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By the morning of Monday, August 29, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish at the southeastern tip of Louisiana, its fiercest winds had abated to 140 miles per hour. The storm system tipped to the northeast, brushing its back against fragile New Orleans, hurling most of its destructive might at the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

At first it appeared that Katrina had thrown New Orleans a sharp but non-lethal punch. The jazz clubs, tourist attractions, and gay businesses of the historic French Quarter suffered minimal damage. Unconcerned, President George W. Bush played golf. Many tourists who had booked rooms for Southern Decadence, the bacchanal staged each Labor Day weekend by gay New Orleans, saw no reason to change their plans.

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By Monday evening, however, the party was off. The city's levees-- flood walls holding back Lake Pontchartrain-- had burst at two critical points along drainage canals. New Orleans, set in a basin below sea level, faced an inundation that in little more than 24 hours would engulf nearly 80 percent of the metropolitan area in water up to 20 feet deep.

Wide swathe

Across 90,000 square miles from Louisiana through Mississippi and into Alabama, Katrina left behind a sodden litter of obliterated businesses and homes. When the winds died down in Plaquemines Parish, whole towns had ceased to exist. Oil rigs had been ripped from their moorings. Ships had been flung ashore as the Gulf of Mexico surged inland. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a massive gambling barge had vaulted over a highway and into a parking lot.

Roads were submerged. Bridges were gone. Lacking power, millions sweltered in darkness. As land lines broke and transmitters failed, telecommunications collapsed. Demolished ports left cargoes stranded, paralyzing trade. Oil refineries and pipelines shut down, sending gasoline prices soaring.

In New Orleans, much of the French Quarter, built on high ground, remained dry, while swamped areas lapsed into chaos. At the New Orleans Superdome, at least 15,000 evacuees huddled without water, food, or sanitation. The Superdome's emergency generators provided limited light; the absence of air-conditioning caused fatalities from heat exhaustion. At the sports arena and the Convention Center a few blocks away, there were fights, rapes, murders, suicides. Looters roamed where streets were passable, foraging for water, food, and medical supplies, or simply pillaging.

Many people who had fled the city ahead of the storm-- before or after Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an evacuation-- headed for reception centers across three states. Those who could stayed with family or friends. Hotels overflowed. Gay New Orleans residents found themselves dispersed from Cape Cod to Florida, from San Francisco to New York.

The Guide's Eddy Hougen, who had recently moved to a New Orleans neighborhood near the Fairgrounds, went to Baton Rouge, then embarked on an odyssey through Texas before driving eastward to his sister's home in Massachusetts. Keith Griffith, who operates a constellation of websites including cruisingforsex.com, wound up in Miami, then drove to Atlanta following confirmation that his New Orleans street was "like a canal."

"My friends, my whole family are scattered all over and we just don't know when we're ever going to see each other again," said Dorian-Gray Alexander, a gay New Orleans native marooned in Georgia. Like thousands of others, he was relying on cell phone and internet connections to locate people and share information. The New Orleans Times-Picayune absorbed thousands of postings at its website, www.nola.com, from individuals seeking lost friends and relatives, reporting conditions, or calling for help.

Land of equality?

Most who stayed behind lacked transportation, financial resources, or the fundamental physical ability to move. These included thousands of underpaid service workers, largely black or Latino, toiling in the tourist industry; members of a predominantly African-American underclass, already jobless and destitute; patients at area hospitals; residents of nursing homes; working-class retirees; and the disabled or chronically ill, among them indigent people with AIDS.

Not long after the current President first took office, the federal entity designed to address calamitous events-- the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)-- announced that the three worst catastrophes likely to strike the US were a terrorist attack on New York, a major San Francisco earthquake, and the immersion of New Orleans caused by a powerful hurricane hitting the Mississippi Delta.

The warning implied an intention to prepare, but preparations were barely in evidence several months later, when New York's World Trade Center toppled on 9/11/2001. Astonishingly, no added safeguards were in place on 8/29/2005, when nature provided a few days' notice.

For a time, the federal and state response to Katrina appeared nonexistent. The lack of intervention surprised no one aware of the Bush Administration's efforts to shrink and privatize FEMA while giving state and local governments minimal help in filling the gap. The process began well before 9/11 under Joseph Allbaugh, the President's ex-campaign manager and first FEMA director. It continued under his successor, Michael Brown, nicknamed "Brownie," a Republican activist who served as Commissioner of Judges and Stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association until, according to the Boston Herald, he was fired following lawsuits over "alleged supervision failures."

