Sep 07, 2007  |  By: ZACH HUDSON  | COMMENTS     

In just under two years as an Atlanta resident, Jason Toups says his life is more comfortable, but not necessarily better. Toups, along with four other gay men, escaped New Orleans on Aug. 28, 2005, within hours of Hurricane Katrina’s initial landfall off the Gulf Coast.

Up until that day, Toups had lived his entire life in New Orleans. He’s been back home three times since.

“The life I had, the life I knew, the reasons why I loved that place just aren’t there anymore,” he said.

That life, as Toups describes it, was charmed by the ever-present possibility of artistic renaissance in New Orleans’ art galleries and independent theater troupes. He and his friends — many of whom, like Toups, were closely associated with the Running With Scissors theatre company — lived life in a gentle, bohemian mix of creativity and poverty.

“You could live at the very edges of your imagination,” he said.

Toups’ home — a second story flat in uptown New Orleans, close to the city’s college district — was largely untouched by Katrina and the subsequent flooding. But when the storm hit, his life was forever changed nonetheless.

Today in New Orleans, the French Quarter is up and running again. And according to Katina Parker, a documentary filmmaker, the rebuilt district that remains New Orleans’ most famous tourist draw is likely in better physical shape than ever.

“From what I understand, the French Quarter has been basically returned to whatever its status quo was. Some people say it’s even cleaner,” she said.

The sights just beyond the French Quarter in any direction — from which, Parker says, tourists’ eyes are strategically averted — are what drew the bisexual filmmaker to the city.

“If you’re a person of some means, it’s very possible to go to New Orleans and not see a lot of what’s really there. But if you go just two blocks off the tourist path, you see the boarded up homes with the graffiti on them,” she explained.

Parker is taking her feature length documentary, “New Orleans: A Labor of Love,” to college campuses throughout the U.S. to recruit volunteers for a rebuilding project under the same title.

The documentary follows a group of students who made a March 2007 spring break trip to New Orleans to assist with rebuilding efforts. The students expected to work hard, Parker said, but they were overwhelmed by the rampant, unchecked destruction they faced when they arrived.

To help counter the devastation, Parker founded a new organization, also called New Orleans: A Labor of Love, to recruit at least 5,000 people and $400,000 for rebuilding projects in 2008. The group’s web site aims to connect potential volunteers to those needing help.

“Basically, the site that we’ve built is one that if you have had any notion that you want to volunteer, you can come to us. I get excited when people want to help,” she said.

The people who have wanted to help her so far, in large numbers, include churches — sometimes anti-gay ones — and gay sororities and fraternities.

“We’re taking an approach to recruiting that is radically inclusive. It’s not so much that gay people or straight people are any more special to do this work. It’s that everyone is needed,” she said.

In the wake of Katrina, if verbal storms arise during the rebuilding projects, Parker says she and her volunteers can weather them.

“It’s about rebuilding New Orleans and it’s about including everyone. And if in including everyone, it creates some dialogue in the midst of everyone, then cool,” she said.

Parker recently returned to New Orleans for Labor of Love projects during the Aug. 29 second anniversary of Katrina.

“Political figures and people who have a vested interest in creating some symbolism out of it stop to celebrate [the anniversary] and to acknowledge the day,” she said.

The people on the ground — the people she wants to help — barely noticed. 

“For most folks it was just another day — another day when they went to work, came home, and spent the evening working on their houses,” Parker observed. “There’s nothing really to celebrate.”

Parker blamed the news media for what she said is a common and inaccurate portrayal of ...