Unfazed by his personal inquiry, Garrison continued to impugn Shaw. During the 1969 show trial, which lasted a month, Shaw would, as The New York Times noted in his obituary, “chain smoke filter cigarettes impassively at the defense table as prosecution witnesses described him as a flamboyant homosexual.” Having raided Shaw’s home and discovered private sexual paraphernalia, Garrison manipulated the businessman’s secret, and his wish to remain closeted, to cast a haze of intrigue over the case. The foundation of Garrison’s argument rested on a virtual clown parade of witnesses: the confessions left behind by a pilot named David Ferrie, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage that Garrison trumpeted as an “apparent suicide”; the hypnosis-induced testimony of a businessman named Peter Russo; the assurances of a convicted heroin user named Vernon Bundy; and the sworn statements of Charles Spiesel, a paranoid accountant who regularly fingerprinted his children to confirm that they had not been replaced by CIA doubles.21
“Gay people in New Orleans, after Clay Shaw was arrested, went into panic,” noted local gay historian Roberts Batson, who happened to live near the Up Stairs Lounge crew. “Because if someone as prominent and important as Clay Shaw could be arrested and destroyed by Jim Garrison, who’s next?” Clay Shaw, despite the humiliation, chose to provide his account of the ordeal to author James Kirkwood for the book American Grotesque: “In the early days after my arrest, Mr. Garrison said to a journalist that I’d never come to trial, I’d commit suicide first.”22
Although the jury found Shaw not guilty after less than an hour of deliberations—an agonizing defeat for Garrison—the businessman suffered permanent damage to his reputation. His personal revelations, cast into public light, were not minor indiscretions but an imbroglio that created stigma and embarrassment.23 Doubling down then on what seemed like less a prosecution than a personal vendetta, Garrison accused Shaw of several counts of perjury; a federal judge later dismissed these charges, ruling that they had been brought in bad faith,24 but such a decision hardly provided solace or rehabilitation for the once accused.
The French Quarter beckoned ahead as Buddy and Adam continued their drive. This was New Orleans’s oldest neighborhood—sometimes still called by its French name, Vieux Carré (literally, “Old Square”)—which languished as a colorful ghetto in a city deeply at odds with itself. The Quarter was forever a place of the imagination, the home of wrought-iron balconies and Blanche DuBois, among other louche literary figures. On its pitched and gabled rooftops, said the legends, the Creole pirate Jean Lafitte leaped from house to house to ply his illicit business. The famously eccentric Ruthie “the Duck Girl” Moulin was constantly out walking her mallards, and the badly denigrated Clay Shaw still resided in the district on St. Peter Street.25
In the spiritual brew, voodoo spirits mixed with Catholic saints, houses of the “rising sun” with Gothic-inspired churches. Every Fat Tuesday was inevitably followed by an Ash Wednesday, just as mourners of the dead participated in gloomy-cum-joyous spectacles after burials called jazz funerals. Even the compass seemed to adjust to a different pull. A neighborhood called the West Bank lay east of the French Quarter. North, to any decent New Orleanian, was “lakeside” toward Lake Pontchartrain. South was “riverside” toward the Old Man. Reference to north, south, east, or west instantly revealed your status as a tourist. This amended sense of space reflected not just street lingo but reality for residents, who used these terms in police reports, land deals, and other legal documents.26
Scenery changed from steel and glass to stucco and brick as Buddy and Adam proceeded onward, but the French Quarter didn’t officially begin until they crossed Iberville Street,27 one block farther, which fell to the backside of Canal’s swank hotels and department stores to offer the other side of commerce: twenty-four-hour bars and a drug fix, perhaps, or hustlers dabbling in the oldest profession for money, a meal, or both. Misadventures often ended on Iberville at gay-friendly establishments like Gene’s Hideaway or Wanda’s, both owned by an entrepreneur named Gene Davis, or around the corner at La Normandie Bar, where, in 1972, a gay bartender named Jerry Capplin had been found with his throat slashed and body stuffed into an ice cooler (as usual, the murder and trial had gone mostly unreported by the Times-Picayune). City institutions were attempting to downplay rising crime rates, which could easily stanch the procession of tourists.28
Buddy and Adam slipped into a ghetto sleeping off a routine hangover, but few streets on that Sunday were silent. Neighbors sipped coffee with chicory, an herbaceous additive brewed by New Orleanians for centuries, as they chatted on balconies and doorsteps. Bohemian artists took showers in art galleries. On nearby wharves, Greek and Norwegian sailors milled about barges that held the proverbial world’s shipping. Down Decatur Street, the mealy aroma of grain wafted from the smokestacks of the Jackson Brewery, a local landmark known as the Jax. Tourists filtered down the pedestrian walkway of Royal Street, closed to daytime traffic by proclamation of Mayor Landrieu, and shopped for antiques.29 Just a block south of Royal Street appeared the slightly more worn corner of Chartres and Iberville, Buddy and Adam’s port of entry.
