Larry Bagneris, Jr.

Larry Bagneris, Jr. , a native New Orleanian, began his civil rights activism as a student at St. Augustine High School. He graduated from Xavier University of Louisiana and moved to Houston, Texas, where he was a two-term president of the city’s Gay Political Caucus, chairperson of Gay Pride week, and, in 1979, founder of Houston’s Gay Pride parade. Bagneris returned to New Orleans in the 1990s and became a lobbyist for the NO/AIDS Task Force. He served four mayoral administrations as executive director of New Orleans’s Human Relations Commission before retiring in 2018. He is the author of the memoir Call Me Larry, forthcoming March 2025 from UVA Press.