Richard Balthazar

Divine Debauch: Chronicles of a Dissolute Youth in the French Quarter Richard Balthazar

In the early sixties, before Stonewall, before hippies, even before the Beatles, the French Quarter in New Orleans was a Bohemian enclave of artists, eccentrics, and/or perverts not unlike the Left Bank in Paris. DIVINE DEBAUCH is the tale of Tommy Young blood, a gay college boy, who frequents disreputable sailor dives along the waterfront of the Quarter, enjoying his own version of "La Dolce Vita," dancing his way through an epic series of love affairs and amorous adventures. Tommy loves white, brown, black, and yellow men, painters and models, football players and swimmers, satyrs and sailors, especially young Greek ones who are still versatile. But French or Israeli mariners will do. All of them are deliciously fair game for that degenerate peer of the realm and errant knight, Sir Roger Wrighte-Rowndleigh, as Tommy has dubbed his unruly middle leg. Dancing merengues and cumbias in La Casa de los Marinos and other ecstatic choreography in a Greek sailor bar called the Gin Mill, Tommy becomes a dervish in the Holy Carouse. Through sublime dissipation he achieves a philosophy of life as the DIVINE DEBAUCH and comes to embody the Olympian Dionysus himself, god of mystical dance and revelry.