The couple parked and walked, crisscrossing the almost invisible border between rich and poor—the ivory tower of the new Marriott Hotel casting a shadow near their feet. Up ahead was the dark canopy they sought near the Chartres Street intersection. It bore the cursive words “Up Stairs.” The text, partially blocked by the rain roofing of the bar next door, was intentionally easy to miss. The sign didn’t offer a hint of impropriety or any enticement to enter, nor did it aim to titillate with a turn of phrase. Instead, it appeared like a public notice of a place off the beaten path.
Buddy turned the key in the wrought-iron door, marked 604 Iberville Street, and started up the thirteen wooden steps, so old that they whined when you climbed them. The building dated at least to the 1870s, when Iberville had been called Custom House Street.30 Some of its fixtures and systems looked to be plucked from a museum. There was room to climb the stairs two abreast, but not enough to extend your arms without clipping the pipes and wires running over brick. Buddy had made these eyesores more palatable by attempting to cover them in burlap fabric. Light barely shone inside this entryway. Heading past wood-paneled walls and curtains was much like entering a portal—up, up, and away. This wasn’t a saloon stumbled into by accident: the place was somewhat concealed, and only those in the know entered.31
Buddy pivoted at a landing with a small window and scaled the final steps. He unlocked a steel door to the bar appropriately called the Up Stairs Lounge. Empty, the bar possessed a hushed quality. Surfaces gleamed in the light of windows and smelled of cigarette smoke. Buddy flipped on the lights. Red was the scheme: red-flocked wallpaper, red indoor-outdoor carpeting, pink-orange laminate on the bar, red fabric streaming across the drop ceiling. Even the bar stools had red seats. The place looked to be cloaked in a velvet robe, giving what Susan Fosberg, the arts critic of the Vieux Carré Courier, a local alternative weekly, called the impression of “discreet elegance.” (Stewart Butler begged to differ with this assessment: “I don’t know if it was elegant,” he remembered. “Well, it just hid the bare walls.”)32
The Courier, edited by Bill Rushton, an openly gay man, reviewed the Up Stairs Lounge as a “warm and congenial haunt” in its 1972 French Quarter bar guide, a “big intimate room” where “middle aged queens and their trade flock.” Times-Picayune writer Howard Jacobs pronounced it a “first-class tonsil coolery.” Stewart Butler thought of it as a “social club.”33 Tables and chairs were crammed, inviting random interactions; this was less an intended feature than a remnant of the pickup bar that had previously held the lease—telephone cords had run from table to table as a method of fostering hookups between business executives and ladies of the evening.34 Buddy had removed the phones but not the furniture or wan sense of joie de vivre.
