Accordingly, Buddy, Adam, and their circle regarded the involuntary exposure of anyone’s sexuality as a serious problem, and they took measures to avoid its ever happening. Newcomers to the Up Stairs Lounge, especially those acting uncomfortably or unaccompanied by a familiar face, could encounter a few minutes of suspicion or wariness until sounded out. Buddy would loop such a customer in by asking him to carry a pitcher to the piano or a coin to the jukebox. “Request a song, honey?” he would ask. The point wasn’t to be conspiratorial or clannish. Men of any stage of “outness” were welcome. But in an age when gay sex was still criminalized and stigmatized, it was important to protect customers from a mugger seeking a mark; a sexually conflicted, violent assailant; a con artist looking for a blackmail victim; or anyone from the outside world looking to prey upon a man with a secret.53
Indeed, blackmailing homosexuals was a form of con artistry that had thrived for centuries. As late as 1967, as the Chicago Tribune reported, federal authorities exposed a nationwide blackmail ring targeting homosexuals. Subsequently, at least thirty persons were convicted on charges of extortion when an unnamed member of U.S. Congress from an eastern state was shaken down for $40,000 (then several years’ pay for the average person), on the threat that his homosexual activities would be otherwise exposed. Of course, in keeping with the mores of the era, the Tribune didn’t reveal the congressman’s name, nor did any other publication. Other victims, said the report, included “two deans of eastern universities, several professors, business men, a movie actor, a television personality and a high ranking military officer who committed suicide the night before he was to testify before a New York county grand jury.”54
Up Stairs Lounge regulars, more vulnerable to predation than members of the social elite, feared the blackmailer seeking something other than money. Such paranoia became a noticeable part of the gay psyche. “It was S.O.P. [standard operating procedure] at the Upstairs [sic] to know your customers,” remembered the longshoreman known as Cocoa. “The management required you to be there with someone they knew before they would serve you.” And there was always the possibility of gay-on-gay betrayal. Unscrupulous individuals were known to engage in the practice of “dropping a nickel” on a fellow homosexual—a term that signified using a pay phone to anonymously call a person’s employer or family and report their location.55
If a new patron pitched in when Buddy asked for help, he passed the initial test and was considered a friend until proven otherwise. Through Buddy’s efforts, the Up Stairs Lounge had succeeded in becoming an oasis where regular customers felt safe, less a hook-up space than a hangout where friends and lovers could exhale and be themselves. “There was a brotherhood there,” wrote Susan Fosberg. “People who understood, people with whom you could let your hair down. A place, perhaps, to find love.” Buddy kept a microphone behind the bar and would call the names of regulars as they entered in a style reminiscent of announcer Ed McMahon, a venerable late-night television fixture as second in command to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Buddy would announce, parodying the jolly McMahon, “Heeeeeeeere’s Luther Boggs!”56
When Buddy didn’t know a patron’s name, he’d call them “Honey” or “Sweetheart.” He was also known to wear one-piece leotards to lighten the mood. “It was an unusual mix of people, both in dress and appearance,” remembered Up Stairs Lounge regular Paul Killgore, “but, to be honest with you, there was kind of a sweetness.” Patrons would compete in tricycle races over zigzag courses between the tables or try to win the Easter bonnet contest. David Stuart Gary—or Piano Dave, as he was dubbed—would march up to the baby grand and ready the room with his signature “Ready, kiddies?” Sing-alongs ensued.57
