Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  After graduating from high school, Steven enlisted in the air force in 1972 and was stationed at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. He knowingly entered the service as a gay man. “I went through basic training,” he recalled. “I went through computer training in Biloxi, Mississippi. The whole time, I kept my ‘straight face.’ ” Steven knew that the unmasking of his “straight face,” the detection of his inner world, would lead to a dishonorable discharge and his blacklisting from countless civilian careers. Distance and fear, however, couldn’t fully extinguish Steven’s desire for fun. Once a month, sometimes more, Steven would sneak out of his military barracks and drive his 1969 Buick Wildcat the eight hours across Texas and Louisiana to Stewart’s house. With a four-barrel, 440 engine, the car could eviscerate the highway with a top speed of 140 mph. One time, Steven got pulled over in Bienville, Louisiana, at three in the morning, but he avoided a speeding citation by giving the cop a blowjob.37

  New Orleans had long been a sexual oasis for members of the armed forces like Steven. As a port city, like San Francisco or New York—where generations of “undesirably discharged” homosexuals settled after being kicked off transport ships—New Orleans boasted a lineage of military men on leave seeking gay sex. In fact, Tennessee Williams’s first homosexual encounter was with a G.I. in New Orleans.38 In 1966, W. F. Charles of the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board wrote the proprietor of Café Lafitte in Exile: “Inspection reports presented to the Board indicate that your establishment is a known hangout for persons of undesirable character.” This letter had the reverse of its intended effect. Tickled instead of intimidated, the owners of the bar framed the letter and put it on display near the front door.39

  Nothing could keep Steven from drinking with Stewart that Sunday. Unbeknownst to them, their revels coincided with national gay pride celebrations—observed in different ways across American cities since the uprising at the Stonewall Inn four years before, when homosexuals had resisted police and demanded visibility. That Saturday in 1973, gay and lesbian New Yorkers had marched from Central Park through midtown Manhattan to Washington Square, evidence that a gay political revolution was very much on the horizon. According to reports in The New York Times, police barricades stretched fifteen blocks to contain gay revelers, with thousands chanting in unison, “Out of the closets and into the streets!” These festivities marked the fourth annual “Christopher Street Liberation Day” parade to commemorate Stonewall.40

  The political ferment was also evident in San Francisco, where “Gay Freedom Day” had attracted more than forty thousand people. In Chicago, three thousand marchers braved a heat wave to parade from the Loop to Lincoln Park. Ripples of Stonewall were also visible in Los Angeles, though the Christopher Street West association’s parade had been canceled due to infighting among gay groups, but Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles had stepped in to preserve the gay pride sentiment.41

  Few American cities with sizable gay populations could escape the fervor set off by Stonewall, but New Orleans had managed to do so. Many New Orleanians hadn’t even heard of the Stonewall Inn or, if they had, questioned the relevance of “pride” to lives they knew and enjoyed. At Café Lafitte in Exile, gays and lesbians celebrated their “pride weekend” rather mutely, if at all, with obligatory cocktails. There would be no marches in the streets, no posters, and certainly no speeches. As Gay Orleanians well knew, their alternate system balanced on a knife edge and wasn’t always foolproof. Police had raided a gay Mardi Gras ball for the Krewe of Yuga eleven years before, in 1962, and arrested ninety-six for “disturbing the peace.”42

  Still, bars like Café Lafitte in Exile were places where gay men like Stewart Butler could cut loose with a modicum of safety. “Modicum” was the key word, as fraternities from Tulane University were still said to practice their longstanding tradition of “rolling a queer.” These college boys would “roll” a gay man by luring him from a gay bar, beating him senseless, and stealing his wallet.43 Hunting gays in this way offered fraternity brothers safeguards from getting into trouble, in that one’s prey possessed little means of recourse. The assault and theft would go unreported because doing so would implicate the victim in a sex crime.

  Even though fifteen years had passed, the cautionary tale of Fernando Rios lingered in memory. A Mexican tour guide visiting New Orleans, Rios had been lured by Tulane student John Farrell from Café Lafitte in Exile in 1958. Farrell and two friends then ambushed and attacked Rios in a secluded walkway next to St. Louis Cathedral. In a horrific scene, Rios’s echoing whimpers went unheard, even by priests in the rectory mere steps away. Rios lay bleeding until about 6:00 a.m. the next morning, when he was found, and he died at the hospital. Subsequently, the undergraduates beat the murder rap with high-priced attorneys, who argued that Rios’s cranium was “egg-shell” thin, too weak in constitution for an attacker to suspect it would crack from a pummeling. Legal notes indicate how attorneys questioned the coroner about the hormonal implications of an “egg-shell” cranium or “anything else abnormal about [the] body to suggest to show homosexuality.”44

