Francisco “Frank” Earl Perez (1968 – 2026) – historian, tour guide, educator, former Southern Decadence Grand Marshal, Editor-in-Chief of Ambush Magazine and Executive Director of the LGBT+ Archives Project – passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, August 8, following a sudden and valiant fight with cancer. He was 57 years old. Perez is survived by his loving partner of 12 years Chris Trentacoste as well as his mother Louise McCann, his father Frank Perez, and countless loved ones from the many chapters of his life. As Perez liked to say, “I wear a lot of hats, and my being has many facets.”
A funeral visitation for Perez will take place at Jacob Schoen and Son Funeral Home (The Schoen Chapel) 3827 Canal St, New Orleans, La on Saturday, August 15, from 10 am to 12 pm.
Perez, whose childhood hero was Huey Long, grew up in Baton Rouge, and he served as a page in high school for the Louisiana Legislature. As a child, he travelled into New Orleans with his grandfather and marveled at the architecture while enjoying the brunches at Tujague’s. After a brief stint attending LSU, he transferred to University of Louisiana, Lafayette, where he graduated in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and, in 1997, with a master’s degree in English. While active in campus ministry, Perez was publicly outed as gay and forced to attend a conversion therapy camp in Kansas. It was at this facility that Perez befriended a young gay man abandoned by family named Eddie, who sparked in Perez lifelong appreciation for the films of Bette Davis before he died of HIV/AIDS-related illness in obscurity.
The injustice of Eddie’s death marked a crisis point for Perez. He left the camp to embrace his sexuality, and he enrolled at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas to begin PhD studies. While in Fort Worth, he became a tenure-track professor at a community college before straining under the constrictions of academia. He entered a freewheeling phase, which he’d later regale to various audiences in well-crafted stories, of card-counting, liquor bootlegging, country politicking, and vague but friendly associations with members of an unnamed but well-known international gang. These were among his best yarns, and he told them with a glee that pulled in the listener.
Perez moved to New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina to rebalance and start anew. The city called to him. As he told in a 2023 oral history, “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get back to New Orleans,’ even though I had never up until that point fully lived in New Orleans.” Perez rapidly established himself as a community leader and voice in the French Quarter. In 2012, he coauthored the first major queer New Orleans history book In Exile: The Story of Cafe Lafitte with his friend Jeffrey Palmquist, then a bartender at the fabled Café Lafitte in Exile featured in the text. At the invitation of local gay entrepreneur and editor Rip Naquin, Perez began to write a weekly history column for the gay French Quarter newspaper Ambush. In 2014, Perez co-founded the nonprofit LGBTQ+ Archives Project of Louisiana to help preserve regional queer history. And by 2018, he was selected to be Grand Marshal of Southern Decadence, a grassroots community honor.
Perez would write and publish more than six history books in the last 15 years of his life, one of which (Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler) received a “2024 Honorable Mention” for the Louisiana Literary Award. He ran for New Orleans City Council District C in 2021, placing third and befriending the winning Councilmember Freddie King, with whom he worked on future projects. In 2023, he received the NOAGE “Trailblazer Award” for his lifetime devotion to human rights. The constant in these later years of achievement, advocacy, and mentorship was the extraordinary connection he shared with partner Chris Trentacoste, who filled his domesticity with joy and provided him the certainty of a love worthy of the romantic poems that he liked to recite in between ribald tales.
Perez will be greatly missed by the many he inspired and discipled or metaphorically deflowered. Community members and loved ones are invited to the funeral visitation for Frank Perez on Saturday, August 15, from 10 am to 12 pm at Jacob Schoen and Son Funeral Home (The Schoen Chapel) 3827 Canal St, New Orleans, La.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.
A Celebration of Life in the French Quarter will be announced at a later date.
