Skip was the man to beat AIDS. Lesbian activist Charlene Schneider pinned her hopes on him—and in 1986, no less. It was a psychological survival game, a willful delusion of her mind for desperate times. The guy checked all the character boxes to steal back a soul from the reaper: first leader in New Orleans of a successful gay protest; first New Orleanian to publicly identify as a PWA (Person with AIDS) in the pages of IMPACT, the gay local newspaper; first Mardi Gras King of Olympus to reign with the disease; and first PWA asked to keynote an interfaith mass memorial for other PWAs, the ones who weren’t so lucky.  

So why not, Charlene wondered, first to survive a death sentence? Skip had bottomless energy to worry about others with AIDS, when most were shattered by day’s end. “Dammit Skip, you did it,” Charlene declared when she hugged him, looking so fantastic, during the 1986 Carnival season. When he died—the day before Mardi Gras, February 10, 1986, at the age of 38—she wasn’t ready. Simultaneously losing her friend and her sense of human agency in the fight against AIDS, Charlene retracted emotionally. She’d said goodbye to so many others, but this one hurt differently.  

A few years earlier, Charlene had hosted the first meeting in town on the dreaded “gay cancer,” at the time clinically identified as HTLV-III/LAV, at her eponymous lesbian bar and queer political center on Elysian Fields Avenue. Sandra Robinson, Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Resources, addressed a small group at Charlene’s. “They had no name for it and just said it seemed to only affect gay people,” Charlene recalled in a note for her unpublished autobiography. “It sounded outlandish to me.” Six cases, and five deaths, hit Louisiana by July 1983. Then the death count spiked exponentially. Friends started dropping in the streets, collapsing mid-gait like medieval depictions of the plague, before being conveyed to C-600, the isolation ward for AIDS patients in the looming tower of Charity Hospital.  

For most, C-600 was a final stop before the great beyond. “This place is really depressing,” Skip Kibodeaux attested in a September 6, 1985, story in the gay New Orleans newspaper IMPACT of the grim, crowded, and underfurnished AIDS ward, where he spent weeks himself. “I’m lucky I’ll be going home soon.”  

Then he was gone, passing so suddenly that organizers of the PWA interfaith memorial who’d asked him to speak had to scramble to find someone else to read the eulogy he’d composed as a tribute to others. Six days after her friend’s death, Charlene felt too frail to show her face at St. Mark’s Methodist Church in the Quarter for the interfaith memorial that, now, would serve as Skip Kibodeaux’s funeral. “I started making up mental reasons for not going—a hangover, tired from the night before, all sorts of excuses,” Charlene wrote in her February 20, 1986 column for IMPACT. “But as it happened, I woke up early.” When she reached the church, she drove her car around and around the block as if unable to leave its orbit. Finally, she parked across the street and waited to see if familiar faces walked in. Slender, wiry and with a butch mullet, Charlene was a lesbian of the classic cut. She chided herself for wearing jeans that day and told herself to go back home to change. Then it dawned on her: “Who did I think I was that I couldn’t handle it? My friends are dying, and I can’t even find the strength to attend a service?”  

Inside, Charlene found the interfaith memorial for victims of the first wave of the New Orleans AIDS crisis to be sparsely attended. Where was everyone else who loved Skip? Probably terrified like her, she concluded. A Catholic nun named Sister Dorothy Dawes, who performed an underground AIDS ministry in defiance of archdiocesan authorities, gave a homily on the sufferings of Job. The Gay Men’s Chorus sang a rendition of “You Are Near” as Father Bob Pawell, a gay-affirming Catholic priest and co-chair of a gay health services organization called the New Orleans AIDS Task Force (NO/AIDS), took the pulpit. “I was with Skip when he died,” Pawell shared with fellow mourners. “I closed his eyes.” Unfolding a piece of paper, the priest, who’d offered last rites to at least fourteen other young men dying of AIDS, continued, “His parents saved this from his effects.” With that, Pawell read selections of Skip Kibodeaux’s final message:   

“If you don’t have AIDS now and should find one day you have it and your whole life flashes in front of you, don’t give up. I’m confident a cure will be found soon. And for God’s sake, keep the faith, it may be the only thing that you will have left.” 

