Fourteen neighbors signed a petition to have its liquor license revoked. Two weeks later, the New Orleans city attorney cited Treme’s case as he charged the Country Club with permitting “obscene, lewd, sexually indecent, immoral or improper conduct” that posed a threat to its patron safety and the Bywater quality of life. In August, Treme told her story on the local news to raise awareness about date rape drugs she hadn’t known to get tested for them until they were out of her system. Two female employees helped fill in the rest-security footage and eyewitnesses indicated Treme had sex with two different men on club premises and went home with a third, wearing nothing but a towel-and helped call the police. She returned to the Country Club, where she’d been tanning and drinking with girlfriends before she blacked out. Her thighs were bruised, her car was missing, and there was lubricant she didn’t recognize by her bed. On July 1, Maria Treme woke up with no memory of the previous night.
The result is a clash of protective liberal instincts that force the question: Can you make a city safe and keep it weird? The Club is a historically gay bar in an artsy neighborhood which, like many across America, is being homogenized by gentrification. But because the Country Club isn’t a fraternity or some other bastion of chauvinism, there’s no clear institutional villain. The sexual assault case and its aftermath brings a national conversation about “rape culture”-the notion that women invite unwanted sex if they drink or dress provocatively-to the Bywater’s doorstep. And when a woman reported being drugged and raped there in July, it became a flashpoint for a debate about whether the newcomers’ arrival threatens the same Bywater culture that drew them there. It was on savvy tourists’ list of must-dos. The Club was a testament to the reasons transplants had moved to New Orleans. Its parties were wild, its bartenders were affable, and it reliably provided the Authentic New Orleans Experience, for just $10 at the door. The policy had been New Orleans’s worst-kept secret, often touted as proof that nonconformity lived on in the Bywater neighborhood, even as the rest of the city Disneyfied.īut the appeal of the club, tucked inside a 19th-century Italianate mansion on a quiet residential block, was not purely symbolic. Two weeks earlier, in October, a consent judgment handed down by the New Orleans Alcohol Beverage Control Board abruptly ended the club’s clothing-optional policy, forbidding patrons from swimming, tanning and drinking in the nude for the first time in its 37-year history. I could see her tattoos, her BDSM bruises, and her nipples, kind of, but by Country Club standards, it was an oppressive ensemble. We were sitting under a heat lamp on the deck of the Country Club, an ironically named New Orleans restaurant, bar and pool a few days after Halloween-me in jeans and a sweater, her in a sports bra and undies, soaking wet from the pool. My only FOMO is that you can’t see my boobs,” a blue-haired artist said.