Tinderbox
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Gay Christianity remained a lightning rod even for magazines with a stated mission to serve gay and lesbian interests. In publishing “Is God Gay?” The Advocate was baiting a cultural majority that continued to view homosexuality as an immoral choice and the path to perdition. When a Gallup survey in June 1992 had asked whether “homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle or not,” 57 percent of the respondents said that homosexuality was “not acceptable.”12 The uproar over “Is God Gay?,” according to Advocate editor in chief Yarbrough, provided a “way to point out how marginalized we were at the time.”13 But at least, in Dexter Brecht’s assessment, The Advocate was printing these words, these pictures. And, to think, the young preacher had played a small role in inspiring the noise.
This distant world of 1995, in which The Advocate boasted a regular circulation of more than 100,000 readers,14 granted gays and lesbians the power to provoke but rarely to set the social agenda. Fear and condemnation of same-sex relations remained one of Western society’s deepest and most irrational prejudices: the belief that acting on this specific biological impulse constituted a moral offense. This bias had roots in Christendom itself—dating to myths of Sodom and Gomorrah, the letters of Paul, and the Justinian code of Rome15—and leached into the foundations of our civil society. It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote the 1777 revision to Virginia law that sodomy should be punished “if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole,”16 and General George Washington who court-martialed a Continental Army lieutenant for “attempting to commit sodomy” with another soldier, which resulted in the lieutenant’s dismissal by being marched out of Valley Forge “by all the Drummers and Fifers in the Army.”17
In the late twentieth century, it was often easier to say you were dying of AIDS than to admit you were healthy and gay. In fact, the AIDS epidemic became a window through which many “straight” Americans found their compassion for so-called queer folk, although it was hardly a universal gateway. Celebrities, with legions of devoted fans, often found easier acceptance from the grave. In 1991, closeted Queen front man Freddie Mercury announced he had AIDS and expired but a day later. Before Mercury, actor Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, in 1985—ending the life of a Hollywood hunk long in the closet.18
Bucking this trend, as he did not contract the disease like scores of his closest friends, singer Elton John ended years of speculation by formally declaring himself to be gay. A friend of Princess Diana, he continued to be the most prominent out gay voice in the world.19 Rock singer Melissa Etheridge was barely two years out of the closet, her release of the 1993 album Yes I Am a semaphore.20 In 1987, U.S. Representative Barney Frank had become the first member of Congress to voluntarily out himself by identifying as homosexual.21 Ellen DeGeneres, despite beginning her career out at Clyde’s Comedy Corner in New Orleans, remained a closeted actress in Los Angeles. To even suggest that someone was gay, whether this was true or not, could generate a whisper campaign heard round the land and catalyzed on internet message boards, then in their infancy.
Brecht’s experiment with the press in 1994, however, had a salutary effect in that it restored the faith of his congregants; by the early summer of 1995, the ranks of his New Orleans flock had grown to more than three dozen attendees. Consequently, Brecht spoke with credibility in front of his kin: a remnant church that had survived a catastrophic event—one that happened years before the ravages of the AIDS. Their house of worship had been forced to move many times and seen a long procession of ministers since suffering an act of devastation, which had occurred on a Sunday much like this one.22
There was a fire, Brecht began. It was a fire so horrific that Courtney Craighead, the church’s deacon (who was standing nearby), couldn’t even speak about his memories of the event. It was a fire set intentionally on June 24, 1973, resulting in the death of one-third of the MCC congregation at the time.23 This fire, which had happened twenty-two years and one day before, at a hangout called the Up Stairs Lounge, remained so disturbing a memory that it never existed in the pages of American history. This tragedy, congregants knew, was in fact the only reason that the Times-Picayune had opted to send a reporter to hear their minister. “We gather here this morning to remember,” Brecht continued. “Remembering, whether we like it or not, is part of the human condition. It is good as a way of acknowledging our grief.”24
It was a horrific scene to relate: a fire in a busy bar on the fringe of New Orleans’s French Quarter that was set with lighter fluid. On that evening, flames had invaded a sanctuary for blue-collar gay men. The fast-moving blaze overtook the second-floor bar with deep ties to the MCC faithful, but the destruction would extend well beyond church membership, claiming the lives of thirty-one men and one woman.25
Although it raged out of control for less than twenty minutes, the blaze left a fallout that shocked Carl Rabin, the coroner who would struggle to identify the bodies using jewelry and hotel room keys. Fingers and faces and bones were scorched beyond recognition. “They were just piled up,” he said. “People in a mass. One falls, then another falls. It’s just a mass of death. It’s sickening.”26
Then the story went silent. After a mere blip of coverage, it fell off the front pages of newspapers, and then from interior pages entirely. Local and national television channels would dedicate just a few minutes of on-the-scene coverage to the Up Stairs Lounge, in which survivors were interviewed with cameras to their backs, due to reporters’ fear of legitimizing the gay lifestyle and victims’ fear of outing themselves. Yet, in fact, the tragedy had affected nearly every segment of New Orleans’s closeted gay community, estimated a month later by the local Gay People’s Coalition to be from 40,000 to 100,000 of the city’s then 600,000 residents. Most of the dead—educated and illiterate, young and old, white and black, including a hustler, a minister, and a dentist—perished within the fire’s first 360 seconds.27
The Up Stairs Lounge, Brecht related to his flock, represented a moment that exposed a majority of citizens as at best apathetic toward homosexuals while also revealing that civil rights movements of the era were tone-deaf to homosexual plight. Indeed, civil rights and feminist constituencies in the 1970s did not leap to the defense of the Up Stairs Lounge victims.28 The tragedy was not noted in Distaff, New Orleans’s feminist magazine—it was a time when lesbians themselves were marginalized from “mainstream feminists”29—nor was there any mention in iconic black newspapers like The Chicago Defender, despite there being a black victim.