More than a year later, in August 1987, as Charlene readied herself to attend the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in the nation’s capital, she heard about a plan to unfurl an AIDS quilt the size of a football field on the National Mall to memorialize the nearly fifty thousand lives then lost to AIDS. As Charlene told Times-Picayune reporter Greg Belanger, she knew just for whom she needed to make a patch. She carried that sacred banner all the way from the Big Easy to Washington, DC.  There, Skip’s name shimmered in block letters between two pink triangles on a bed of blue fabric, and his impact was reflected in the largest work of community folk art ever created.  

Patrick “Skip” Kibodeaux’s section of the AIDS Quilt (spelled “Kiboudeaux” on the quilt), which was unfurled on the National Mall during the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987. Courtesy of The National AIDS Memorial

Patrick “Skip” Kibodeaux was born a ward of the Catholic Church on February 18, 1947, at the St. Vincent’s Infant and Maternity Asylum on Magazine Street in New Orleans. Founded by the Daughters of Charity in 1858 to care for parentless babies following successive outbreaks of yellow fever, the orphanage had expanded over the decades and added services for unwed mothers or so-called “women in trouble.” Before this maternity program, newborn babies were often left in baskets on the doorstep. “The institution has a total capacity of 125, from infants to the age of three,” reported the newspaper New Orleans States in 1953, around the time of Kibodeaux’s stay. “The children include orphans and youngsters from broken or economically unstable homes.” Most children at St. Vincent’s were reclaimed by hastily married birth mothers or placed with adoptive parents before their first birthdays. But Patrick Kibodeaux lingered at St. Vincent’s past age three.  

In 1951, Patrick was finally welcomed into the home of the Saladinos, a recently wed Catholic couple who lived on North Gayoso Street in the working-class neighborhood of Mid-City. Sam Saladino was a WWII veteran who toiled as an auto mechanic; Marcelle Saladino was a homemaker born in Paris, France, who had immigrated to the American South. The boy called Marcelle “mother” and Sam “stepfather.” Given these assignations, it’s likely that Marcelle was one of the birth mothers from St. Vincent’s who was able to regain custody of her child. Patrick attended Warren Easton High School off Canal Street, where he played clarinet in the marching band and starting going by the diminutive “Skip.” Tall, lean, strong-jawed, big-eared, and handsome, Skip dressed in impeccably preppy attire and was a catch to girls his age, who he’d sooner befriend than court.  

In 1965, he got a job fresh out of high school as a corporate accountant, identifying professionally as Patrick Saladino according to queer local historian and former IMPACT columnist Roberts Batson as well as New Orleans AIDS activist Mark Gonzalez in recent interviews. Flush with cash and ready to discover himself, the teenager signed a lease on a single-bedroom apartment in the French Quarter near the major gay bars of the so-called “Fruit Loop.” When out and about, he used the “bar name” (or gay calling card) of Skip Kibodeaux—a fusion of his nickname and his birth surname—a then-common tactic, according to Batson, to compartmentalize one’s sexuality from one’s job identity. Skip entered the queer warrens of the Quarter, such as Café Lafitte in Exile on Bourbon Street, and let loose.  

In an era when homosexuality was ubiquitously criminalized, from bedroom “crimes against nature” to “importuning” (flirting) on the sidewalk, the use of a “bar name” provided deniability in the event of an arrest, which would be reported in the crime blotter of the local newspaper of record, the Times-Picayune. “That section of the paper was treated as required reading by society,” recalled Albert Carey, former gay Carnival queen and ex-president of the gay New Orleans Krewe of Armeinius, in a June 2019 telephone interview. “Some killed themselves rather than appear in those pages.”  

Twentysomething Skip Kibodeaux was notably more daring than the average bachelor. “Skip was rumored, when he was in the mood, to go to Lafitte’s, enter the door and ask the first person to go home with him,” recalled Skip’s friend Ben Jones-Walters in an email conversation on November 6, 2024. “Naturally, many startled men said no. So Skip, undeterred, simply went to the next person in line and asked them. Since he was a nice-looking guy, he eventually got a yes.” Skip only half-heartedly tried to play down this gossip. “I could never live up to my reputation,” he said coyly in an August 1985 interview with IMPACT.  