  This bit of convoluted logic—using an autopsy to make a character insinuation—appealed to the jury, which acquitted these students and served as broader confirmation that homosexuals, when exposed to the light of justice, lost their basic inalienable rights. But, alas, the danger of the Quarter remained part of its allure. New York Times reporter Roy Reed called it “an enchantress who always keeps her secrets” in a 1972 travel piece. And the Vieux Carré continued to be a beacon for celebrants like Stewart Butler and Steven Duplantis. After each of his New Orleans soirees, Steven needed to be back at his base in Texas on Monday morning. He recalls changing from his street clothes into military dress while driving down the highway. He would report bleary-eyed at 7:30 a.m. and do his utmost to pass as the masculine norm.45

  Once he had settled into this arrangement, Steven began exploring gay life in Texas, but he did so cautiously, never bringing any identification to bars in case of a police raid. On one of these excursions, Steven accidentally befriended an Office of Special Investigations (OSI) officer from the air force investigating homosexual cases. Introduced by a mutual friend, the man had sat and flirted with Steven for several hours. The OSI inquisitor eventually divulged that he was homosexual himself and used his position to provide advance warning of raids and investigations to gay friends like Steven. For months now, the eight hours between New Orleans and San Antonio put time and miles between Steven’s two lives, but Steven felt the distance closing.46

  Occasionally that Sunday, as Stewart and Steven laughed and clinked their glasses, Steven’s eyes would wander off vacantly, and Stewart had to ask what was wrong. Nothing, Steven would respond, flashing a grin, but Stewart surmised that something weighed on him. Starting during Mardi Gras 1972, Stewart and Steven had entered more of a “friends who drink together sleep together” phase of their relationship, but they still teamed up to lure unsuspecting thirds. That’s how they met Alfred Doolittle.47

  It had rained torrentially during much of February 1972, more than any other Mardi Gras in decades. The typical 4:00 p.m. drizzle of “holy water” in New Orleans had turned that year into an unrelenting tempest. Stewart and Steven had already ducked into Gertrude’s, a gay bar located a few doors down from the Up Stairs Lounge. They noticed Alfred, whom they took to be a baby-faced hustler, shivering outside. “He’s standing in the door out in the rain sopping wet, crying,” remembered Steven. “I said, ‘Stewart, look at that poor boy.’ He was beautiful.” Alfred had chin-length dark hair that fell in his face. He reminded Stewart of the comic strip character Prince Valiant. Alfred’s cherry-red lips matched his maroon shirt, the polyester so wet it was nearly see-through. Stewart went out and cajoled Alfred into joining their table.48

  They hit it off, and the group soon headed for a second stop at Café Lafitte in Exile, where the flirting escalated. A photo taken at that bar that night shows Alfred hugg
ing Stewart from behind. In the picture, Alfred is catching Stewart off guard as he snuggles his nose into Stewart’s ear. If Alfred looks smitten, Stewart looks to be lovesick, his eyes closed. He’s leaning back into Alfred’s embrace with a cigarette dangling from his lips. “He came onto me like gangbusters,” recalled Stewart. “On the way to the car, he says, ‘Well, you’ll probably throw me out tomorrow like everybody else does.’ ” The next morning, Steven drove back to San Antonio, and Alfred stuck around with Stewart for the rest of the day. “During the following months, it became obvious that oh no, that was it!” said Steven. “Alfred’s going to be there forever.”49

  Alfred Doolittle, as it turned out, wasn’t so clueless as he first appeared. He wasn’t even a hustler. As a trust-fund recipient in his thirties with mental health difficulties, “Alfred was a little bit screwy in the head,” agreed Stewart. “People would say, ‘What’s his diagnosis?’ And I would say, ‘All of the above.’ ” Alfred was heir to a family fortune built on the ambitions of James “Jimmy” Doolittle, a celebrated World War II hero. He had grown up attending General Doolittle’s military balls with the rest of the family and felt the pressure of regimentation crash against his wild sexuality. Now an outcast from his San Francisco–based upper-class family, and to their chagrin, Alfred received regular checks from his trust fund, which he squandered on books, boys, and booze, among other indulgences. Fortunately for Alfred, Stewart was a man without the usual moral or sexual hang-ups. Stewart never wanted the party—or, in fact, the orgy—to end. He craved more than a little eccentricity in his bed, and he sensed in Alfred not just a romantic prospect but also, he admits, a financial sponsor.50

  But Stewart’s life had always muddled the pragmatic and the romantic. Stewart had a unique upbringing—spending his formative adolescent years at the National Leprosarium, a self-contained medical campus in Carville, Louisiana, for individuals suffering from leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease). Carville, as it was nicknamed, was one of only two lazar houses—isolation facilities for patients with leprosy—in the United States. Between 1942 and 1949, Stewart’s father worked at this remote sanatorium as a maintenance and supply officer. Thus, from the ages of eleven through eighteen, Stewart and his family resided on the hospital campus, living across a dividing line that quarantined the patients away from staff and their families.51

