Tinderbox
Page 1
TINDERBOX
The Untold Story of
THE UP STAIRS LOUNGE FIRE
and the Rise of
GAY LIBERATION
ROBERT W. FIESELER
For Ryan, my lover,
who was born on the thirteenth anniversary
of the Up Stairs Lounge fire.
The fates are strange, even cruel,
and yet aware.
“We will be citizens.”
—CURTAIN SPEECH,
Angels in America: Perestroika by Tony Kushner
Contents
Historical Figures
Preface
Introduction: History Reclaimed
ACT I: FIRE
1.Brotherhood of Men
2.Sunday Service
3.Gay Liberation
4.United We Stand
ACT II: FALLOUT
5.Mayhem
6.Call for Aid
7.Liberation Descends
8.Visions
9.Fun House
10.Firetraps
11.In Memoriam
ACT III: LEGACY
12.Deliverance
13.Downfall
14.Rally Forth
15.Last Resort
Coda: Second Line
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Research
Illustration Credits
Index
Historical Figures
UP STAIRS LOUNGE
Stewart Butler
professional draftsman
Courtney Craighead
deacon, MCC of New Orleans
Alfred Doolittle
Stewart Butler’s lover
Steven Duplantis
air force serviceman
Phil Esteve
Up Stairs Lounge owner
Ricky Everett
MCC of New Orleans congregant
Adam Fontenot
Buddy Rasmussen’s lover
Glenn Green
MCC of New Orleans congregant
Henry Kubicki
MCC of New Orleans congregant
Bill Larson
pastor, MCC of New Orleans
Bud Matyi
musician
Bob McAnear
federal officer
Bettye McAnear
Up Stairs Theatre director
Mitch Mitchell
deacon, MCC of New Orleans
Buddy Rasmussen
Up Stairs Lounge bartender/manager
Ronald Rosenthal
MCC of Atlanta congregant;
Up Stairs Lounge patron
GAY LIBERATION
Lucien Baril
interim pastor, MCC of New Orleans
Paul Breton
pastor, MCC of Washington, D.C.
John Gill
pastor, MCC of Atlanta
Morris Kight
president of Gay Community Services Center of Los Angeles
Morty Manford
president of Gay Activists Alliance, New York City
Troy Perry
founding pastor of MCC;
based in Los Angeles
Bill Rushton
managing editor of Vieux Carré Courier
FRENCH QUARTER FIGURES
Roberts Batson
LGBT historian
Joseph Bermuda
owner, Cabildo Gallery
Dexter Brecht
pastor, MCC of New Orleans, 1994–2006
Gene Davis
Iberville Street businessman
Clancy DuBos
journalist; former Times-Picayune intern
Mark Allen Guidry
Iberville Street hustler
Milton Mary
French Quarter bartender
John Meyers
Catholic seminarian; Café Lafitte in Exile patron
Roger Dale Nunez
Iberville Street hustler
CITY/COMMUNITY LEADERS
Finis Crutchfield
bishop, United Methodist Church
Edwin Edwards
governor of Louisiana
Charles Ferguson
managing editor of New Orleans States-Item
Jim Garrison
district attorney of Orleans Parish
Philip Hannan
archbishop, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans
Moon Landrieu
mayor of New Orleans, 1970–1978
William McCrossen
New Orleans Fire Superintendent, 1972–1993
Ernest “Dutch” Morial
Appeals Court judge; mayor of New Orleans, 1978–1986
Henry M. Morris
major, New Orleans Police Department
Bill Richardson
pastor, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Clay Shaw
New Orleans businessman
Rod Wagener
local radio host
FAMILIES
Mary David
niece of Up Stairs Lounge victim Glenn Green
Anna Howell
mother of MCC pastor Bill Larson
Tina Marie Matyi
daughter of Up Stairs Lounge victim Bud Matyi
Duane Mitchell
son of MCC of New Orleans deacon Mitch Mitchell
Preface
Every social movement in American history has a body count. From Wounded Knee, a massacre of the Lakota by U.S. cavalry in 1890, to Emmett Till, a black teenager lynched in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, an industrial disaster in 1911 that killed more than a hundred people and exposed the slavish conditions of Gilded Age labor, it is routinely through death that we reckon with violations of our basic liberties. The full impact of these reckonings—for Native Americans, for the civil rights movement, for organized labor—often takes years or even decades.
