Tinderbox

  Rodger held the distinction of being both the elder boy and the middle child of his brood, the third kid of four. Rodger’s father, Mansel J. Nunez, served with honor in the Coast Guard during World War II and was an exemplar of masculinity. Mansel fancied himself a bit of a cowboy and bragged about life in the saddle. Mansel and his wife Rose, Rodger’s mother, divorced in 1963. During the split, Rodger stood in the prime of adolescence, and he took the breakup very seriously. His mother received custody of the children and did not remarry immediately.15 There was great shame in reneging on one’s vows in this heavily Catholic region. At some point after the divorce, Mansel decamped for other locales, and Rodger started to test his freedom.

  Rodger began spelling his name without the “d” around this phase of his life, passing himself off as Roger Nunez. He applied for, and received, a Social Security number using this pseudonym. Few left the microcosm of Abbeville; as a Cajun, it would be akin to abandoning one’s tribe, but Roger did choose to vamoose during high school—ahead of schedule. Something within him must have felt constrained by the world he knew. In June 1964, he applied to enlist in the navy as a seventeen-year-old minor with the consent of his mother. On his enlistment form, he answered no to the question “Have you ever suffered from epilepsy, fainting spells or dizzy spells?” Considering that Roger would eventually enlist in the U.S. army—a separate military branch—several months later, it’s likely that navy recruitment discovered a problem with this questionnaire.16

  From 1964 to 1967, Roger served in the army as a typist, first in Louisiana and then at the headquarters of V Corps in Frankfurt, West Germany.17 Writing his hometown newspaper a letter to the editor from abroad, Roger described the heartsickness of being away. “I miss Abbeville very much,” he pined. “It is my home and I love it. You can’t possibly imagine how much something means to you until you no longer have it.” Roger’s posting in Europe proved fortunate, since the Vietnam War was at its height, with troop presence in South Vietnam soaring from 23,300 in 1964 to 485,600 in 1967. U.S. forces in West Germany were actively monitoring Soviet communications, and Roger won his spot away from battlefields either through luck or merit or due to medical restrictions that would have rendered him ineligible for combat.

  Despite not being in a war zone, Roger was wounded in service. Following an unspecified injury, he received a transfer back to the States and recovered at a Georgia base. In Roger’s military records, the transfer is marked as “CAS” (casualty), but the circumstances of this injury and transfer remain unknown. Roger served out the remainder of his career in Georgia and then transferred to the army reserve with a National Defense Service Medal and a good conduct award.18 It’s unknown exactly when he began acting on his feelings for other men, but one can presume that Roger found eager companions in warrens where gay servicemen congregated in West Germany.

  Notwithstanding his public yearnings for Abbeville, Roger didn’t settle home when he received his discharge. He was a haunted character to those who met him in 1970, around the time he emerged from a state mental hospital and resurfaced in New Orleans. At some point, he applied to become a candidate for the New Orleans Police Department, though he had a drunk driving conviction, and his application wasn’t taken seriously. Roger was not one to discuss his past at length, but he gained a reputation for taking advantage of people and situations. On at least two occasions, in December 1972 and April 1973, he was arrested and charged with making illicit purchases using stolen credit cards. Roger, in fact, was already in violation of the one-year probation he’d received for pleading guilty to these charges as he drank at Gene’s Hideaway. He had failed to report to his parole officer, and he’d given his parole board a fake address.19

  THROUGHOUT THAT SUNDAY afternoon, Roger and Donald Landry do-si-doed between tables at Gene’s Hideaway and Wanda’s, the other bar on Iberville Street owned by Gene Davis, who continued to watch their dalliance. Davis recalled that Roger and Landry would lean close to each other and make eyes. But a younger, slimmer hustler staying in a nearby hotel named Mark Allen Guidry—supposedly, an acquaintance of Roger—walked into Gene’s Hideaway and must have sensed an opening. While Roger was, as one might have said in that era, no slouch in the looks department, he was by no means a catch. He stood five foot eight and had a slight tummy. With a ruddy complexion and medium-length hair, he struck the eye as average.20

  Yet in the eyes of an older man standing in a darkened bar, having already had too many drinks, Roger’s averageness could mollify and become elevated. But Roger did lack a certain charisma to pull off the illusion. He took the medication Dilantin to treat his epilepsy and occasionally had seizures in public as a result of alcohol diluting its effect. Nevertheless, he tended to brush off these alarming displays and keep the party rolling.21 Roger also occasionally attempted to date women, although these dates would end in utter failure.