This rich social dialogue, a dominant feature of the Lounge, also reflected the expressive sexual mores of the decade. According to the Vieux Carré Courier, “As you walk in Up Stairs first thing you notice is a picture of Queen Victoria seated with the caption, ‘Even a Queen can get the Clap.’ ” There was plenty of kissing and ducking out to get a room, but those practices occurred in a relaxed, unpressured atmosphere. “It certainly was more accepting than some of the other gay bars that were down along Bourbon Street,” recalled Killgore, “where, at that time, if you were going out, you wanted to look good, or you wanted to be in the company of attractive people.” By contrast, Killgore explained, “When you went into the Up Stairs Lounge, nobody gave a fuck about that. I mean, just enjoy yourself. Be nice. Be polite. Behave.”58
As sex and sexual expression were not frowned upon per se, the Lounge’s main room was decorated with suggestive and erotic imagery, such as a tiny replica of a statue called the Farnese Hercules, the disrobed Grecian hero leaning on a giant club with an apple tucked behind his nape.59 On the far wall, a naked Burt Reynolds—his revolutionary Cosmopolitan centerfold from 1972 enlarged to poster size—grinned on a bearskin rug with a hand suggestively draped over his crotch; Reynolds was a newly minted star who, only the year before, had shown off his acting chops in the movie Deliverance. Elsewhere, an image of Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz appeared, smiling with his thin mustache and chiseled frame, his seven gold medals dangling just above his star-spangled Speedo. Around 2:00 p.m. that Sunday, Buddy opened the bar for his first customer, Adam Fontenot, and handed him a drink.60
CHAPTER 2
Sunday Service
Afternoon
The church service at Magazine Street, down the street from Buddy and Adam’s house, caused a stir but not for any religious reason. The summer solstice had occurred just three days before, and that meant long days. The faithful entered the church’s front door expecting an hour of worship in close quarters, the proximity of bodies creating a pungent aroma. Circulation could be sparse in a “double” Creole cottage like this one, erected without insulation and elevated a few feet off the ground to prevent the slow decay of mold. Humidity, so thick with vapor that breathing air could feel like crying tears, would almost routinely reach 100 percent. Add the singing and sweating of congregants inside New Orleans’s only gay-friendly church, and matters could become unbearable with larger groups. Despite such deterrents, worshippers made the best of circumstances, since this was a sanctuary of their own, long struggled for and prayed for, and the only one that they could afford.1
Imagine the surprise of attendees on this, the last Sunday of June, when they crossed the porch and entered their church to be hit with the hum of an electric organ and an unanticipated blast of frigid air. Someone had donated a relatively expensive item: a window-unit air conditioner. Pastor Bill Larson thanked the anonymous benefactor for the generous gift to New Orleans’s own Metropolitan Community Church.2
The coolness felt new, even fancy, for these working-class men of faith, who, as if in a Tennessee Williams play, typically ventilated their homes with fans; air-conditioning was a luxury relished only in bars or at the office. Heading inside, worshippers took their seats in a room about twelve feet wide and twenty feet deep, flanked by folding chairs angled toward an oaken table that they used as an altar. This table and its five Gothic arches, reminiscent of the five candles of Advent, had been salvaged and repaired by the pastor himself.3
Indeed, Bill Larson was known as a carpenter of some skill. He had moved a load-bearing wall to free up room and convert this private residence, with a floor plan like Buddy and Adam’s home, into a gathering space. The sanctuary was tall and bright, with sieves of light falling in from side windows. The effect was ethereal and peaceful. New Orleans excelled at making rooms of these sorts. Bill had also maintained for himself and future pastors a small living quarters in a back room, generously referred to as the rectory. Most of this work he did at personal expense—using money he’d earned working nights—and at some risk, since the MCC did not own the building yet. The church rented the cottage on a lease-to-own basis and was saving for the down payment.4 Standing with grace behind the altar he’d saved, Bill Larson welcomed gay Christians to another Sabbath on this first Sunday of the summer
.