The Up Stairs Lounge was surprisingly roomy, linked across three contiguous buildings and wrapped by twelve-inch-thick brick walls. The bar it
self, the locus of activity, was stationed parallel to Iberville Street in the first room.35 Near one end of the bar was a small, elevated stage with a white baby grand piano. Its worn keys suggested that they had been frequently played. Adam Fontenot, a few drinks deep, would sometimes sit at the bench and come to life crooning jazz ditties. A jukebox situated nearby was loaded with contemporary hits, as well as records brought in by Buddy and regular patrons.36
Close by was a window overlooking a fire escape, which stood beside the entrance to the tiny bathrooms—the only commodes in the place. Lines frequently formed here that stretched to the front door. Often, the inconvenience provided an opportunity to make friends while commiserating over the call of nature. Behind the bar, among assorted liquor bottles, stood a decorative fountain. Regulars called this first room the “bar area,” but there were other, quieter spaces in the Up Stairs Lounge.37
A long archway provided exit from the bar area, which was festooned that Sunday with Fourth of July decorations to publicize an upcoming party, into a parlorlike space, smaller than the first, with tables and a dance floor. This was called the “dance area,” where bodies whirled and drag queens like Marcy Marcell performed on Sundays for charity shows. At the time, the Up Stairs Lounge offered the only drag revue in the Quarter other than Club My-O-My, whose previous location had burned down without explanation the previous year. Beyond the dance area stood an unmarked door to a final section, a theater space often locked up and overlooked by patrons. The New Orleans MCC had hosted prayer meetings there for a span. Patrons also put on theatrical performances there, sometimes for charity, at other times just for kicks.38
Adam parked himself on a stool while Buddy Rasmussen tallied the previous day’s receipts and ducked out to make a bank deposit. The owner of the Up Stairs Lounge, a gay man named Phil Esteve, had basically handed Buddy the reins to the business. As the “heart and soul” of the bar, Buddy had managed the Up Stairs Lounge since its opening night, on Halloween in 1970. In fact, it was Buddy who had championed the beer-bust idea to Phil, and the drink special had grown in popularity; by the early summer of 1973, it drew a hundred or more people reliably each Sunday.39
Buddy ran the place efficiently—no small order by Iberville standards. His rules were clear and consistently enforced: no hustling the customers, although hustlers were allowed to drink as customers during breaks from work. Hustlers could even date patrons, but monetary solicitation was strictly forbidden. For example, a hustler nicknamed Napoleon, who dressed like the French dictator as a calling card, had met his lover, Stanley Plaisance, while nursing an after-hours drink at the Up Stairs Lounge. Napoleon had made romantic overtures to Stanley but wasn’t soliciting him, and so the two hit it off as Buddy observed. Love followed, surprisingly, and Napoleon abandoned his career Iberville’s “queer legionnaire.”40
The Up Stairs Lounge banned “tearoom sex,” the furtive encounters that often took place in dark corners or bathroom stalls of gay bars, frequently the only places where gay men could then steal a private moment. Nonetheless, according to patron Michael Scarborough, a “small hole” did exist in the partition between toilets stalls to facilitate peeping or previewing the so-called merchandise. Ricky Everett did not recall said hole, although he did remember a chalkboard, which Buddy had installed in the bathroom as a deterrent to patrons scrawling phone numbers and explicit messages on the walls. But Ricky could be rather innocent; although he had been the childhood best friend of Stanley Plaisance, and even had sleepovers with him when they were teenagers, Ricky professed to have no idea that Stanley might be gay, too, until he saw his old friend at the Up Stairs Lounge in the arms of Napoleon.41 Although they’d drifted apart since high school, Stanley and Ricky hugged and burst out laughing. Charmed by this mutual revelation, they immediately reconnected.
In addition, no drug use or drug dealing was tolerated inside Buddy’s bar. Nevertheless, if a patron like Stewart Butler came already high, well, that was his business. “It was off the beaten path,” Buddy Rasmussen told a Times-Picayune reporter in the 1990s. He continued, “But the Upstairs had a regular, steady clientele. Mostly employed people, mostly gay, but some straight, some women, too.” Ricky had similar memories: “It was just a wide variety of people,” he said. “We had politicians who come in there. We had doctors, lawyers, everyday hourly-wage blue-collar people.” Writing after the fire, Vieux Carré Courier editor and bar regular Bill Rushton attested, “The Up Stairs set out to give Iberville Street a new kind of anchor.”42
