Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  Despite efforts to veil the purpose of Solomon’s new church, the coded announcement in the Times-Picayune caught the attention of gay Christians like Courtney Craighead, Bill Larson, and Mitch Mitchell. “The MCC was a church for everyone,” explained congregant Henry Kubicki, “but it had an outreach to gays and lesbians. That’s why they were there: because they had enough hurt from the denomination that they grew up with, but they were not about to be an activist or have anything that would bring harm to their comfort or sanctuary.”27

  Craighead, Larson, and Mitchell would attend the first MCC meetings led by Reverend Solomon in 1971, and they’d all be anointed as deacons in 1972. Courtney Craighead would often recall his ordination as the greatest day of his life. Reverend Troy Perry, the founding minister of the national fellowship of MCC churches, presided over the ceremony. “I was ordained as a deacon by the laying of hands,” Courtney would tell fellow congregants and new pastors, “and you can’t ever take that away from me.”28

  Perry, pastor of the original MCC church in Los Angeles (sometimes called the “Mother Church”), would pass through New Orleans on several more occasions in 1972 and 1973. Troy Perry was not just a minister of some renown but also a man whose name connoted social action.29 He was the gay rights equivalent of either civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Black Panther leader Huey Newton, depending upon whether admirers or critics were describing him. With his Southern drawl, domineering height, and piercing blue eyes, Perry could hold a room with a spellbinding presence. He was a holy man, much in the American evangelical tradition, quick to shout and quicker to shed tears.

  Troy Perry’s origin story had become part of church legend. As an ex-Pentecostal minister from Florida, Perry had been ousted from a ministerial position in the Church of God of Prophecy in the early 1960s for his so-called homosexual sins. “They viewed homosexuality, in the South, as something heterosexuals did that was bad,” he explained in an interview for this book. “They didn’t view it as a separate orientation.” Losing his church and a heterosexual marriage to the scandal of being outed, Perry left his home state. According to his controversial 1972 autobiography, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, he served in the U.S. army in Europe before resettling in California. In 1968, Perry posted an advertisement in The Advocate and founded the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) as the first gay-friendly Christian fellowship in the United States.30

  By April 1972, the MCC boasted twenty-four congregations and missions from California to Washington, D.C., the rapid growth reflecting a religious need. Perry’s work was revolutionary in that he appended formal spirituality to a lifestyle that previously lacked a religious center. Much like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which imbued the civil rights movement with religious imperative, Perry and the MCC—with its avowed platform of social action—injected a Christian sensibility into the early character of Gay Liberation. He received some notoriety for performing the first public same-sex wedding—called a “holy union”—in the United States, although this ceremony was not recognized by any legal entity.31

  In 1970, Perry teamed with an activist named Morris Kight to organize Los Angeles’s first gay pride parade. Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis, predictably, opposed the parade vociferously. “We would be ill-advised,” Davis told the police commission, “to discommode the people to have a burglars’ or robbers’ parade or homosexuals’ parade from a legal standpoint.”32 Still, Perry and his team eventually received a permit to hold the event. Photographed for countless news articles, Troy Perry was among the few visible faces for homosexuality in America.

  BY 1972, DESPITE the best efforts of men like Reverend David Solomon, New Orleans had witnessed no pride parade or equivalent act of gay mass expression. The city also lacked a visible leader like Troy Perry to serve as a spokesperson for gay causes. With a Pentecostal background similar to that of Perry, Solomon viewed himself as a leader of the same mold, with the same responsibility to buck the system. But Solomon faced a sizable challenge in the Big Easy, called by then the Queer Capital of the South by pro- and antigay groups, a place where most homosexuals felt the need to live secret lives.33

  Values encoded in the region’s French Creole heritage tolerated sexual “otherness” only so long as such behaviors remained immured in a private realm. In this neo-Victorian culture, built on overlapping private realms, homosexuals could be offered a closeted niche, similar to 1920s Berlin. Such was the bargain for keeping quiet. This quirky system had functioned for centuries, offering homosexuals the promise of safety in hiding, but it strained against the encroachment of America’s broader sexual revolution.