The room was lively, but Bill commanded it. He evoked a parental presence with his blond hair, sharp nose, and square chin. Bill was a tall, soft-spoken figure in his late forties who seemed to exude Midwestern humility. Originally from Kentucky, he had been born with the name William Roscoe Lairson and raised in crippling white poverty.5 Bill’s parents had married when his mother, Anna, was only sixteen. They had six children, with Bill being the baby of the brood. Bill’s father was a gambler who died from drinking poison whiskey when Anna was three months pregnant with Bill. Then the widowed Anna Lairson uprooted her kids to small-town Ohio.6
There, Anna waitressed and received a mother’s pension for child-rearing expenses, yet often left the children alone to raise one another. In Anna’s care, Bill’s six-year-old sister Dorothy ran into the street and was crushed beneath the wheels of a car. This death occurred around the time of Bill’s first memories. While Anna received a financial settlement, the money was squandered.7 Receiving reports that Anna was neglecting her children and entertaining men, the county paid a visit and assumed responsibility. Though Anna remained local, her children became dependents of the state. Subsequently, Anna was arrested on statutory charges while living in a shack on the city dump with Troy Howell, a disabled World War I veteran with sizable debts. In a local scandal, a county official turned up at their residence and hauled them to a courthouse to be married, under the threat that the two would otherwise be arrested for the sex crime of adultery.8
Bill’s new stepfather was not able to accept Anna’s children into his home. Thus, from age three to fifteen, Bill would be raised as “Roscoe,” in the Butler County Children’s Home9 (apparently, he became Roscoe because there were already too many Williams at the facility). Although Anna hoped to spring her kids from county care someday, she never was able to do so, and neither were any of Bill’s elder siblings. When Bill was a junior in high school, he enlisted in the armed forces. He served in the European theater and got married to his church sweetheart when he returned to the States. He and his young wife were both likely virgins, at the tail end of puberty, when they made lifelong vows. Bill’s wife bore him a son and then left abruptly because he wished to become a Methodist minister.10 Evidently, she did not want to be a preacher’s wife. Bill eventually did become a lay minister and youth fellowship leader, despite the toll of losing his family. Abandoned and eventually divorced for the official reason of neglect, Bill became free in his thirties to explore his once-latent attraction to other men. By then, he had changed the spelling of his name from William Roscoe Lairson to William Ros Larson,11 a nonlegal gesture common for homosexuals in this epoch, when aliases served as self-protection, a means to embrace what was then a radical new identity and avoid being outed in a newspaper, were that radical new identity to spur an arrest.
Bill never abandoned his religious calling, although a divinity school education never became a reality for him. He did what one did in those days: apprenticed in a trade and then worked as a master carpenter for many years. Drawn to New Orleans, Bill eventually made peace between his orientation and his religion. He found his way to St. George’s Episcopal Church, with a supportive minister named Bill Richardson, and then to the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church, which had formed in 1971 under Pentecostal minister Reverend David Solomon.12 It is unlikely, by 1973, that even Bill Larson’s closest allies in the MCC knew of his past or his birth name, but many gay men existed in this fashion: sloughing off previous identities to embrace their truer selves, much like Saul of Tarsus abandoning his given name to become Paul on the road to Damascus.
THE HISTORY OF the creation of the MCC of New Orleans bears telling. The church’s original leader, David Solomon, stood in deep contrast to Bill Larson, who was no politico by any stretch of the imagination. Solomon was a small, mustachioed man with a thunderous disposition—a figure quick to blend social activism with matters of religion. In 1970, Solomon had helped found a short-lived chapter of a militant political group called the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New Orleans.13 At the time, GLF organizations were popping up across the country and loosely networking with hubs in San Francisco and Greenwich Village.14 Through the GLF, Solomon had led protests in response to the mass arrest of homosexuals at a French Quarter cruising ground called Cabrini Playground.15
As a fenced-in, unlighted space just a short jaunt from Bourbon Street, Cabrini Playground had long been fertile terrain for gay or closeted men looking for quick, anonymous encounters at a time before the internet obviated the need for public cruising. This fenced-in zone also made for easy pickings when officers of the NOPD vice squad came calling. In a four-day period in January 1971, thirteen gay men were lured, beaten, and arrested by plainclothes police officers posing as fellow “cruisers” seeking, and sometimes even accepting, sexual attention. “One brother, his head ripped by a billy club, was taken to Charity Hospital, given a tetanus shot and returned to his cell,” read a report in Sunflower, New Orleans’s first “gay newspaper,” which had been started by the GLF. “Neither police nor (so-called) physicians cared about his bleeding head,” the report continued. “We, the homosexual people of New Orleans, have been patient. We have suffered silently untold abuse at the hands of police. Now we draw the line.” The establishment press, of course, barely covered the park raid or the subsequent protests.16