“This fire was a holocaust,” Brecht intoned. “Perhaps not in the millions like in the forties, but surely just as devastating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gendered community.” The immediate aftermath of this blaze—occurring on the last day of celebrations marking the fourth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots30—became a chilling moment of loss for those gay Americans who actually heard the story, who were long conditioned to the reality that their sorrows were quarantined from the heterosexual American dream. In a cartoon in the August 1973 issue of The Advocate, which was then a somewhat ragtag alternative newspaper, a man in a hospital bed was bandaged up like a mummy; in the background, his chart read “Up Stairs Bar Fire Victim.”31
With its physical and emotional toll, the Up Stairs Lounge fire sat in stark contrast to the legendary riot that had taken place outside of the Stonewall Inn in New York City on June 28, 1969. On that day, homosexuals, transsexuals, and street kids had joined forces to resist New York Police Department officers who were raiding a gay bar and arresting the patrons. This act of defiance had become a wellspring for gay political recruitment.
In the wake of the Stonewall Riots, a new movement called Gay Liberation arose. It was a “radical thinking” and “militant” crusade—according to a newsletter distributed by the more conservative Homophile Action League—whose stated goal was “complete sexual liberation for all people” through the abolishment of institutions that forced homosexuals to “live two separ
ate existences.”32 Gay Liberation was a departure from the so-called homophile movement (the term derived from the Greek words homo and phile, meaning “same love”), which had led the fight for homosexual rights up until then. Standing in an oblique shadow of the Stonewall Riots, the Up Stairs Lounge fire would be a major test of Gay Liberation: Could the movement steward its people through a crisis? Would gay people recognize its right to lead?
Yet, as Dexter Brecht spoke twenty-two years later, the Up Stairs Lounge remained forgotten. Aspects of the fire were reminiscent of other notable events that had shaped social-justice movements. There was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, as previously mentioned, in which 147 people (mostly female garment workers) died in New York City. The owners of the Triangle factory had locked employees into the building to prevent theft and truancy—and thus imprisoned them in an inferno.33 Similarly, at the Up Stairs Lounge, victims were trapped inside a burning structure because windows had been sealed with iron bars—bars overlooked in lax inspections by authorities.34 Parallels could also be drawn with the 1963 firebombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. Even though the Up Stairs Lounge fire was determined to be an arson—most likely by a disgruntled bar patron exacting revenge upon a rival gay clique—the homophobia that resulted from the tragedy and the conspiracy to erase its memory differed markedly from that outpouring of sympathy that accompanied those four deaths at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.35
So why did the Up Stairs Lounge remain obscure? Brecht asked. While the Triangle fire had led to mobilization for the labor movement and the Birmingham bombing had served both as a rallying cry and an elegy for the civil rights movement, the Up Stairs Lounge fire had not been a turning point for homosexual rights in America. Civil rights leaders in 1963 had advocates in northern papers like The New York Times, and labor leaders in 1911 had political champions like New York State assemblyman Al Smith, who later ran for president.36 By contrast, the Up Stairs Lounge fire received no political attention or investigative stories from a national newspaper.