  Yet, in 1970s New Orleans, traditions continued to trump Gay Liberation. Only in New Orleans was the term “uptown marriage” popularly understood as two well-to-do aristocrats married to women while romantically involved with each other.34 “In my world, and this is what’s very hard to put across, there were definitely people who were gay, but they didn’t live as gay ‘out,’ ” explained New Yorker writer and former dean of the Columbia Journalism School Nicholas Lemann, who grew up in 1960s New Orleans and attended the private high school Country Day. It’s important to note that Lemann was heterosexual, a sympathetic outsider who looked into the gay substrata early on. “Some were married. Some were quote ‘confirmed bachelors,’ ” Lemann continued. “And, to the extent that you had a very hazy understanding [of their sexuality], it was that they had a kind of other side of their life that they kept compartmentalized and separate.”35 A homosexual, in these circumstances, would hardly ever be asked to speak about private trysts; most neighbors would be more upset at the person or institution asking the questions. For example, many New Orleanians grew angrier with Jim Garrison for discussing Clay Shaw’s sexuality than with Shaw himself for being homosexual.36

  In such a society, built not on morality or rule of law but on social exchanges, the closet came advertised as functional and preferable. Those who accepted closeted lives would resist even identifying with the closet. Most preferred more elegant labels, such as “disinclined to be identified as homosexual,” according to John Meyers, who lived blocks away from the Up Stairs Lounge. The famously louche traditions of the city allowed for such broad types as the “dandy,” the “millionaire bachelor,” or two “longtime companions.” As early as the 1890s, John McDonogh, a shipping titan and New Orleans philanthropist, for example, was widely reputed to be one of these “bachelors.”37 Therefore, a curious dichotomy pervaded in New Orleans that was hardly new to the twentieth century: the success of hidden gays could, in a sense, provide the closet’s greatest defense.

  Modern homosexuality posed a dilemma, however, in that it violated Creole discretion and triggered reprisals. Despite its flamboyant reputation, resulting from the presence of drag queens and men in extravagant costume during Mardi Gras season, New Orleans had witnessed frequent persecutions of openly gay residents, especially effeminate “jennie-men” or cross-dressers who could or would not conceal their differences.38 A 1906 article in the Sunday Sun, a New Orleans morality newsletter, called homosexuals “its,” as if they were beneath naming. Hostile attitudes were also common in the post-McCarthy era; a 1958 campaign led by prominent French Quarter resident Jacob Morrison, half brother to Mayor Chep Morrison, proposed several ordinances to “drive out the deviates,” including decrees to fire immoral workers and the aforementioned statute to seize homes and property—all of which the mayor signed into law.39

  Given these peculiarities, it shouldn’t be surprising that New Orleans’s closeted lineage tended to operate slyly—but in plain sight. One of America’s oldest continually operating gay bars, Café Lafitte in Exile, for example, had shelled out drinks to closeted celebrities and dignitaries from 901 Bourbon Street since 1953. A precursor to Café Lafitte in Exile, more efficiently known as Café Lafitte, had opened during Prohibition and catered to such “exotics.” But when the original property owner died, new management barred such fr
aternization. Café Lafitte in Exile, flauntingly, opened up on the next corner, the “in Exile” referring to those “bachelors” and queens banished from their former domain.40

  Café Lafitte in Exile, a tavern for the “genteel,” not only survived but thrived in the wake of a 1969 incident in which Laisder Mendoza, the twenty-five-year-old gay son of a Venezuelan industrialist, had gotten into an argument with a lover, exited the bar, and then plowed his pickup truck through the building’s front door, injuring three. Five years earlier, Mendoza had been arrested by the vice squad and booked for “attempted crime against nature,” but, because he was a closeted member of diplomatic society, it does not appear that he received any comeuppance for that charge or for driving his truck through the bar.41