  Mark Allen Guidry, taking a seat in the bar with Roger, must have presented a striking contradiction to his friend. At nineteen, Guidry would have stood out as a more desirable catch for Donald Landry. In the terminology of the time, Guidry looked like a Peter Pan, and Landry was eager to find a young specimen. Guidry made eyes, and Landry bit on the metaphorical line, which resulted in Guidry “nipping the trick” from Roger. It became clear that Landry was now Guidry’s piece of business. Hustler competition could indeed be so cutthroat. Guidry and Landry canoodled as Roger brooded. Eventually, the lovers-to-be left Roger to his cups, heading to a St. Charles Avenue hotel, where Landry procured food and paid for their lovemaking with a personal check. Meanwhile, Roger vented rage and stomped about Iberville Street. He reappeared at Gene’s Hideaway around 5:00 p.m., just when Guidry and Landry had returned from their engagement.22

  Although Landry—with his colostomy bag—was hardly dashing, and probably unused to being fought over by two younger men, Roger fumed over lost earnings. Incensed, he guilted a twenty-dollar bill (the contemporary spending equivalent of a hundred dollars) from Landry for services offered but unperformed. Roger then emptied his pockets of stray bills and coins onto the bar. He publicly counted his loot and demanded that a barmaid break the twenty-dollar bill into smaller increments, which she did. Next, Roger insisted, with some amount of aggression, that another dalliance was still possible. Their party would continue, Roger emphasized loudly enough to be overhead by Gene Davis, three doors down at the Up Stairs Lounge beer bust. By this time, Landry, well past slurring in his speech, kept falling off his bar stool, and Davis voiced concerns that Landry wouldn’t make it up the stairs to the beer bust without injury.23

  PERCHED ABOVE IBERVILLE STREET in the Marriott Hotel, Henry Kubicki dipped his hands into an industrial sink filled with soapy water. He tried to keep pace with the dinner rush and avoid invectives from coworkers and his boss. For months, Henry had worked as back-kitchen help in the luxurious high-rise restaurant called Port Orleans. His shifts ran from 4:00 p.m. to midnight, which meant that Henry constantly missed drink specials at the Up Stairs Lounge. Henry was making minimum wage, $1.65 per hour, and the Port Orleans effectively ran his life.24 Hemmed in by ceramic tile, Henry’s work space resounded with clatter, steam-cleaning machinery and dishes balancing in stacks. Henry, who was legally deaf, seemed to be the only worker who didn’t mind the constant racket.

  He would turn down his hearing aids and drift away into the swish of the water, following trains of thought over past and present. How did he get to this place? The year before, celebrities and heads of state had presided over the opening of this restaurant and hotel with Mardi Gras–like celebrations. Governor Edwin Edwards had attended the festivities, which started on Canal Street and rose forty-two stories to this top-of-the-city vantage point. According to a spread in the Times-Picayune, 175 business conventions had booked the Marriott, whose backside on Iberville Street—as the article failed to mention—abutted a sprawl of midcentury porno theaters and gay bars.25 This juxtaposition was hardly unusual, for the well-heeled and the in-need of Ne
w Orleans often rubbed in close proximity.