On June 12, 2016, an American-born citizen named Omar Mateen stepped into a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, called Pulse. He entered the crowded room strapped with body armor, bulk ammunition, and a semiautomatic firearm. At twenty-nine years old, Mateen had already been investigated by the FBI, and some at Pulse thought they’d seen his face beforehand.1 He was a rejected prison guard candidate, a one-time divorcé, and a devout Muslim who had performed the rites of hajj and seen Mecca. No doubt haunted by memories of his father calling him gay in front of an ex-wife, an accusation deemed abominable by his faith, Mateen had grown extreme in his politics and become desperate to purge the world of gays.2
After assembling a small arsenal through legal means, he acted on those beliefs. That Sunday in June, Mateen opened fire on the unarmed crowd in Pulse. He took the lives of his fellow Americans to punish their presence in a gay-friendly establishment—all during national gay pride week. He played executioner for hours, hunting men and women indiscriminately and taunting authorities by pledging allegiance to ISIS, until eight bullets from the Orlando Police Department took him down.3
His was an almost unimaginable field of slaughter, claiming forty-nine lives and injuring fifty-three others in what constituted one of the deadliest mass shootings of citizens and the largest mass killing of gay people in United States history. His attack seemed to defy the modern acceptance of homosexuality into mainstream society, a process that had permitted the once persecuted the right to live openly. Astoundingly, Mateen’s rampage topped the body count of the most ghastly event that had previously struck the American gay community: the thirty-two burning deaths in New Orleans forty-three years earlier, at a bar called the Up Stairs Lounge.4
Disparities in the reaction to these two tragedies, the Up Stairs Lounge fire and Pulse, became apparent within minutes of the Florida attack. Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer rushed to the scene with emergency workers and comforte
d survivors. Florida governor Rick Scott, a staunch Republican, offered condolences to families. President Barack Obama made a statement that, four decades before, could easily have applied to the destruction of the Up Stairs Lounge: “For so many people here who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the Pulse Nightclub has always been a safe haven, a place to sing and dance, and most importantly, to be who you truly are … Sunday morning, that sanctuary was violated in the worst way imaginable.”5 Flags flew at half-staff over federal buildings. None of this happened for the bar-fire victims of 1973.
Yet stories of that incinerated building in New Orleans and faded pictures of a charred body dangling out a street window inundated media outlets in 2016 alongside news of the Florida shooting, with commentators in social forums citing that 1973 massacre as an antecedent to the homophobic, “lone wolf” ferocity made manifest at Pulse.6 After the shooting, the New Orleans Superdome was lit up in all the rainbow of colors of the gay pride flag in recognition of the Orlando victims; days later, those same colors were lit again, to honor the Up Stairs Lounge victims.7 In fact, more stories about the Up Stairs Lounge appeared in major news outlets after the Pulse shooting than in the previous four decades. The tragedy in Orlando had succeeded in shedding some light on the tragedy in New Orleans, just as that historic event was lending context to the present-day grief, which in turn made a reckoning with Pulse more immediate.
The story of the Up Stairs Lounge, by contrast, had disappeared willfully, hushed by a nation not ready to look. It was only recently revived by a persistent set of voices who paid a ransom’s price for their work. Homosexuals, for decades if not centuries, existed in a lived lie called the closet,8 that obscure place where men who love men hid their true selves. Edward Sagarin, who published under the pen name David Webster Cory in the 1950s to protect his life and livelihood, once observed, “Society has handed me a mask to wear.”9
A gay publication called Vector described the pragmatic gradations of the closet in 1966: “We lie so that we may live. Whether it is to our boss, or the draft board, or the civil service, we rarely can afford to divulge the simple truth of our homosexuality. But this is merely the beginning. Lying begets lying: we have to cover up for so many of our activities and doings that we find ourselves in a mire of untruths.”10 If the closet began as a personal conspiracy to turn away from portions of the self, then the conspiracy metastasized when enough closeted citizens aggregated to form a societal illusion, a closet deep enough to create a secret world inhabited by a secret class of Americans.
The closet, thus, grew to function as a governing institution for nonheterosexual life in twentieth-century America, which explains precisely how a makeshift bar like the Up Stairs Lounge could burn to its foundations and, in so doing, disappear from memory. The closet had enough power to eat it up. This framework, by historic reflection, helps to illustrate how a gunman’s slaughter of innocents in Orlando could no longer be silenced in the same way: by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the closet no longer prevailed as the governing institution for gay life. Something had irrevocably changed, and, true to the undulations of history, someone had died to change it.
This book, then, is about those generations who battered their heads against padded walls and fell so that events like the Up Stairs Lounge might be known and aligned with America’s larger civil rights story.
TINDERBOX
INTRODUCTION
History Reclaimed
June 25, 1995
What does it mean to remember? What does a memory give you license to do? Resurrect, retell, or embellish? Honor, avenge, or fume? Can we remember without an agenda, without an enemy to bury and shame? And when can yet another recollection of a bygone tragedy yield something new? Such were the questions reverberating in the mind of Dexter Brecht, a gay minister in New Orleans who in the summer of 1995 was about to reintroduce history to his small congregation.1
It was a Sunday morning in the Crescent City. The air felt sweet, fecund, almost fermenting—blue to the heavens and green to the earth, sunny from levee to levee. Inside the worn building at 1128 St. Roch Avenue, a flock of about forty members of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) scrutinized Reverend Brecht and waited to hear the holy man in white and red preach the good word. Today, his gentle voice seemed to quiver with an unusual anxiety. He clearly had something to say, beyond the ordinary sermon. His audience was not a wealthy assemblage, but a host of working-class gay men and lesbians who, as with most New Orleanians, took to gatherings and festivals like hot sauce to gumbo, but to politics like water to oil.