Skip joined the gay Carnival Krewe of Olympus by 1973, and he reveled in that year’s Olympus Ball as the tableau character “Rain” for the chosen Mardi Gras theme “Evening of Enchantment.” A krewe member recalled Skip’s ball attire: “It was an Erté costume [referencing the Russian-born French designer], very large and fabulous.” Ticketed balls for gay krewes elevated Mardi Gras traditions into tongue-in-cheek art forms by celebrating a certain breed of stylish man who took to drag in elaborate performances. “The gay balls of New Orleans are even more elite than those given by straight society,” touted IMPACT in 1979. “It is not unusual to see a member of Comus go begging for a ticket to a gay tableau.” 

In a city where “politics” was a dirty word, the purpose of the gay Carnival krewes was chiefly social, although appearing in drag at a private event did serve as a sly rebuke to the mores of furtiveness governing gayness in Dixieland. As such, sought-after invitations to gay Mardi Gras balls came with assurances of discretion from those who attended and requests for “no pictures please,” lest the performers be outed. “He was one of the main, main players in the krewe of Olympus,” recalled fellow krewe member Larry Holbrook in a telephone interview on October 24, 2024. Despite these safeguards, Skip’s Catholic family discovered his sexuality through his Carnival pastime. Expressing outrage, they fell out with him. “My father didn’t agree with his lifestyle,” shared Skip’s sister Michelle Saladino via telephone conversation on May 17, 2023, “and I really don’t know much about his life at all.” Though the rift was painful, as averred several of Skip’s friends, it also freed the man to be more Skip Kibodeaux than Patrick Saladino as he moved between worlds.  

In 1977, while attending an activist meetup in response to anti-homosexual celebrity Anita Bryant’s upcoming set of concerts at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium, Skip inadvertently thrust himself into the gay vanguard. “I had gone to a meeting at the urging of a friend,” he recalled in the August 1985 interview with IMPACT. “Someone said something I couldn’t hear. I raised my hand for him to repeat what he had said. Next thing I knew people were applauding and congratulating me!” Skip had just unwittingly volunteered to be the public face of a new grassroots coalition of gay and lesbian organizations called HERE (Human Equal Rights for Everyone) to oppose Anita Bryant’s visit. As Shakespeare writes in Twelfth Night, “Some have greatness thrust upon them.”  

Anita Bryant was not only a singer but also a political juggernaut—spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, former Miss Oklahoma, friend of Lyndon Johnson, and, as head of the national Save Our Children campaign against homosexuality, megaphone for Christian conservatism in the guise of a mother figure. Skip Kibodeaux was a gay accountant. They did not exactly seem equally matched as adversaries. But through his association with the largest and most reputable gay organizations in the city—the gay Carnival krewes—Skip was uniquely positioned to dominate the ground game in New Orleans.  

Patrick “Skip” Kibodeaux, at center in a short-sleeved-button-down shirt behind the guitarist, protesting Anita Bryant’s homophobia in Jackson Square ahead of her New Orleans concert. Photo by Owen Murphy

At Skip’s incitement, kings and queens of Carnival raised their voices against Bryant. Seven of the city’s nine gay krewes, including Olympus, voted to join the HERE coalition alongside the New Orleans chapter of the National Organization for Women and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I was so incensed at the time,” recalled Paul Kilgore, a gay New Orleanian spurred into politics through HERE, in a 2016 interview for the queer New Orleans history book Tinderbox. “Because I had actually liked her when she was in the Miss America pageant and bought one of her record albums.” Charlene Schneider, who was swept into the anti-Anita fervor through Skip, later recalled in her IMPACT column, “The air was filled with energy.”  

Roberts Batson, working for the Municipal Auditorium while reporting intel to HERE, led a team from the venue to try to void Bryant’s contract. But, according to Batson’s recollection of the pivotal conference call, Anita’s husband and manager Bob Green threatened the auditorium management: “We will destroy you.” The event would proceed as scheduled on June 17 and 18, 1977. “Everyone is disappointed,” Skip, as chairman of HERE, remarked to the Times-Picayune in a June 8, 1977 story. “But it is just one battle, and we’re going to continue to fight.”  