  A few years before, Henry had made the mistake of skipping town with an older man. He remembered meeting a sophisticate named Jeff when he was an eighteen-year-old runaway crashing at a New Orleans bathhouse. At the time, Henry had been feuding with his father, a former military man. As revenge, Henry vanished from the family home and took up residence in the Club New Orleans Baths, which had just opened on Toulouse Street. As bathhouses began proliferating in urban areas, the Club New Orleans Baths became the French Quarter’s first official business devoted to hosting anonymous encounters between men around the clock. Stretching across numerous rooms, the “Club Baths,” as the establishment was nicknamed, offered not just a pool area but also, ironically, a reading room, as well as a sauna, shower facilities, a living room with a television, and private rooms for the more inhibited. Indeed, “the bathhouse” became such a celebrated institution of the American gay community in the 1970s that these establishments would feature full gyms for working out, just as in Man’s Country in downtown Manhattan. In these early days, before the scourge of AIDS, the Club Baths—like countless others—celebrated its orgy chamber, kept nearly pitch-black.26

  When he met Jeff, Henry was exhausted from several nights of trying to sleep in a reading room chair, so he’d flopped onto a mattress in the dark room. Henry then felt hands unzipping his pants. “In the heat of the moment, I professed love, which is a crock of shit,” recalled Henry. “Well, when the light came on, it was not exactly Prince Charming. It was more like Prince Charles of England.” On his part, Jeff professed affection for the teen and prevaricated about his age, shaving off about a decade. Smitten, Henry followed Jeff all the way to Brooklyn Heights, New York, and then to Georgia—without alerting his family, of course, to the journey. Henry, with his sensory impairments, had trouble finding consistent work and became a financial burden on his beau. By 1972, Jeff grew tired of their May–December entanglement and ended the relationship. Afterward, Henry’s handsomeness got him a job selling men’s suits at Davison’s Department Store in Atlanta. He rented a garage apartment, but his landlady, a churchgoing woman, saw him leave with Jeff for a late-night soiree. She reported Henry to the authorities for sexual immorality. The next morning, security guards at Davison’s escorted Henry from the front doors to a manager, who fired him summarily.27

  At the time, few legal protections existed to prevent the firing of gays and suspected gays. Only the municipalities of New York City and San Francisco offered employment protections to homosexuals in 1972. Private employers in Atlanta or New Orleans, or any other city in the United States for that matter, could do as they wished. So widespread was such discrimination that these practices were not challenged or seen as wrong by the vast majority of citizens; nor did any major civil rights group document or prevent employers from “cleaning out the riffraff” by firing the odd gay or lesbian. The federal government had explicitly endorsed this practice during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, a protracted hunt for homosexuals in the Department of State that had led to the firing of approximately five thousand people. Common sense dictated that where one found a gay man, one had a duty to remove him from the situation. As late as 1967, the Supreme Court had validated this precept, when, by a vote of 7–2, it ordered the deportation of a Canadian national applying for U.S. citizenship purely on the basis that he said he was homosexual. In a dissenting opinion, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “It is common knowledge that in this century homosexuals have risen high in our own public service—both in Congress and in the executive branch—and have served with distinction.”28

  Walking home after his dismissal, Henry pondered suicide. He found his belongings tossed out in garbage bags along the front driveway. A sheriff stood, like an armed sentry, next to his landlady. This county official was present not to protect Henry’s property but to ensure that he wouldn’t cause a ruckus as he left. Taking pity on an ex-lover, Jeff bought Henry a one-way ticket back to New Orleans.29 With a new job at the Marriott and his apartment on Coliseum Street, Henry was attempting to reestablish ties at home and restart his life.

  Henry’s story of expulsion was relatively common among the so-called queer folk of New Orleans. His friend at the MCC, Deacon Courtney Craighead, had been exiled in a similar way from his Methodist church in Little Rock in 1967, when an associate pastor began spreading rumors that Courtney was gay. Courtney and Henry had both found refuge in Up Stairs Lounge society and sought lives at the level of their emotional states. They worked low-wage, low-skill jobs where an absence, even for illness, meant termination. Many gay men had similarly hardscrabble lives dominated by basic threats to their survival. Those who succeeded in advancing themselves did so, like Clay Shaw, at the risk of exposure. States and professional bar associations used licensing laws to prevent homosexuals from practicing as a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a pharmacist, or an embalmer. Thus were out homosexuals barred from many occupations associated with higher-income lifestyles.30

  Henry often came home from the Marriott Hotel demoralized, shattered on the very nights that Ricky Everett came home with stories from the weekend. The pair had in fact met at the Up Stairs Lounge on a Saturday in 1971. A photo of the two that day by the bar’s front door shows them smiling, with Ricky sitting demurely on Henry’s lap. Henry sometimes fantasized about quitting his damn job at Port Orleans and taking the elevator down to meet Ricky at the Up Stairs Lounge. He’d have a great beer bust if he left tonight, but then, he reasoned, where would he be? “I had to work or be fired,” he explained matter-of-factly.31 His hands kept cleaning the plates.

