Mississippi Violet
My first attempt to drive to the only gay bar I had heard about on the Mississippi stretch of the Gulf coast missed the exit. When I realized that my GPS went haywire, I took the first ramp I saw off the highway. This dumped me right in the middle of a residential neighborhood with single family homes (wood siding, simple pitched roofs, small gardens). I could tell it had been a while since the narrower north-south streets were last paved. The asphalt crumbled in places and two freestanding basketball hoops stared into the empty street. It was noon, so kids would have been at school. The mid-September humidity saps all the pleasure from being outside this time of day. I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder.
I was in Biloxi, a coastal city of 48,000 residents just over an hour east of New Orleans. The city has long been shaped by its geography, the temperamental Gulf weather, and its culture is as layered as its colonial history dating to its founding in1699 as a French outpost.
Once the GPS got its bearings, it instructed me to turn around, get on the main road, and drive to the east end of the town. That was no more than a five-minute trip. Three minutes out, the landscape changed. Buildings along the road —one story tall—were more spread out and in larger lots. Most sold things: auto parts, groceries, hamburgers, weed, booze, salvation. Behind these buildings, houses again, many empty lots (many of them never rebuilt after Katrina). No street-facing basketball hoops here.
I could have easily missed the bar—again—if I hadn’t seen a mural painted on its side with “love is love” spelled in bold typeface, each letter casting rainbow shadow on the teal wall (Figure 1). Flying over the covered patio, three rainbow flags, one trans flag, one US flag, and a hybrid US flag with the stripes replaced by the rainbow announced the building’s unique brand of American queerness.
Figure 1. Approaching Just Us Lounge in east Biloxi. Photograph by Stathis G. Yeros.
Mississippi is a deeply conservative state—60.9 percent of voters supported Trump in the 2024 elections—and when I visited just before the election, anti-trans rhetoric was a major selling-point of the Republican campaign. Horrific acts of violence against trans people, and especially trans people of color, including the 2021 unsolved murder in the state capital of Dominique Jackson, a Black trans woman who was systematically misgendered by the media. At the state level, Mississippi has no anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people. But my face-to-face interactions with both queer and straight interlocutors, like those in Biloxi, revealed another part to the story.
The bar was a simple rectangular box with a metal roof that tops cement block walls. The roof was concealed at the front by a three-tiered parapet, elegant in its simplicity, giving the street façade the flatness that I have come to expect and appreciate in similar commercial buildings framing scenes of the American landscape. There was no big sign announcing the name on the bar. The narrow door was flanked by two symmetrical, long, mirrored windows. Upon closer inspection, the windows displayed a calendar with monthly events, which included a mix of drag shows and other live performances (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Just Us Lounge’s simple street elevation. It used to be covered with a mural depicting the pre-Katrina Biloxi coast preserved by the local historical society. Photograph by Stathis G. Yeros.
I stepped out the car into the gravel lot and was greeted by the humid air that after three months on the road in the Deep South was still unfamiliar. A young man—later I found out that he worked at the bar—was picking up trash from the parking lot; otherwise, the scene was eerily quiet. Inside, a large room had dim light and cooler air. To my right, there was a stage that could fit a five-person band, a couple dozen tables with ample standing room, a pool table at the back corner, and a long bar along two of the perimeter walls. The walls were covered with posters, old photos, and beer ads. The reflective ceiling, painted black, and stained-glass clearstory windows heightened the drama (Figure 3).
Figure 3. The Just Us Lounge interior. The bar hosts regular drag shows and live music. Photograph by Stathis G. Yeros.
I chatted with the small mid-day crew assembled at one end of the bar that included one of the owners, a bartender, and two locals sipping on long drinks.
“This is a pilgrimage stop, right?” The co-owner greeted me, smiling. “We are famous in these parts, you know.”
I introduced myself as an architectural historian studying queer spaces (always uncomfortable with this description as historians would barely count me in their midst and I don’t really study Architecture). I told her that I had come to meet Lynn Koval, the bar’s founder, who was featured in the 2018 documentary Southern Pride.
“That’s my sister. She hasn’t been in for a few months. She is terminally ill; doesn’t get out of the house much these days.”
I tried to square this news with the image of Koval in the documentary, at the center of the hectic preparations for Biloxi’s first Pride festival, boiling shrimp, gently bossing people around, and building festival tents.
It turns out that my interlocutor had some axe to grind with how the bar was presented in the documentary and offered to arrange a meeting with her sister, “to get the record straight.”
Koval agreed to meet me the next day. When I arrived, she was waiting for me at the bar, cigarette in one hand, gin and tonic in the other. I ordered a beer. It was barely 11 am and I don’t really drink alcohol. It was refreshing.
Koval’s voice was barely audible, so we retreated to the quiet green room behind the stage, filled with wigs and drag costumes. Despite her weakness, for the next two hours she gave me a crash-course on the politics of Biloxi’s—and Mississippi’s—queer life. We spoke about her relationship with her parents who rejected her when she fell in love with another woman at seventeen, her many years working at bars, her unlikely career as a bounty hunter, the life she built with her wife in Biloxi, her loving relationship with her formerly estranged son who reached out after hurricane Katrina, the playground she built in the bar patio for her grandchildren. In her telling, owning a bar grew organically from her life experiences: in 1997 she simply got tired working for others at a local casino, she already had managerial experience, and she was able to get a line of credit. Not so simple.