The mainstream reaction to the fire ranged from silence and avoidance to trivialization and demonization. This response could be seen in the comedic quips of locals, in the refusal of state and local officials to issue statements of sympathy for victims and families, and in the abandonment of the investigation by the New Orleans Police Department, which led to no charges or prosecutions even though a prime suspect was taken into custody and then lost, due to carelessness. Other local disasters, such as a fire at the Rault Center office building that killed six people in November 1972, received greater news coverage for a longer period of time than did the Up Stairs Lounge.37
Long before the existence of the Up Stairs Lounge, forces had conspired to suppress homosexuals in New Orleans. In 1958, a New Orleans police superintendent sent a letter to forty-two fellow police chiefs inquiring about methods of combating the “problem of homosexuals and lesbians.” Other undesirables throughout the French Quarter, he noted, could be handled with existing laws. But with homosexuals, the policeman complained, “most of them are gainfully employed, or have a source of income from their families, and are not engaged in crime for profit.”38 Twenty-four police departments, from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, responded to that letter with sympathetic suggestions.39
At Tulane University, the city’s premier private educational institution, Dr. Robert Heath, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, conducted “gay conversion” experiments, published in two medical research papers in 1972, with university approval and some state funding. Listed as a “mental disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, homosexuality was a condition that fell well within Heath’s purview to treat and investigate.40 Heath’s research on a homosexual patient codenamed B-19 was particularly grim. Heath described how he had drilled stainless steel electrodes into nine regions of patient B-19’s brain, with wires dangling out of the man for more than ten days, and paired electrode stimulation with pornographic images of women to create sexual arousal, thus building a Pavlovian association that culminated in a bizarre lovemaking session between the gay man and a well-compensated female prostitute.41
The Roman Catholic Church of the time significantly contributed to the general air of homophobia. Two months before the fire, an interfaith group called Morality in Media of Louisiana paid for a half-page ad in the Times-Picayune, which called for the “deletion of obscene language and immorality” in the news. “The problems of homosexuality, prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, perversion,” the ad read, “must not be treated as normal behavior.”42 Signing the message “Faithfully yours” was Archbishop Philip M. Hannan, head of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
Thus did the city’s civil, scientific, and religious authorities each perform a pivotal role in the oppression and censorship of gay life, which coalesced into successful campaigns to prevent them from organizing in the open. Gays were sinners, said religion, sexual psychopaths, said science, and sex criminals, said the law. It’s no stretch to say that the media reflected the same bias. If one looks at the number of mentions in the Times-Picayune, the Rault Center fire had five days of front-page articles and twenty-one letters to the editor were published, while the Up Stairs Lounge—with five times the victims—spent only two days on here and just two letters to the editor appeared.43
Likewise, the American public remained largely committed to a campaign of gay oppression. Seventy percent of Americans, according to a 1973 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, thought adult homosexual relations were “always wrong.” By and large, the public viewed talk of sexual “orientation” with suspicion, believing that there was one true alignment for sexuality—heterosexuality—and all other alignments represented the blunders of heterosexuals needing intervention. “There are no homosexuals—only people with homosexual problems,” wrote Dr. Daniel Cappon, a preeminent psychologist in the field of sexual deviance. Journalist Mike Wallace, in a 1967 CBS News special, “The Homosexuals,” summed up prevailing attitudes as such: “Homosexuality is an enigma. Even in this era of bold sexual mores, it remains a subject that people find disturbing, embarrassing in their reluctance to discuss it.” Another NORC poll said nearly 35 percent of Americans opposed the idea of allowing a homosexual to speak in public.44
It’s little wonder that Gay Liberation attracted no political sponsorship following the Up Stairs Lounge. There was simply no support, certainly not in an era when more than one third of the public contested the idea of First Amendment rights for homosexuals. Moon Landrieu, the progressive mayor of New Orleans, remained out of town for several weeks after the incident—on vacation and supposedly unreachable in Europe. Governor Edwin Edwards—the self-declared “crook” of the 1990s—would studiously avoid phone calls and telegrams in 1973 from ministers asking him to declare a statewide day of mourning.45 President Richard Nixon, perhaps not even aware of the tragedy, offered no condolences on behalf of the nation.
Speaking in 1995, Dexter Brecht told his congregants, “It is time to go back to the fire that the media and the historians have forgotten.”46 The preacher then recited the names of the thirty-two victims, pausing after each one—the rhythmical beat emphasizing that every name was that of a real human being:
Joseph Henry Adams
Reginald Adams Jr.
Guy O. Andersen
Joe William Bailey
Luther Thomas Boggs
Louis Horace Broussard
Herbert Cooley
Donald Walter Dunbar
Adam Roland Fontenot
David Stuart Gary
Horace Getchell
John Thomas Golding Sr.
Gerald Hoyt Gordon
Glenn Richard Green
James Walls Hambrick
Kenneth Paul Harrington
William R. Larson
Ferris LeBlanc
Robert Lumpkin
Leon Richard Maples
George Stephen Matyi
Clarence Joseph McCloskey Jr.
Duane George Mitchell
Larry Stratton
Willie Inez Warren
Eddie Hosea Warren
James Curtis Warren
Dr. Perry Lane Waters Jr.
Douglas Maxwell Williams
Unidentified white male
Unidentified white male
Unidentified white male47
More than a third were veterans, men who had served their country while risking the punishment of an undesirable discharge if they were discovered as gay. More than a third were under the age of thirty. More than a third were practicing Christians—baptized, confirmed, and active members of their religious communities. At least seven of the victims had been married to women prior to embracing their homosexuality; as a result, six men were fathers of young children, which defied prevailing stereotypes. Yes, Brecht noted, three of the victims were charred so horrendously that they could never be identified. For their loved ones, they had simply “disappeared”; they were buried without gravestones in the city’s potter’s field.48
In reading the names aloud, Brecht did not mean to belabor the tally of carnage. He didn’t call out the fourteen men and one woman who had been injured by the fire, many grievously. But his recitation did move congregants to tears; their wails and sniffling were mixed with the muted sounds of the photographer’s camera. Brecht had wondered whether he should have mentioned which of the victims were MCC members, but he’d decided against it when he considered the Catholic Church and its role in dismissing the tragedy. Despite pleas for the archbishop to do so back in 1973, Philip Hannan had not offered a resounding statement of sympathy for the dead of the Up Stairs Lounge, although he had within hours of the Rault Center fire the previous autumn.49