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Although there are competing accounts of how the parade began, many LGBTQ residents of Baton Rouge describe a narrative of the parade as being started by drag queens in a gayborhood. This chapter traces the queer origins of the Spanish Town parade to the racially integrated bohemian gayborhood of Spanish Town in the 1980s. In the 2010s, the event has retained some of its queer cultural influence, even as it is predominately organized by white heterosexual men. The Spanish Town parade is now the largest Carnival parade in Baton Rouge, with hundreds of thousands of attendees dressing in pink costuming, cross-dressing, and wearing pink flamingo paraphernalia. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people were visible in the neighborhood and parade during this time, with the most visible participation being from white gay men.
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During the 1980s, the Spanish Town neighborhood developed a reputation as a bohemian neighborhood and gayborhood and began staging a neighborhood Mardi Gras parade. The Spanish Town neighborhood is not now nor has it ever been an ethnic urban enclave and it has had a complex history of racial segregation and integration. Spanish Town, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a small neighborhood built in 1805 by Canary Islanders who had moved from Spanish-ruled Galvez Town (Isch 2016). Although LGBTQ residents still attend the parade in large numbers, there is more ambivalence about the homophobic imagery in the parade and the consumption of gay culture by heterosexual parade participants. This vicarious citizenship is tempered by the heterosexualization of the contemporary Spanish Town parade. Using interviews, archival research, and participant observation, I argue that current LGBTQ residents of Baton Rouge, even those who have never lived in Spanish Town, claim a vicarious citizenship to the neighborhood and parade through an understanding of the queer origins of the parade in the 1980s and the parade’s beginning in a gayborhood. The Spanish Town parade is currently the largest Carnival parade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with hundreds of thousands of attendees dressed in pink costuming, cross-dressing, and wearing pink flamingo paraphernalia.