Fiery in tone, Solomon showed few qualms attacking the integrity of Louisiana officials and equating them with some of history’s most notorious rogues. “The folks in GLF were antagonistic,” remembered a gay New Orleanian named Roger Nelson. “They were stirring the shit. This had always been a very genteel city, and suddenly here were these insurrectionists.” Following the Cabrini Playground arrests, Solomon led a group of seventy-five GLFers to City Hall and clamored to present Mayor Moon Landrieu with a list of demands, much in the style of the Black Panthers. Solomon wanted the mayor to immediately suspend Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso, a well-connected “top cop” who had inherited the post from his brother, Joseph Giarrusso, also immensely popular.17
Solomon’s request was audacious, considering that most of New Orleans’s closeted community had not exactly risen up in response to the beatings. Landrieu, a Democrat with civil rights credentials, was in the midst of racially integrating employment in his administration. He clearly felt he had bigger worries. “Before I got there, not absolutely so, but there was hardly a black above the broom and mop job in City Hall,” Landrieu said in a 2009 interview for the Historic New Orleans Collection. “And I decided to go ahead and just get it done. So it wasn’t just the tokenism.” Landrieu declined to speak with homosexual activists of the GLF in 1971, even as they chanted outside of his office, his recalcitrance reflecting a widespread belief that gays were beyond the pale of America’s civil rights debate.18
David Solomon, however, would not be deterred. “We will march daily until we get a redress and satisfaction,” said Solomon. The next day, Landrieu again rebuffed the protesters. “The mayor had other things to do,” reported the Times-Picayune without attribution, revealing the newspaper’s sentiment.19 Absent from headlines, however, a backdoor series of conversations did occur. Richard Kernion, an assistant to the mayor, met with GLF leaders and scheduled a meeting between the activists and the New Orleans police chief. A genuine cessation of hostilities followed, and the mayor’s office made a statement that no newspapers chose to print: “Superintendent Giarrusso stated that no citizens would be harassed in any way provided that they were not molesting others or otherwise breaking the law.”20
Without any publicity, this behind-the-scenes victory for the GLF seemed more like a defeat, which emboldened Reverend John Harrington, the self-styled “Chaplain of Bourbon Street,” to challenge the gay radicals and praise police for protecting “the natural man against the unnatural.” Other Solomon-led events, such as an attempted “gay-in” at City Park, met with apathy, even vituperation. Within the year, the New Orleans chapter of the GLF had faltered, losin
g the support of Lynn Miller, the group’s female cofounder and financial sponsor.21
Changing tack, Solomon announced his intention to organize a gay-friendly Christian fellowship. “New Congregation Will Be Organized,” read an April 17, 1971, headline in the Times-Picayune. The religious assembly “to be known as the Metropolitan Community Church” would be led by Solomon “to cater to the spiritual needs of those up to now neglected.”22 The phrase “those up to now neglected,” instead of the obvious term “homosexual,” can be read as the coded style of the time, since it remained provocative to reference homosexuality in print.23
Additionally, using the word “Gay” was widely considered to be an act of advocacy for Gay Liberation organizations. It was a social gesture that aimed to counter the image of a stigmatized group, since in the public’s eye the term “homosexual” was virtually synonymous with “sex criminal.”24 In this era, where out homosexuals faced constant attacks on their characters, a happy term like “Gay” was a way to reject negative stereotypes, but acceptance of this substitute was rare. For example, in 1970, when Henry Kubicki declared to his father “I’m Gay,” the man responded, “Well, I’m not very gay about it.”25
When forced to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, the average person, whether in New Orleans or elsewhere, tended to frame his or her language in a derogatory manner, lest he or she be accused of sympathizing or participating. “The word ‘Gay’ was not used, as it was sort of new,” remembered Joseph Bermuda, an art curator and father of two who ran the Cabildo Gallery in the French Quarter in 1973. “They were called fruits, homos, tutti fruttis, and queers. The latter was the prevailing word: they were referred to as queers.” According to Bermuda, the slur “faggot” was reserved much in the same way that the n word was reserved for blacks—for opportunistic delivery or deepest hurt.26 In a city of southern gallantries, most recognized “faggot” as a term to be muttered under the breath unless challenged or provoked.
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