The building was in a poor neighborhood and in need of gut renovation. The renovation crew—Koval’s friends and family—allegedly found more than one machine gun hidden in the attic. Meanwhile Koval reached out to the neighbors, door-to-door, to let them know she was opening a new bar that was “open to anyone.” An elderly neighbor offered her the name: “Why don’t you call it Just Us.” Quickly, a self-selected community congregated: gay bar regulars, young trans people navigating uncharted territory, queer kids dipping their toes into drag. There were also gay and straight transplants to the Gulf Coast, including a talented muralist who adorned the street façade with a detailed scene of the pre-Katrina coast. After the artist’s death and before humidity claimed the mural, which was eventually replaced by the current one, the local historical society preserved it in high-resolution photographs as a representation of Biloxi’s bygone era.
As Just Us became a gathering place, its rhythms intertwined with the city’s own. It was not uncommon to throw meat on the BBQ at four in the morning to feed casino workers finishing their shifts at that time. Along with its sister city Gulfport—established in 1898 as a port for the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad—Biloxi hosts eight casino resorts. In the early twentieth century, the city had emerged as a regional tourism hub, earning the nickname “Little Las Vegas of the South” for its tacitly tolerated anything-goes gambling and entertainment scene. Gambling has been legal in Mississippi since 1990.
“Bars have long served as central sites for queer resistance in the South, but they are far from alone. Bookstores, shelters, and informal community centers have also sustained queer life across generations.”
Since opening its doors, Just Us Lounge has operated around the clock, with a brief gap during Katrina. When the water receded after the hurricane and Koval was able to reach the building, only the four walls and the roof had remained. The water had reached the ceiling and everything inside was ruined. In the next few weeks, Koval, whose own house was spared, was there to help put the community back together. People came back one-by-one, adding their names on a chalk board, a physical listserv to account for each other’s whereabouts. Miraculously, everyone was alive. Removing old furniture, killing the mold, re-finishing interior surfaces, building the current bar (in which, as I found out, they encased sand and mementos under a thick coat of resin) required group effort. The surrounding neighborhood was less fortunate and without insurance access, as Koval told me. Many houses still lay vacant, although road re-paving during my visit may indicate change.
The power of community-building was not new for Koval. She recounted that when she worked in local bars in the 1980s, straight men would “drag [gay] people out the front door and beat the shit out of them. That was their past-time.” Having built rapport with some of these men over many stiff drinks, she described a typical interaction:
“What are you doing? I’m also gay. You are not going to do that on my watch. They said: yeah, but you’re Lynn. I said yeah, but Lynn loves them. Get it?”
She quickly saw results: “Before all was said and done that community was protecting the gay community” (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Lynn Koval at Just Us Lounge, September 2024. She is holding a “Make America Gay Again” red baseball cap. Photograph by Stathis G. Yeros.
Bars have long served as central sites for queer resistance in the South, but they are far from alone. Bookstores, shelters, and informal community centers have also sustained queer life across generations. At the University of Mississippi Archives, I encountered newsletters from the Mississippi Gay Alliance, published from 1975 to 1991 that listed gay-friendly businesses, community events, and activist efforts, offering a glimpse into the enduring presence of queer life in the state.
I visited Biloxi as part of a three-month-long research trip through the Deep South documenting queer sites across the region to try to understand how race, rurality, and religion have shaped queer life since gay liberation (this informs my next book project on placemaking and democracy in the queer Deep South).[1] A longtime lesbian activist told me that Mississippi should not be viewed as a “lost cause” for progressives: “If we reached every marginalized person in the state, we would build an electoral majority. In sheer numbers, we are a purple state.” After this interaction, I kept returning to the metaphors of lavender and purple—lavender as a symbol of queer persecution and defiance, and purple as the blending of red and blue, a stand-in for political centrism. Elections hinge on numerical majorities, but queerness resists quantification. Perhaps that’s why queer communities have always built their own institutions—borrowing from tradition yet reimagining them to suit new and often precarious realities.
Queer people in Biloxi still face queer bashing but as Koval puts it, “that doesn’t come from Biloxi. That’s people coming from over the highway.” For her, Interstate 10—the inland east-west artery that bypasses the city—marks an unofficial boundary between Mississippi’s conservative state politics and Biloxi’s more defiant, independent spirit. My broader project contends that understanding the labor it takes to build community, what these spaces look like, who is included, and why exclusions persist, open queer history up to the brick and mortar of the places where everyday life unfolds.
Author’s note
Thank you to Kerri Arsenault and Thaïsa Way for their generous and perceptive feedback on previous drafts of this essay.
Citation
Stathis G. Yeros, “Mississippi Violet,” PLATFORM, September 22, 2025.
Note
[1] It is essential to note that existing archives predominantly reflect the social worlds of white, middle-class gay men. This imbalance is not incidental, but a product of the region’s deeply segregated queer histories. References to Black queer life appear primarily in oral histories. The book explores the links among racial segregation, community building, and queer placemaking in the Deep South.
