Political Animal
Political Animal
The Life and Times of Stewart Butler
Named a 2024 Honorable Mention Book by the Louisiana Library Association
During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco. Their relationship was an improbable love story that changed the course of LGBTQ+ history. With Doolittle’s money, Butler was able to retire and devote his life to political activism in the cause of queer liberation. A survivor of the horrific Up Stairs Lounge arson, Butler was a founding member of the first statewide lesbian and gay rights organization in Louisiana and an early champion for transgender rights, playing a key role in the eight-year struggle to persuade PFLAG to become the first national LGBTQ+ organization to include trans people in its mission statement.
In Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler, author Frank Perez traces Butler’s amazing life from his early childhood in Depression-era New Orleans, his adolescence at Carville where his father worked, his first unsuccessful attempt at college, his time in the army as a closeted gay man, his adventures in Alaska, his transformation into a hippie in the 1960s, his love affair with Doolittle, his decades as a gay rights advocate, and ultimately, his twilight years as an elder statesman.
Based on Butler’s own personal papers, including hundreds of letters, and dozens of interviews, Political Animal paints an intimate portrait of a legendary figure in gay politics and the times in which he lived.
This is a work of tremendous scholarship and keen insight into New Orleans gay history.
There is simply no way of understanding queer Louisiana in the late twentieth century and the queer American South in the same period, more broadly, without understanding the legacy of this one gay hippie. Political Animal represents the first and only work of scholarship to address this gap in public knowledge by revealing the groundwork of how a major human rights movement unfolded regionally, through coalitions assembled by an unlikely citizen powerbroker.
Frank Perez is cofounder and current president of the LGBT+ Archives Project in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is an instructor in the Office of Professional and Continuing Studies at Loyola University New Orleans, owner of Crescent City Tour Booking Agency, and columnist for Ambush Magazine and French Quarter Journal. He is author of Treasures of the Vieux Carré: Ten Self-Guided Walking Tours of the French Quarter and coauthor of Southern Decadence in New Orleans; My Gay New Orleans: 28 Personal Reminiscences on LGBT+ Life in New Orleans; and In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Gay Bar.