Surprisingly for New Orleans, Buddy set a policy of no sloppiness due to overimbibing. Nights could end with Buddy calling a cab and serving a patron coffee or a soft drink. Buddy even stocked milk behind the bar, which he’d occasionally mix with a dollop of vodka and serve to Stewart Butler’s dog, Jocko, the unofficial mascot of the place. “He used to sit up on the bar stool,” Stewart recalled, laughing. “A bar-hound, literally,” he continued. “Cause it didn’t take much. He’d get a little smashed, and I remember one time he got out of the place, and, when we noticed, we had to run out and caught him down near Exchange Place.”43
While this was a gay bar where people met and danced and dated, the staff did their best to encourage responsibility without being preachy. Perhaps this refreshingly sane attitude of fun within reason was why Bob McAnear, a plainclothes narcotics investigator working for U.S. Customs in New Orleans, had been visiting the Up Stairs Lounge both on and off duty from its inception. Bob often brought along his wife, Bettye, who had befriended Buddy Rasmussen years before.44
“Buddy and Phil [Esteve] invited us over to look at the proposed bar they were going to open,” Bob McAnear recalled. “I helped tear up the linoleum covering the floor.” Bettye had a passion for acting and directing in local theater troupes, and so Bob had, over the years, met countless gay men whom he deemed to be decent folk.45
The McAnears had grown particularly fond of Buddy and Adam as a couple and trusted them to babysit their kids whenever Bob was out on a case or Bettye was rehearsing for the New Orleans Opera. The couples became like family to each other—with a closeness that always extended into the Up Stairs Lounge. “The guys trusted me, and knew their being gay was not a problem,” explained Bob. “Due to their trust, if I needed information, the guys knew everything that happened in the streets, and they would give me information that other lawmen couldn’t get.” He continued. “I never betrayed that trust.”46
This was New Orleans, after all, a Mediterranean and Caribbean melting pot that preferred to be Janus-faced on a vast range of topics, including the factual validity of one’s so-called racial makeup. This Creole culture would rather accept moral incongruities as part of human nature than try to root them out in a witch hunt. The Puritan mind-set never touched the Paris of the South.47 Contradictory actions and beliefs could be sustained in one body so long as that person held them discreetly in two hands and—to borrow a phrase from Matthew 6:3—never “let your left know what your right hand is doing.” Terrible things were known to happen in New Orleans when the left hand acknowledged the right, and no one wished for the trouble that could spoil the party, even for a moment.
Quickly drawn into the bar’s inviting culture, Bob’s wife, Bettye, directed several melodramas in the back theater hall. Art critics like Susan Fosberg and female friends like Jeanne Gosnell also made the Up Stairs Lounge their watering hole.48 It was just the kind of neighborhood place that seemed to welcome all, its overt friendliness an antithesis to the hostility of the outside world. Several times, owner Phil Esteve invited female secretaries from Touro Hospital, his former workplace. Longshoremen working the river, known by nicknames like Smokie and Cocoa (probably racially inspired monikers), lived above the bar in a flophouse and became regular faces. And, of course, countless gay couples, like Deacon Mitch Mitchell and Horace Broussard or Michael Scarborough and Glenn Green, made the Up Stairs Lounge their base of operations, from which they’d make incursions into deeper parts of the Quarter.49
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br /> Perhaps because management made sure the bar’s rules were obeyed, it had never been raided. Right after the fire, Sergeant Frank Hayward, information officer for the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), confirmed to The Advocate that “the department has no records of any arrests at the Up Stairs—for thievery or anything else.” When the Up Stairs Lounge had opened back in 1970, it was the first gay establishment in New Orleans to receive a dancing license.50 This official sanction was significant for the safety of patrons. Historically, gay men in New Orleans and elsewhere could be arrested for making physical contact or shaking hands in a drinking establishment. For example, Napoleon had once been arrested at Caverns, a Bourbon Street bar, and booked for “dancing with a member of the same sex in an intimate embrace.” Buddy Rasmussen regularly sent the NOPD notice of upcoming events, a signal that he operated the place as a legitimate enterprise, not an underworld lair.51
This was also an era where phrases like “discretion assured” and “strictly confidential” proliferated as gay code words to ease the fears of closeted men and advise that their patronage at a bar or membership in a social club would not jeopardize their privacy. Informal surveys estimated that about 75,000 homosexuals lived in New Orleans in 1971, but fewer than 1,000 could be called “out,” by twenty-first-century standards. According to Bob Damron’s Address Book, an annual travel guide for the gay vacationer, in 1972 New Orleans boasted two gay bathhouses, twenty-four gay and lesbian bars, and three restaurants that were particularly gay-friendly.52 Thus was the gay community expanding its footprint in a town where, paradoxically, most homosexuals continued to wear the mask of heterosexuality.
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