To be fair, Louisiana politics could be hard to fathom, whether one happened to be straight or gay. Sometimes, the particulars could be hard to stomach. A 1991 gubernatorial runoff had pitted the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke against ex-governor Edwin Edwards, an emblem of the Democratic machine who during his third term had stood trial on federal corruption charges. In the end, the election had tipped in Edwards’s favor through the clever use of the campaign slogan “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”2 Edwards remained the people’s governor that June of 1995.
Brecht’s congregation sat in folding chairs in loosely assembled rows: men and women, black and white and Creole. All were casually, if colorfully, dressed in summer outfits. The house of worship was an old storefront—small and bare save for a piano in the corner and flowers near the altar. The congregation couldn’t afford to keep much more around, for fear of break-ins. A humble roost, their building was among the first real property to be owned by an LGBT-identified organization in the city.3 Yet, according to some MCC members, the building itself was a sore spot—situated in a “less than desirable” neighborhood of déclassé groups, to which many of the faithful just wouldn’t make the trip. New Orleans, after all, remained a stratified metropolitan area with rising crime rates. A record 424 murders had occurred in 1994—more per capita than in any other American city.4
Reverend Brecht, at thirty-seven years of age, gripped his lectern. Like so many preachers possessing charisma and a healthy mane, he styled himself after the image of Christ in Renaissance paintings. Long hair flowed from the top of his head to his thin shoulders. A mustache framed a sharp grin. Eyebrows angled to an aquiline nose. Brecht had all the bearing of a young idealist, a pastor on his first assignment with a flair for social crusading. In the back of the room stood Mark L. Thompson, a cub reporter from the Times-Picayune, New Orleans’s major newspaper. A staff photographer had also tagged along.
Brecht found himself not alarmed but “excited that a reporter for the daily newspaper was willing to attend worship.”5 A newly minted Princeton graduate, Thompson had interned the previous summer at the political newsmagazine The New Republic for editor Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan was then a controversial figure: an Englishman who’d studied at Harvard and a gay Republican, he was said to be working on a book that made a conservative argument for gay marriage.
Reverend Brecht had sent an invitation to the Picayune for the day’s events but hadn’t expected any coverage. In many cases, his congregation shunned such attention from the press. Almost as soon as Brecht had taken the job the previous year, he risked it by penning a critical letter to the editor of The Advocate, the nation’s premier gay and lesbian magazine. Brecht knew that his congregation had a mixed record with activist ministers, having heard about the pastor who founded the MCC of New Orleans back in the 1970s, David Solomon. Evidently, Solomon had been asked or forced to leave his post—no one could recall the exact details—after campaigning to become a delegate to the 1973 Louisiana state constitutional convention.6
“He stirred the shit,” remembered Henry Kubicki, a longtime congregant and friend of David Solomon. “His activism was an affront to the congregation’s closeted-ness.” In his candidacy, Solomon had taken the radical step, no doubt natural to him and ghastly to his flock, of aligning his liberal politics with their religion. Solomon “feels that the church has always had a role in the shaping of
society,” read a candidate profile in the Times-Picayune, “and that his church, the Metropolitan Community Church, is a leader.” But in fact, a reticence to engage the community soon muddled the church’s mission and gradually the number of members dwindled. By 1994, when Dexter Brecht inherited the gay church’s pulpit, only a dozen or so people regularly attended.7
The young minister’s political salvo, published in the March 1994 issue of The Advocate, chided the magazine and its editors for ignoring or misrepresenting gay Christians. “The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches celebrated twenty-five years of ministry in 1993,” wrote Brecht, “and there was no coverage in The Advocate. Could it be Christophobia? Get with the true spirit of pride.”8 Brecht’s letter appears to have resounded with Advocate editor in chief Jeff Yarbrough. That December, The Advocate featured a front-cover illustration of a crucified Christ with the incendiary headline “Is God Gay?” Inside was a seven-page story on the MCC, Brecht’s LGBT-friendly Christian fellowship with more than 42,000 members in sixteen countries.9
The issue had exploded off newsstands, demonstrating that gays were Christians too, and attracted the ire of Christian Right leader Jerry Falwell. “Advertisers pulled out,” Yarbrough later recalled. “My publisher screamed at me and told me someone called in a death threat. Readers and a lot of nonreaders sent us hate mail. The straight press said we’d stepped over some imaginary line.”10 That imaginary line of decency—reflecting midterm elections in which Republicans had recaptured the House of Representatives in a fifty-four-seat swing that would elevate Newt Gingrich to Speaker when the 104th Congress convened in January 1995—conflated morality squarely with the “family values” of conservative Christian politics.11