As Bryant’s concerts approached, national Gay Liberation organizations threw their support behind the HERE campaign, sending a host of celebrity speakers for a “Gay Day Rally” in Jackson Square on the evening of June 18—an unprecedented queer protest timed to coincide with Bryant’s final performance. In a promotional coup, Skip secured, for the event’s keynote address, the most famous gay American in 1977: Sergeant Leonard Matlovich. Back in 1974, Bronze Star recipient and Vietnam War veteran Sergeant Matlovich made the cover of TIME magazine with the headline “I Am a Homosexual” after being dismissed from the US Air Force and denied an honorable discharge for telling superiors his sexual preferences. In the years since, Matlovich had become synonymous with gay activism, stirring audiences with the line “They gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one” in his stump speech. “Skip brought Sergeant Matlovich down here to lead the anti–Anita Bryant parade,” Charlene verified in her IMPACT column.  

When skies darkened as the rally time approached, Skip worried that his anti-Anita ambush was about to be rained out. Then the clouds parted and a thousand gays and lesbians emerged into Jackson Square. From a makeshift bandstand, Leonard Matlovich seized the bullhorn and revved up the crowd. “Hey, hey, ho ho, Anita Bryant’s got to go!” they shouted. Though HERE had acquired all the proper permits from City Hall, police still felt the need to register their presence. “They were on the roofs of the Pontalbas, the Cabildo, and the Presbytère,” recalled gay activist Roger Nelson in 1989 to queer New Orleans historian Johnny Townsend. “They were on mounted patrol . . . I think they expected trouble.”  

Skip appointed Paul Kilgore and Charlene Schneider to be his parade marshals. When Skip shouted the cue through a bullhorn—“All marshals on the street!”—the twosome lined up at the base of St. Ann Street, blew their whistles, and guided the surging crowd through the heart of the French Quarter. More joined the mass of people, chanting, “Out of the closets, into the streets!” When they halted at the steps of the Municipal Auditorium, their shouting threatened to drown out Anita Bryant’s saccharine crooning inside.  

Skip’s “Gay Day Rally” was, according to a Times-Picayune report on June 19, 1977, “the biggest gay rights protest in the city’s history.” Skip and Leonard Matlovich also spoke on a news segment for the local ABC affiliate. “I’ll never forgot Leonard sitting with me waiting for us to be interviewed by ABC News,” Kibodeaux recalled in his August 1985 interview with IMPACT. “He told me that once I appeared on TV as an openly gay person, my name in town would be mud.” But Matlovich’s prediction of Skip’s name being sullied failed to transpire—because New Orleans’s most visible gay activist was still, like many, living a double existence, with one name for the bedroom and another for the office. It would be years before a gay politico of the Big Easy could safely maintain one identity without being fired or evicted.  

The toast of New Orleans post-Anita, Skip received one of the highest honors in gay Carnival when he was crowned Queen Olympus VIII for the 1978 season. “The royalty of Olympus are chosen solely by the Captain,” explained krewe member Ben Jones-Walters via email in October 2024. “It’s [an honor] to be given to those who have worked hardest and have been inspirations to the Krewe and community.” At the Saint Bernard Civic Auditorium, the Queen made her entrance at the culmination of the Xanadu Ball in feathers and glitter and gown to riotous applause.  

Absent the unifying rancor towards Anita Bryant, the HERE coalition fragmented. But Skip maintained his appetite for grassroots campaigning. In 1980, he teamed with gay bar owner Danny Wilson of the Golden Lantern to organize the first Blue vs. Gay charity softball game—fielding teams from the New Orleans Police Department and the queer community, umpired by City Councilmembers Lambert Boissier and Mike Early—to broker a détente on gay bar raids.  

But the city shifted into siege mode with the arrival of a plague. “Gays’ Disease Spreads to Heterosexuals” ran a sensational headline in the Times-Picayune in 1982. Skip and Charlene joined the NO/AIDS Task Force when it filed articles of incorporation in June 1983. New patient cases overran Charity Hospital, with no treatments on the horizon.  

Skip was residing in a house in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie with his fellow Olympus krewe members Carl Benoit and David Tringali when, as he recollected in his August 1985 IMPACT interview, it started to feel like he was running on empty. On December 1, 1984, he collapsed on the way to a corner store and had to be helped home by strangers. He spent the next ten days in the hospital, during which time his symptoms stumped clinicians and his mother Marcelle hardly left his side.  

