How John Cameron Mitchell Turned His New Orleans Home Into a Queer Art Church

John Cameron Mitchell has always been drawn to religious iconography, largely inspired by his late mother, who would travel the world seeking out visions of the Virgin Mary. "She said she had messages for us," John says, looking up at his favorite Mary statue, which he found at a flea market in Bordeaux. "The messages are always very banal."

This bit of personal history makes it especially fitting that John’s 19th-century home in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans served as a church for several religious denominations since at least the 1930s. The ground floor of the looming creamsicle-colored, two-story Italianate house is dominated by a 45-foot-long ballroom, perhaps constructed in 1934 as an auditorium for a Catholic church, fittingly named St. John’s. The building has also served as a meeting house for Seventh Day Adventists and been home to a mortuary, a Baptist mission, and, most recently, the secret society Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which was once led by notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley. Vestiges of religious practices can be found throughout the building. In one room, a numerology mosaic called the Square of Jupiter is embedded in the tile floor; another has planetary religious symbology painted on the walls; the opening to the downstairs kitchen (yes, there’s an upstairs kitchen, too) is a dramatic arch that, before John decided to remodel, was covered in gold.