Over Labor Day weekend, hundreds of thousands of people will travel from around the world to New Orleans for Southern Decadence, one of the country’s biggest LGBTQ celebrations, after a two-year COVID hiatus.
“The fact that the parade is returning is a sign that we have survived,” says Rikki Redd, a New Orleans resident and the first Black trans woman to grand marshall the festival’s main parade. “We’re dedicating this parade to the people of New Orleans for their resilience—and now the community is trying to come back.”
But the global spread of monkeypox this summer has presented a new challenge. The virus has sickened more than 16,000 Americans so far, and the outbreak is still growing in Louisiana. A monkeypox infection typically causes painful blister-like sores, which harbor infectious particles and can pass the disease on. Although the pathogen can spread by touch—and in rare cases, through spit or dirty sheets—a multinational study from July found that 95 percent of examined cases were acquired during sex. So far, most cases have showed up among men who have sex with other men, although anyone could be infected.
[Related: Is monkeypox spread by sex?]
That means the risks of catching monkeypox at a big celebration can vary based on the activities and environments. “The heart and soul of Decadence is the parade,” says Redd. “And the events that we sponsor have absolutely nothing to do with sex. We hosted a drag brunch; we hosted a pool party.” The bigger concern is that over the course of the weekend, festival goers are going to hook up, as they would at other big parties, and many of them will be members of high-risk groups.
The other worry is that sweaty, packed crowds could be a potential vector. In one exceptional case, a man in California was likely infected at an outdoor music festival in the UK—he reported no sexual history for the previous three months—and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that many other monkeypox patients had recently visited festivals. The packed nature of the event could also expose not just attendees, but bouncers, bartenders, and even hotel workers changing sheets.
Those risks were front of mind for Chuck Robinson, the owner of Napoleon’s Itch, a gay bar in the French Quarter, and the organizer of Bourbon Street Extravaganza, a free street concert that headlines the weekend. When he first began hosting the event two decades ago, it was in response to efforts by the archbishop of New Orleans to end the festival, which is now in its 50th year. The narrative at the time was that “it was vulgar and nasty,” he says. “That was a challenge to me.”
But this year, he wondered whether it was a good idea to go on with the concert almost as soon as he saw the first news of US monkeypox cases. “The estimated 20,000 that line up in front of our nightclub for the concert—sweating, having a good time, shirts off—and with all the people coming in from all over the world, there’s no way that they’re going to be immune to this.”
Monkeypox isn’t COVID—it spreads less easily, and in contexts that are easier to identify—but festival leaders and local health experts are trying to figure out how to manage the risks at such a sprawling event.
Two weeks ago, Robinson announced that he was canceling the extravaganza to protect both concertgoers and his staff. He says that by and large, people have been supportive of his decision—but other elements of the celebration are still going forward. “At the end of the day, educating yourself is the key to safety, and the LGBTQ community has been doing that for years,” says Redd. Indeed, a CDC survey published on August 26 found that half of respondants, all men who have sex with men, had recently reduced their number of sex partners because of monkeypox.
City officials are also trying to be proactive in vaccinating against the virus, building on lessons learned during COVID, which led them to cancel Mardi Gras in 2021. “We had been working really really hard to put [Southern Decadence] on the CDC’s radar for months now,” says Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department. The national agency can provide the hard medical resources the city needs to fight monkeypox—but without grassroots outreach that speaks to the unique event and its audience, that will only go part way in protecting the most vulnerable.
Getting monkeypox vaccines to at-risk residents
In mid-August, the CDC announced that it would provide 50,000 extra doses of monkeypox vaccines to cities holding major LGBTQ celebrations, including 6,000 for New Orleans. At a press conference about the Southern Decadence response today, the White House also noted that it was planning shipments to Oakland, California, and other cities with upcoming Pride events.
But even with thousands of additional vaccines, “the timing for Southern Decadence is really difficult,” says Joe Hui, the communications director of Crescent Care, a New Orleans health clinic that was founded to care for AIDS patients, and has been administering monkeypox vaccines independently. Doses have been prioritized for cities that saw the first monkeypox outbreaks, like New York and Los Angeles. (The entire state of Louisiana only has 150 confirmed cases.) What’s more, it takes six weeks to get the two-shot sequence, so few people are likely to have finished their vaccine series by the time Southern Decadence begins—and that’s not counting the thousands of tourists.
Those are now being distributed in a series of pop-up events at bars in nightlife hotspots. The first, held in early August at a bar called the Phoenix, administered 300 doses to a crowd. On August 24, the New Orleans Health Department (NOHD) held an event called Vaxxtravaganza in the French Quarter, advertised by stilt-walkers and loudspeakers. Attendees who spoke to Popular Science said that while they’d been thinking about getting the vaccine ahead of Southern Decadence anyway, they showed up to the event because it was convenient. “I read in other places that you’d have to sign up and get on the waitlist,” one said. “And it seems like New Orleans has more than enough vaccines.”
But Avegno says that assembling staff to run vaccine clinics is a challenge. “There’s no funding to do this for monkeypox, like there was for COVID, so everybody’s kind of scraping it together.” The department is offering COVID jabs at monkeypox events to access federal funding, and relying in part on vol