shine.

I went this year. Sort of.

Gardner, an online friend of mine from Oregon, came down to Decadence with friends. He’s just ended a 17-year relationship, and the promise of an unfettered weekend where he could do whatever the hell he wanted with whomever the hell he wanted seemed like a perfect expression of newfound freedom. Great in theory, sure, but once he found himself here, in practice, the freedom didn’t fit quite so comfortably.

He needed a little rescuing, so I hopped in the car and drove to New Orleans.

For about an hour we walked around the French Quarter, then we grabbed a bite for lunch while an afternoon rain carried on outside. Then, we decided to go to the Audubon Zoo, and we spent four hours wandering around, checking out monkeys and giraffes, talking, laughing, hanging out.

“You know we’re the only two gay guys in the city here at the Zoo today,” Gardner said while we were checking out reptiles. “We could be our own exhibit.”

That made me think of a coffee date I had the week before with my friend Jude. We were talking about Decadence, and he offered me this:

“Back in the days when everything was about sex and partying, it was like the gay community was just in its adolescence. And now, we’re fighting for marriage, and it seems like adulthood. As a community. So Decadence seems, I don’t know, out of step with who we are.”

I get that. And listening to my friend Gardner talk about coming down here for one thing and ending up with me at the Zoo, I was struck by how that dichotomy plays out in our community all the time.

On the one hand, we’re still defining ourselves by our sexual liberation, earning an identity in it, calling freedom the ability to love who we love, be physical with who we want to be physical with and do it without shame. On the other hand, we’re asking to define ourselves in a new way — solely through the way we love, through the acknowledgement of our relationships, through our emotional and spiritual commitment to another person.

I don’t think it has to be one or the other. But I don’t think the extremes of the two can exist together without some hypocrisy being present.

It works for me, anyway. Right now. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe it’s really where our community is headed.

It’s an interesting time to be gay. Our community is changing. In itself. In its relationship to the world around it. And change always means, to some degree, losing something you’re carrying. And I wonder sometimes if we need to think about losing a bit of the adolescence and embrace a bit of our adulthood.

Labor Day weekend,brings on Southern Decadence, New Orleans paean to gay debauchery and craziness.  One of the acts that has been a Decadence staple, Charles Knipp a/k/a Shirley Q. Liquor, will be a no show and neither Decadence organizers nor Ms. Shirley are saying why.

For those not in the know Liquor is Knipp’s drag stage name and her life is interesting to say the least. She has 19 “chirren” (children), fathers unknown. The names of her children are Bucket, Gonorrhea, Bubblelicious, Cheeto, Orangello, Chlamydia, and Kmartina,  etc., etc. She sings songs wondering about the parentage of her brood, the United Negro Scholarship Fund, and the joys of a toke or two. For Knipp, a white gay man in his 40’s,  to perform as Shirley he dons black-face.

Knipp is convinced his act, a 21st century minstrel show, is about racial healing.

“There are so many pent-up things that black people want to say to white people and vice versa, but we’re all scared to death of offending each other,” Knipp told Rolling Stone a few years back. “I think God’s plan for me is to get right in the middle of all the tension and just make them laugh and say, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve thought that, but nobody’s ever said it out loud.’ There’s gotta be some healing that comes from that. And I truly think that’s why God put me here: to be a healer.”

Racial reconciliation through darky humor?! That is as kooky as saving a village by burning it down. Dear Mr. Knipp: drop me a note and explain how this racial love happens with your face corked up.

It should not be surprising that Knipp’s act has few supporters who are black and gay (although RuPaul is a fan and thinks anyone who calls Knipp’s act racist is not paying attention). Journalist Jasmyne Cannick has written some biting commentary about the man and his act (for some reason Knipp thought it would be precious to superimpose Cannick’s face on the body of a black porn star with huge breasts).

“A man who out of one side of his mouth tells the media that you love you some Black people and was raised by a Black woman and you have nothing but the utmost respect for us, all the while you make a living by degrading us and our race,” Cannick wrote in a letter to RuPaul and Knipp.

I’m no betting man and have no inside information, but this silence from the Knipp camp means he’s planning a big to-do. Because Knipp is convinced he is a healer (I laugh every time I think about that) here is what he will do this year: Shirley Q will be transformed into the “real Michelle Obama” (shrewish and disdainful of J. Crew clothes) and RuPaul will play President Obama as he really is when the lights are off–thuggish with a love for dog fighting. Like I said, I have no inside scoop, but when it happens at Decadence remember where you heard it first. Let the mending begin!

The evacuation went smoothly and the levees largely held, limiting damage from the big storm. Still some areas of the Gulf coast sustained serious damage, and eight people died in the U.S. as a result of Gustav, which had killed 94 across the Caribbean.

As Gustav advanced towards New Orleans on Saturday, Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mass evacuation of the city, curtailing Southern Decadence, the largest gay festival in the South that was to have gone on throughout the Labor Day weekend.

It was the second time in three years that a major hurricane disrupted the massive party centered in the French Quarter.  In 2005, hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, forcing cancellation of Southern Decadence.

The festival, which takes over the French Quarter regularly, attracted more than 100,000 people and had been one of the city’s biggest moneymakers. This year attendance was lower as concerns mounted that Gustav was heading toward the Big Easy.

The party has had its detractors in a city known for hard partying. In 2003, the state legislature passed a new indecency law that bans public nudity.

The festival also has been the target of evangelical preacher Rev Grant E. Storms, who leads a small group of demonstrators through the throngs on Bourbon Street. In the wake of Katrina, some conservative church leaders said the devastation was the result of God’s wrath on gays.

Tuesday, city officials began examining damage from Gustav.  Power is out in some areas of the city. The sewer system was damaged, and hospitals are working with skeleton crews on backup power.

But residential areas appear secure, and drinking water is safe.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin used stark language at a Saturday night news conference to urge residents to get out of the city, calling Gustav the “storm of the century.”

“This is the real deal, not a test,” Nagin said as he issued the evacuation order Saturday night. “For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.”

Gustav already has killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean.

Nagin’s evacuation order is the first test of a revamped evacuation plan designed to eliminate the chaos, looting and death that followed Katrina.

The city will not offer emergency services to those who choose stay behind, Nagin said, and there will be no “last resort” shelter as there was during Katrina, when thousands suffered inside a squalid Superdome. The city said in a news release that those not on their property after the mandatory evacuation started would be subject to arrest.

Many residents didn’t need to be ordered, with an estimated 1 million people fleeing the Gulf Coast on Saturday by bus, train, plane and car. They clogged roadways, emptied gas stations of fuel and jammed phone circuits.

Southern Decadence, held over the Labor Day Weekend, regularly attracted more than 100,000 people and had been one of the city’s biggest moneymakers. This year, attendance was lower, as concerns mounted that Gustav was heading toward the Big Easy.

The party has had its detractors in a city known for hard partying.  In 2003, the state legislature passed a new indecency law that bans public nudity.

The festival also has been the target of evangelical preacher Rev Grant E. Storms, who leads a small group of demonstrators through the throngs on Bourbon Street. In the wake of Katrina some conservative church leaders said the devastation was the result of God’s wrath on gays.

Most people fled New Orleans as Katrina approached, but a small number of people remained in the city, and amid the destruction a small parade behind a tattered rainbow flag made its way up Bourbon Street in an unofficial celebration of Southern Decadence.  The group – about two dozen people – all said they lived in the largely gay French Quarter.  Defiant, they said they were not about to flee the community despite orders from the city to do so.