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 Youngblood,
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.