  THE FRENCH QUARTER was a beehive of merriment that hazy evening, and Stewart Butler socialized in his element. Bourbon Street was a notorious bazaar of buskers and hustlers, peddlers and mendicants, an avenue that could hardly be imagined beneath America’s Bible Belt. Most tourists kept to a tamer strip of bars located closer to downtown hotels, but a certain cadre of men dared farther, strolling past the invisible line at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann Streets. If you passed St. Ann, you would inevitably find a cloister of “exotic” establishments, like Pete’s Place or Caverns or Café Lafitte in Exile, where Stewart Butler was currently imbibing.32

  St. Ann Street was one of many markers for men whose tastes ran toward the unconventional. Every year, Carnival season brought money and majesty into the city, in addition to over-the-top galas and krewes, the private fraternal orders that sponsored nearby parades and crowned kings and queens of Mardi Gras. Many krewes were only beginning to racially integrate by 1973. Yet from the Twelfth Night after Christmas to Fat Tuesday in February, New Orleans would be consumed, and the gay community subsumed, in a dream state of masks and feathers and anything goes. For many celebrants, Mardi Gras signified not a pantomime but a culmination of real life, and the French Quarter seemed to savor this fantasia. The nation’s oldest annual gay event, the Fat Monday Luncheon Club, had begun in the Quarter in 1949, while the Krewe of Yuga, New Orleans’s first gay Carnival club (its initials, K.Y., a sly reference to the most popular sexual lubricant of the era), debuted in 1958. A young Stewart Butler, in town with his family, remembered attending his first Mardi Gras with awe and becoming aroused at the sight of the “flambeaux,” or mirrored torches paraded by crews of muscular black men. Such was the spell of the season.33

  By 1972, New Orleans had six gay krewes hosting ticketed balls for private members, with discretion, of course, assured and requests for “no pictures please.”34 The exhilaration of Carnival, with its masked traditions, facilitated the unmasking of otherwise captive aspects of the self, which called into question which one was the truer mask: the pious man or the partier. Alas, the dream of Mardi Gras was fleeting—and ended, always. Ash Wednesday stood as a Catholic roadblock to cut the fun short before Easter Sunday. Bourbon Street attempted to keep a small share of this merriment going year-round, although not always succeeding. Today, in late June, fun was achieved through the bonhomie of Stewart Butler
.

  Stewart held forth at Café Lafitte in Exile with twin “bombshells” on his arms: twenty-year-old Steven Duplantis, Stewart’s “guy Friday,” and thirty-something “baby doll” Alfred Doolittle, Stewart’s steady boyfriend. Stewart had met and bedded Steven Duplantis first, when Steven was eighteen and he drove from Lake Charles to New Orleans for the first time. This was Mardi Gras 1971, and Steven had been accompanied by a few young drag queens from his hometown. They’d all set up a tent on the riverfront parkway, as one could do in this era, but the group had split off and shacked up throughout the first day of partying.35

  Steven was left alone, bereft of companionship and down to his last two dollars at Café Lafitte in Exile. He bought a final drink and resolved to spend the rest of the night in a stinking hot tent. Just then, Stewart Butler, sitting in the back corner of the bar, persuaded a friend to taunt Steven by extinguishing a cigarette in the teen’s drink. When Stewart’s friend did so, Steven became enraged, and the situation escalated. “Well, here comes Butler to save the day,” remembered Steven Duplantis. “He says, ‘Oh, I tell you what, why don’t you come back to the house, and we’ll smoke a joint, and I’ll fix you up all the cocktails you want.’ And I said, ‘Oh thank you, God!’ ” Stewart and Steven became involved physically, even somewhat romantically. But Stewart was in his forties, and Steven was barely an adult. Given their age difference, postcoital conversation could only progress so far.36