On January 4, 1985, Skip’s employer fired him for poor attendance just as he developed a noticeable lesion on his eyelid. Skip scheduled a surgery to get the lump removed, and his team of physicians brought in an LSU specialist to perform the biopsy. On January 26, 1985, when the results arrived, the specialist informed Skip’s mother first. The lesion on his eyelid was Kaposi sarcoma, a rare form of opportunistic cancer common in patients with HTLV-III/LAV. Skip had full-blown AIDS, the physician said. “I didn’t react,” Skip recalled to IMPACT. “How could I react to learning I had a disease I knew next to nothing about?”  

On January 31, Skip’s medical insurance through his former employer elapsed, and orderlies transferred him from a regional hospital for “paying customers” to the AIDS ward of Charity Hospital, the city’s public clinic. One morning at Charity, according to his IMPACT interview, Skip worked up the courage to ask the rounding doctor, “What are my chances to live?” The doctor, visibly exhausted, answered, “None.” Skip asked a visiting friend to draw the thin curtains around his bed so that the other four AIDS patients who shared his hospital room wouldn’t witness him sob. “We all know that we will die someday,” Skip shared in his IMPACT interview, “but at that moment it hit me that I was going to die within a year.”  

Skip’s body bounced back, and he made it out of Charity in time for Mardi Gras 1985. But when a stranger made sexual overtures towards him at a gay bar, Skip felt a responsibility to inform him that sex was out of the question—and why. The man pulled back in revulsion and fear. “Can I get it just by touching you?” the man asked, as Skip recounted to IMPACT. Determined to advocate for public education in the midst of the epidemic, Skip enrolled in the NO/AIDS hospice training program so he could himself become more knowledgeable. “I was uninformed,” Skip said to IMPACT, “and I had the disease.”  

Determined to give AIDS a human face, in August 1985, Skip took a radical leap. He became the first publicly identified person with AIDS in the New Orleans metropolitan region by appearing in a multipage, no-holds-barred profile interview for IMPACT. “I keep busy, I get out,” he shared with readers. “My mother keeps telling me to rest. If I get tired, I rest.” Within the month, he was readmitted to Charity Hospital. From his bed in C-600, he agreed to a second IMPACT interview with an IV dangling from his arm. “I don’t need anything, but the others here sure do,” he said. “Even a well person would start to feel bad in here . . . There are curtains for the window in the closet, but they have never been put up. These places need some brightening. Plants and flowers.” He also identified a need for visitors: “Sometimes while my family and friends are here, I worry about the others who have no one.”  

When he received discharge orders, Skip moved back home to Mid-City, in the care of his mother. By late October 1985, Skip was ready to abandon every southern mask in the spirit of consciousness raising. He wrote a letter to the editor of IMPACT in which he presented his bar name alongside his then-legal surname so that the community might pause and fathom the stakes of what he was saying: “Skip (Kibodeaux) Saladino, A Person with AIDS.” Skip implored in his letter, “Our PWA’s need help. We can’t give up on them, unless we want to give up on ourselves.”  

The move did turn heads, recalled Roberts Batson. Some in the Krewe of Olympus expressed confusion with regard to Skip’s legal name. “Toward the end, for insurance purposes, he was adopted by his stepfather and became Patrick Saladino,” krewe brother Ben Jones-Walters attempted to clarify in an email on November 6, 2024. “He was adopted by my father,” agreed Skip’s sister Michelle Saladino, who refused to say anything more when reached via phone in May 2023. This identity jumble—birth name, bar name, professional name, legal name—only exists because Skip came of age in a homophobic society, with confounding impacts on the historic record.   

With assistance from krewe members, his close friends, and his mother, Skip prepared for what would be his last deeds on Earth—final declarations of love and inspiration intended to motivate others in the crisis. On November 25, a NO/AIDS committee spearheaded by Skip and Father Bob Pawell met with Charity Hospital staff to propose a community-led refurbishment of ward C-600—a process that would require subsequent weeks of meetings to navigate layers of hospital administration. 