  Tennessee Williams frequented Café Lafitte in Exile but avoided acknowledgment of his homosexuality because the content of his plays roused enough controversy as it was: he feared it would escalate if his “mad pilgrimage of the flesh” were to become common knowledge.42 Some critics, such as Time magazine’s Louis Kronenberger, were especially keen to goad Williams as an artist “obsessed with violence, corruption and sex” or a man whose “profanity often seems to relieve … [his] own feelings rather than his characters.’ ” Williams’s dance between outness and closeted-ness created paranoia and psychological breaks. Consequently, the playwright suffered a diminution in self-worth. “I once had the idea, the hope, of being a major artist,” he confessed to his lover, Frank Merlo, in 1957. “I know I am a minor artist who has happened to create two or three major works.”43 At the time Williams wrote these words, he had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

  Still, the playwright Williams, the shipping titan McDonogh, and the diplomat’s son Mendoza had all been moneyed men with the means to live in a gray space. In a pinch, they could bribe or influence their way out of trouble with law enforcement or the press. Homosexuality, for the affluent, was often something to be managed and concealed like a drug addiction, a “social tic” that would only read on the surface of the deranged or confused. It was still relatively common, for example, for the closeted rich to “keep a boy” in the Quarter, a young lover well maintained, at least temporarily, for the wealthy man’s own pleasure.44 “It was more of a class thing,” agreed Jane Place, who waitressed at a gay-friendly French Quarter diner. Upper-class gays could have their way in this world of complex graces. One gay fraternal order, for example, held a Mardi Gras ball at the luxurious Hotel Monteleone in 1970, but no pictures appeared in newspapers. “There were the high societies,” Place noted, “and then there were the derelicts, that you knew they weren’t going to live very long. It was very sad because you could almost pick their fate by the group they were in.”45

  Places like the Up Stairs Lounge and groups like the MCC, however, were havens for blue-collar gays and middle-class professionals: individuals without fortunes, who sometimes lived month to month. Patrons of the Up Stairs Lounge tended to be tolerated in establishments like Café Lafitte in Exile but rarely welcomed into the toniest cliques. The journalist and gay activist Bill Rushton, writing for The Advocate, observed this hierarchy in action, as well as the diminution in power and agency that came with descending the rungs:

  In the mid-Quarter gay bars on Bourbon Street and the surrounding gay restaurants, it’s the “beautiful people” gays with their bow ties and bloody Marys and maybe brunch squeezed in between. On Rampart Street, it’s countless refugees from small southern towns, middle-aged hairdressers and decorators who can’t make it here and can’t go home, repasting off buffet spreads like you’ll only find elsewhere on Southern Baptist picnics. On Iberville, it’s the hustlers and their johns staggering in from the night before, carousing at only a slightly subdued key. Except for the Up Stairs.46

  The Up Stairs Lounge, actually, had provided a lifeline to the MCC of New Orleans at a critical juncture. In the fall of 1971, the growing congregation was evicted from its original gathering place. The MCC approached Up Stairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve, who generously offered up the bar’s back theater hall free of charge. Each Sunday for a long stretch of months, Buddy Rasmussen would let churchgoers in around 2:00 p.m., and they’d file into the back room to pray. Services often included an adaptation of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” with an added line: “Gay and straight together, some day.” Afterward, the MCC would hold a reception of coffee and sweet rolls in the “dance area” that blended into more boisterous “fellowship” when the beer bust became roaring in the evening.47

  It was at this time that the Up Stairs Lounge witnessed a transition in that MCC members played a role in expanding the Sunday beer bust from a gathering of several dozen friends to an end-of-weekend occasion for crowds. “Piano Dave” Gary would take requests and lead groups in song throughout the two hours of bottomless draft beer. Richard Robert Cross, an MCC member nicknamed Mother Cross, started a tradition of requesting the ballad “United We Stand” by the band the Brotherhood of Man.48 The lyrics, extolling the virtues being “together, you and I,” explored themes of unwavering loyalty. Pounded out from the bar piano, it seemed to sum up their lives.

