NEW ORLEANS — The options for French Quarter walking tours are many: cocktail bars, iconic restaurants, haunted houses and streets, riverbend history, voodoo and vampires.

But the tours led by Quinn Laroux cover a fascinating swath of the city’s colorful underbelly: vice and corruption, sexuality and sex workers, the former “red light” district known as Storyville, gay bars and the tangle of gay nightlife in the French Quarter affectionately known as the “fruit loop.” Laroux is a great storyteller, but she’s also armed with abundant historical material about this city that is the gay mecca of the South, or as she proudly puts it, “one of the most openly queer cultures in the country.”

It’s appropriate that Laroux’s tour aims to put “queer people in the center of the story.” She hosts Nola Drag Tours, a lively walking tour she founded last year as an alternative to the traditional and conventional-minded tours that thread the city daily. As one of the city’s new generation of drag queens, Laroux leads her tours in full regalia: a dress, wig and artful makeup. (On the steamy, end-of-summer day I spent walking about 2 miles through the French Quarter, she also carried a ladylike parasol.)

Though it’s hard to raise an eyebrow in this anything-goes neighborhood, Laroux is turning heads for all the right reasons. She and her drag sisters are the hottest thing going in New Orleans these days.

Fueled by the popularity of entertainers such as RuPaul and the Emmy Award-winning “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag culture is blossoming in the Crescent City as drag goes mainstream nationwide. Drag queens and performers, long pillars in the city’s LGBTQ community, are being seen in a new glitter-eyelash light by both locals and tourists who fuel the city’s economy.

Nola Drag Tours is just one example of the lavender spotlight being shone on the city’s drag community. Drag brunches now flourish throughout the city and in venues unthinkable only a few years ago. Iconic, Old Guard restaurants such as Brennan’s, Broussard’s and Antoine’s have played host to champagne-fueled brunches stoked by powerhouse drag performers, some graduates (or “drag-uates”) of the New Orleans Drag Workshop, a multiweek drag curriculum overseen by founder and local drag superstar Vinsantos DeFonte.

And it just so happens that the Louisiana State Museum is presenting a first-of-its-kind exhibition called “Grand Illusions: The History and Artistry of Gay Carnival in New Orleans,” which runs through December at the Presbytère on Jackson Square. The exhibit covers gay Mardi Gras krewes, underground gay balls and carnival costumes from a time when Mardi Gras was the only day of the year when it was legal for men to cross-dress in public.

But the city’s drag culture got its biggest bump with the recent publication of “Drag Queen Brunch,” a cookbook by Poppy Tooker as a valentine to New Orleans’ most beloved restaurants and most resplendent drag performers.

Tooker, a culinary activist, radio and television host, cooking instructor and author, decided to write the cookbook after publishing “Tujague’s Cookbook,” in 2015, honoring a French Quarter landmark that calls itself the second-oldest restaurant in New Orleans. She learned that the restaurant had its own drag ghost — yes, a familiar specter of an actor often appeared in drag in the early 20th century — from when the space was known as Begue’s. Two New Orleans traditions are now celebrated in “Drag Queen Brunch,” which Tooker worked on with photographer Sam Hanna, whose images of some of the city’s most colorful queens are the book’s highlight.

The publication of Tooker’s book — larded with recipes from chefs from restaurants including Brennan’s, Palace Café, Commander’s Palace, SoBou, Tableau, Antoine’s, Toup’s South, Ralph’s on the Park, Saba, MoPho and Maypop — unleashed something of a drag furor in New Orleans.

“We’ve kicked down doors with this book and taken the concept of drag queens and drag brunch into regular company,” said Tooker, the host of the award-winning “Louisiana Eats!” radio show on NPR. “We keep breaking down barriers.”

Tooker hosts Poppy’s Pop-Up Drag Queen Brunch, a nearly monthly event that serves as a fundraiser for CrescentCare, formerly known as the NO/AIDS Task Force — the next pop-up is 11 a.m. March 29 at Bourbon House, 144 Bourbon. Today, there are regular drag brunches at venues such as Cru, Pythian Market, the Country Club and The Fillmore, to name a few.

“It has definitely gone mainstream,” Tooker said. “Now everyone and their brother is hosting a drag brunch.”

That’s not a knock. Tooker sees positive results in the city’s drag queens having greater opportunity to perform their art, no longer exclusively in gay bars and clubs.

Tooker said one of her favorite photographs in the cookbook is a cluster of drag queens in the Rex Room at the venerable Antoine’s Restaurant, the oldest family-run restaurant in the country that is deeply steeped in New Orleans culture.

“That tells me something,” Tooker said. “There is no more sacrosanct Mardi Gras place in New Orleans than the Rex Room at Antoine’s.”

So how would Tooker characterize the city’s drag renaissance?

“It’s a greater understanding, a greater acceptance,” she said. “When we had our first pop-up brunch, we never could have predicted what would happen. Now it’s a wave, an evolution. And people want to be part of it.”

greg.morago@chron.com

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