On Christmas Eve 2009, the disco ball at the Drama Club spun over a packed house. From the plaster walls painted to look like brick to the lights clamped on black pipes overhead, the place had an improvised, high-school-theater feel to it, and the gay men, lesbians, and friends who danced and smoked there that night were especially close and relaxed.

Christmas, and its attendant family time, can be complicated for gays and lesbians in the South, and people were happy for an excuse to get out of the house. It wasn’t just a Christmas party, but also a birthday party for Robert LeCompte, the Drama Club’s beloved bartender and manager. Like many gay bars outside of big cities, it was a place where people who would never deign to cross paths in the larger world could find a home for themselves. It provided safety, solidarity, and sex to a motley social universe. That night, they were there to celebrate Robert and let off steam before heading to their real homes, where trimmed trees might strain against trailer ceilings and a grandmother would look askance if she knew where you’d been.

The party ended early, and by 2:15 Christmas morning, no guests remained. The sole body left on the checkerboard floor was LeCompte’s, sprawled out and bloody, dead from 13 stab wounds to the neck, shoulders, and chest.

Houma, Louisiana, population 34,000, sits at the heart of the Atchafalaya Basin—that part of the state where the Gulf of Mexico and the land and the swamp are so evenly matched that on a map, it looks like a fingerprint. Stagnant, insular, and stubbornly Cajun, it is fixed in place only by grit and the work of the Army Corps of Engineers. Back in 2009, the Drama Club murder was noted only by the local paper and a couple of gay blogs.

Houma is located in Terrebonne Parish, where one out of every 15 families still speak French at home. Catholics still outnumber Protestants. Change is coming, but slowly. For many years, fewer people moved into or out of nearby Vacherie than any other part of America. Workers lived rent-free on the big sugar plantations and sharecropping lasted into the 1950s; a few families still live in sharecropper cabins. People greet strangers with “Who’s your family?” and once they get an answer, there’s always a follow-up: which Verdin, which Dufrene, which Alleman? (“There are four different Marcel families,” one Dufrene told me. “And you better know which one you’re talking about, because one of ’em lives in mansions and another in trailers on Bayou Blue.”)

Joshua Stockley, a political-science professor who taught in the adjacent town of Thibodaux, thinks the locals’ wariness is born of a sense of constant threat—the loss of livelihoods in shrimp and sugarcane, and the loss of the land itself. “They recognize that the Cajun culture is literally washing away,” Stockley said. “Where their grandparents had settled is now water.” Each census shows fewer French-speaking households. The area is becoming like the rest of the Deep South: more Protestant, more Republican. The social structures that created the men and women at the heart of this story were breaking down even before they were born.

Robert LeCompte was 39 years old when he died. Cajun by way of both parents, he was born in Houma, in 1970, into a home that would soon be broken: his father left for Florida when his boy was in grade school, and LeCompte’s relationship with his needy and domineering mother was difficult. He lived at home until he was his early 20s, turning over his paychecks to her to help support the family. He never grew any taller than five foot two.