  “United We Stand” became the anthem of the Up Stairs Lounge, a metaphor for who its patrons were and what they meant to one another, a means through which gay men could temporarily express and escape their existential pain. Piano Dave received multiple requests for the ballad at each beer bust, and it became tradition to sing the song loudly, emotively, to the point of tears until seven, when beer bust ended. Moments like these raised the profile of the Up Stairs Lounge. In 1973, Bob Damron’s Address Book listed the establishment with an asterisk for the first time, indicating that the bar was “very popular.”49

  But challenges arose. A bar that got hopping earlier in the afternoon made a poor location for a gay-friendly church seeking religious legitimacy. “If patrons of the bar are waiting for the service, and they’re already getting their drinks,” noted MCC congregant Henry Kubicki, “they’re definitely ‘feeling the spirit’ but not necessarily holy.” Some gay-friendly aspects of MCC worship could upset Christian traditionalists. For example, John Meyers, who happened to be a gay Catholic seminarian, came to one service but was “mildly offended” when he saw the Eucharist broken into halves so that gay lovers could receive the same “Body of Christ” during communion. Additionally, the MCC was forced to share the bar’s back theater hall with various nonreligious groups.50 It was hardly a consecrated space, although they did their best to make it so.

  Several bar regulars joined a growing troupe of actors who dubbed themselves the Up Stairs Players. The floors of the theater hall often became littered with peanut shells during performances of melodramas there, nicknamed “nellydramas” because of their cross-gender casting. Southern melodramas held proud traditions of being performed before raucous audiences, with crowds cheering on heroes and throwing popcorn and peanut shells at villains, and patrons took this heritage to heart. Bettye McAnear, wife of U.S. Customs officer Bob McAnear, wrote and directed several original melodramas as part of this effort. She initially had high aspirations for these productions, but the closeted stars of other acting troupes wouldn’t audition, for fear of being outed by association with the venue. As such, amateurism became part of the charm. The Up Stairs Players were known to veer from her script in repeat performances by letting audience members interrupt the action to shout the big lines. In response, casts started ad-libbing to throw off the crowd.51

  One night, when the actors thought that the McAnears were out of town, they abandoned the script entirely. “All of a sudden, midway into the play, Bettye stood up,” recollected Ricky Everett, who was a frequent cast member. “She said, ‘I did not write that.’ She turned around and said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and watch this.’ She stomped out of the little theater.” Bob McAnear left with an apologetic look. He knew to follow or face her wrath. “And then some queen back in the back corner of the audience said, ‘Well, if she wrote that, and
she doesn’t want to watch it, why should I?’ ” recalled Ricky. “And he got up and walked out, and there went the rest of the audience behind him.”52

  Proceeds from these performances went to support the local Crippled Children’s Hospital, and many “nellydrama” performers were also MCC members receptive to the idea of having fun for a charitable cause. The melodrama Egad, What a Cad featured MCC members Tad Turner and Jason Guidry. In another performance, Ricky Everett brought the house down as the “Infamous Memphis Queen.” Deacon Mitch Mitchell and Reverend David Solomon also participated, and it dawned on the congregation that there needed to be clearer boundaries between the bar and their church.53

  By mid-1972, David Solomon moved the MCC from the Up Stairs Lounge to a side chapel of St. George’s Episcopal Church in the Garden District. The MCC’s temporary residence there, coming as a result of Deacon Bill Larson’s close friendship with St. George’s minister Bill Richardson, was not without controversy. One longtime congregant of St. George’s had refused to return to worship until the gay Christians left and the chapel had received an exorcism. Eventually, Solomon brought the MCC to the cottage on Magazine Street, an affordable location closer to the apartments of many worshippers.54 It was truly a home of their own, but, even though they’d migrated across town, the congregation kept close ties with the Up Stairs Lounge and maintained the tradition of fellowship.