Meanwhile, in the strictest codes of Mardi Gras secrecy, Olympus captain Bill Walters selected Skip for an extraordinary role at the 1986 Olympus ball, which had a World War II theme that year. As Skip was often unable to reach the Olympus den to work on sewing his costume, his mother helped him create the get-up at home. “Skip always had one of the major costumes,” recalled Larry Holbrook via phone interview in October 2024. “He was very creative.” Skip worried he would pass away before the Olympus bal masqué date, January 11, and then who would wear his outfit? “I remember that early in the year Skip talked to Bill about his ability to do the role,” recalled Jones-Walters via email. “Skip was considering withdrawing and letting someone else be it. Bill firmly but politely reminded Skip that as Captain the choice was his.”  

Patrick “Skip” Kibodeaux in costume as King of Olympus at the Krewe of Olympus Ball during Carnival in 1986, shortly before he died of AIDS-related causes. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum

Patrick “Skip” Kibodeaux as the King of Olympus, alongside Will Hughes as Queen of Olympus at the Krewe of Olympus Ball in 1986. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum

Then came the day. “He was doing reasonably well, but it was touch and go,” Jones-Walters said. “His mother was at the ball.” At the climax of the night, the curtains parted and a silhouetted figure emerged onstage, obscured behind a feathery scepter. Milking the moment, the figure waited until the last possible second to pull the scepter aside, revealing the identity of King Olympus XVI: Skip Kibodeaux. Sporting a blinding white tunic and a colossal golden crown with more than 20 starry points, Skip’s costume symbolically embodied the “Peace” that followed World War II, but he looked more like the Archangel Michael. Ball celebrants understood what this visage expressed: Be angelic; in the face of AIDS,  do not hide your face. It was Skip’s way of saying goodbye to the city he adored.  

As the King swept his white cape aside and lifted a golden chalice to toast the upper stands, Carnival revelers cheered and wept. Carnival Kings rarely outperform the Queen, but this was undoubtedly Skip Kibodeaux’s year. Krewe members hugged Captain Bill Walters to let him know he’d undoubtedly made the right choice of royalty. “Bill said it would be Skip or it would be no one,” reflected Jones-Walters via email. “Bill often wondered if that kept Skip alive a bit longer.”  

On January 27, after weeks of persistent meetings, Skip Kibodeaux and Father Bob Pawell at last broke through the Charity Hospital bureaucracy to reach the Deputy Director of Operations. Together, they established a practical list of goals for an upgrade to C-600, with work to commence immediately after Mardi Gras. With that promise secured in writing, Skip’s legendary vigor left him forever. On February 10, at 3 a.m., he passed away holding the hand of Father Bob Pawell. Family members held a closed service for Patrick Saladino at the Metairie funeral home Lamana-Panno-Fallo at 11 a.m. on February 12, with a Christian burial immediately following at Greenwood Cemetery. On February 16, Skip Kibodeaux’s interfaith mass memorial at St. Mark’s Methodist Church attracted a small crowd of gay and lesbian friends, some of whom recalled that Skip’s mother attended. The NO/AIDS Task Force moved to rename the C-600 revitalization effort in his honor. They called it Project Skip.  

But recognition of Skip’s leadership during the New Orleans AIDS crisis slowly faded with the years. Perhaps his use of multiple names, a protective factor while he lived, had the inadvertent effect of burying his identity in death. In gay New Orleans of the prior century, it was possible to be best friends and never know each other’s birth names. “All of this may be pure fantasy, but it is what I remember,” qualified Ben Jones-Walters via email of the entirety of his recollections of Skip Kibodeaux.    

In 1991, after the Krewe of Olympus lost a majority of its core New Orleans membership to the virus, the organization transplanted to Houston. Charlene’s bar closed in 1999, and Charlene Schneider relocated to Bay St. Louis, where she passed away in 2006. When Skip’s greatest advocate in life, his mother Marcelle Saladino, passed away in 2007, surviving relatives neglected to include Skip in her obituary. In 2008, a New Orleans AIDS Monument was finally erected, in the Faubourg Marigny’s Washington Square Park, but Skip does not appear among the honored dead. It appears no one was left in the city to speak his name. All memory of the King of Olympus lay scattered and fallow like an ancient statue in pieces, waiting to be reassembled.  

Robert W. Fieseler is a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association “Journalist of the Year” and the acclaimed nonfiction author of Tinderbox—winner of the Edgar Award and the Louisiana Literary Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His second book, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, is forthcoming this summer. He lives with his husband in New Orleans.