After the 9/11 attacks, FEMA was subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security, a new bureaucracy focused on law enforcement, paranoid pep talks, and color-coded alerts. By mid-2003, FEMA's funds were being siphoned into the war in Iraq, now costing $5.6 billion monthly in an age of tax cuts for the rich. (Bush's Iraqi misadventure, financed by the plunder of domestic programs, has become the most expensive armed conflict since World War II.) A significant portion of the National Guard, created to cope with disaster at home, has also been diverted to Iraq, along with much of its equipment, high-water vehicles included.

If we just say it's ok...

In the wake of Katrina, federal officials seemed stoned on their own incompetence. On September 1, FEMA's Michael Brown and Homeland Security potentate Michael Chertoff were disputing the existence of thousands of people starving in squalor at the New Orleans Convention Center. Assurances that all was under control and help was near became an empty mantra.

When President Bush emerged from a five-week holiday in Crawford, Texas, two days after the storm, he displayed the kinds of responses that occur to him first, relaxing environmental regulations and getting tough on crime-- demanding "zero tolerance" toward looters while taking a faith-based approach to human need. Later, between photo-op tours of devastation, he sought to shift blame toward local officials and complimented "Brownie" on doing "a hell of a job."

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," said the President. In fact, the levees' failure had been anticipated for years, and predicted by the National Hurricane Center in an August 28 message to Bush. Louisiana politicians had struggled for funds to reinforce and heighten the levees, especially after the active hurricane season of 2004. The threat of accelerated storm activity caused by global warming, a phenomenon the Bush Administration tries to ignore, made improvements to flood control urgent. In 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million to upgrade the levees. Bush tried to slash the amount by 85 per cent; Congress allocated $5.7 million.

A taste of Haiti

Already thriving when the US purchased it from France in 1812, New Orleans was built as a strategic port at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The engineering necessary to protect the city from flooding seemed justified by its status as guardian of the Mississippi and linchpin of commerce. But the Big Easy's commercial importance has waned.

Nowhere in the United States does the gap between rich and poor yawn wider than in Louisiana, whose economy the Almanac of American Politics describes as "more typical of a Caribbean sugar colony than an American state." Viewed through the lenses of class and Republican politics, the city's less affluent-- as well as the Democratic or non-voting servant class all along the Gulf Coast-- have evidently been viewed as expendable, if viewed at all, by President Bush and his peers.

Risk Management Solutions of Newark, California, sets economic losses from the disaster at $100 billion, with a record-breaking insurance bill of over $25 billion, although tens of thousands who lost their belongings were completely uninsured. Congressional sources estimate a loss of 400,000 jobs.

By the Labor Day weekend, a triage center had been set up at Louis Armstrong International Airport, just outside the New Orleans, where debilitated elderly people were left on baggage carousels like unclaimed luggage. Meanwhile, holes in the levee were being repaired. The oil giant Halliburton, ex-employer of Vice President Dick Cheney, was among the first companies to secure a clean-up contract. The work of retrieving the dead from contaminated waters began amid fears of a body count higher than that of the 1900 hurricane disaster in Galveston, Texas, where loss of life exceeded 6,000.

Bedraggled survivors were herded into buses and taken to the Houston Astrodome and other locations in seven states. Houston's Montrose Counseling Center attempted to identify lesbian and gay evacuees and help them find housing. The HIV/AIDS group Bering Omega distributed, food, clothes, and medication. GLBT celebrities including New Orleans native Ellen Degeneres organized benefits.

Gay-specific assistance was sorely needed. The Federal Defense of Marriage Act bars FEMA from distributing relief to gay families, or paying survivor benefits in cases where one partner in a same-sex couple has died in the hurricane. The federal statute is backed by state equivalents in Alabama and Mississippi, and a constitutional amendment in Louisiana. Larry Bagneris, mayoral liaison to the New Orleans gay community, said queer evacuees were being harassed at shelters, and complained of the Red Cross's dissociation from openly gay efforts to help.

Its lively and visible gay culture has made New Orleans a city Christian zealots love to hate. "Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans," trumpeted the website of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church. More circumspect right-wing Christians have openly hoped that the city where Tennessee WIlliams had his first homosexual one-night-stand will never be rebuilt.

But New Orleans, a matrix of jazz, a crucible of race and culture, has always commanded broad and fevered partisanship. As troops at last moved in, 10,000 people remained in the city defying orders to leave, and Johnny White's Sports Bar stayed open. On Sunday, September 4, about two dozen people in grass skirts and tutus held a Decadence parade on Bourbon Street after all. Southern Decadence had been expected to draw 125,000 attendees and pour $100 million into the local economy, but in the end, that wasn't the point.

Editor's Note: An array of charities have been accepting donations to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. Gay relief agencies and funds include the Rainbow World Fund, Hurricane Katrina LGBT Relief Fund, Houston's Montrose Clinic, and the Pride Houston Hurricane Relief Fund.