  Stewart remembered how the place operated as a kind of happy prison. Some of his friends, children suffering from disease on the “patient side,” were abandoned by their parents and assigned surrogates. They’d receive little access to education. Stewart, on the other hand, had attended a special school for the children of Carville staff. Guards patrolled patient corridors from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., when gates to the patient buildings were closed and locked. But Stewart always ran free of those restrictions. Even when he was young, Stewart possessed a demeanor that foreshadowed some degree of isolation in his uniqueness—in the form of his budding attraction to other boys, some of whom were ill. Stewart saw the centuries-old stigma, which predated biblical accounts of lepers, at work in various ways in front of him. These people, thought to be highly contagious in a millennia-long misunderstanding of the slow-spreading illness, were society’s untouchables. More than sympathizing with Carville patients, he related to them. What if anyone discovered his disorder? His family observed Catholic mass, and communion at the hospital church was always served from separate chalices for the diseased and the well.52 The hypocrisy was patent and painful.

  In fact, as a teenager, Stewart zoned in on those disparities and used them to reject organized belief systems. A quarter century later, not even the MCC of New Orleans, with its gay-affirming message, could coax Stewart back to Christianity. He was a man of strong principles but largely without creed. After what he’d witnessed, moral purity seemed sanctimonious. So, as an adult in his forties, Stewart had no qualms taking charge of Alfred’s trust-fund checks and ensuring that the money lasted for the both of them. After a few months, the Doolittle family reached out to Stewart with a supportive letter, saying that they were impressed with how he’d managed Alfred’s affairs. “They knew that if Alfred had his way, in ten years he’d be out of money,” explained Steven Duplantis. Although Stewart didn’t believe in monogamy, Alfred didn’t either, and so their union blossomed—together, and with Steven, and with other hookups and runaways whom they unofficially adopted.53

  In their couplehood, Stewart continued his work as a draftsman at an engineering firm, where he wasn’t open about his sexuality, while Alfred seemed to occupy his time decorating their apartment and cheerfully writing letters to world leaders. The relationship of Steven, Stewart, and Alfred had deepened into a genuine ménage à trois by the summer of 1973, and the trio would sleep in the same bed on weekends when Steven visited. And they seemed to be having a proverbial ball that Sunday, Steven’s small bouts of silence notwithstanding. Steven would soon have to leave for his long drive back to San Antonio, but Stewart suggested that they stop at the beer bust for one last drink.54

  CHAPTER 4

  United We Stand

  Twilight

  Adam Fontenot was visibly sauced. Having imbibed hard liquor for more than five hours without a bite to eat, Adam took on the role of a resident lush at the Up Stairs Lounge. He was, witnesses recall, able to giggle and nod in agreement with a speaker’s words but unable to participate more in the conversation. Nor did his compromised balance enable him to stand or move much from his bar stool. Buddy Rasmussen was busy, if also slightly annoyed with his lover. He was accustomed to seeing Adam in such a stupor, but he also felt partially responsible for serving him too many drinks this afternoon.1

  Buddy and his busboy, Rusty Quinton, had their hands full tending to the crowds, facing the ceaseless call for pitchers and mugs, and they soon forgot Adam. The beer bust was in full swing, with ninety or so patrons laughing and carousing on a carefree Sunday evening. Some patrons needed babysitting more than others. Plus, those not satisfied by bottomless beer were placing drink orders that needed to be filled. During hectic hours at the Up Stairs Lounge, one had to shout drink orders to Buddy, but they needed to be simple. Anything beyond a rum and Coke, a Bloody Mary, or a Cape Cod (vodka, cranberry juice, and lime juice) would be laughed off.2

  Nursing a drink, Steven Duplantis ran his eyes over the bodies around him, looking for a new squeeze. Prospects abounded, many in a condition that made them amenable to a pickup line. Steven tended to drink straight rum, as did many in the armed forces. Stewart and Alfred drank whatever and whenever the fancy struck them, but they usually sprang for vodka. Above their heads, a haze of cigarette smoke hung in bilious clouds that wafted just below the ceiling tiles. Window units pulsed with air conditioning, and Buddy tried to preserve the coolness by shouting “close the door” whenever patrons entered. Coins jangled in pockets or rolled across the bar, as many paid the beer bust fare in change.3

  It felt like everyone was at the Lounge tonight. Robert Vanlangendonck, a newbie, wore gold-rimmed glasses and introduced himself warily as Bob Vann. Maybe he was closeted, some guessed. He used the nickname to protect a corporate job at Shell Oil. Vanlangendonck’s friend Jim Hambrick, a toupee-wearing regular who looked more than a few decades Robert’s senior, had provided a ride to the French Quarter and was ordering drinks. Seeing a crowd form at the bar, Hugh Cooley agreed to pitch in a few hours early as a second busboy for Buddy. The MCC crew arrived in trickles: Deacon Courtney Craighead, around 5:00 p.m.; Deacon Mitch Mitchell with Horace after they’d dropped the kids off at the movies; and Pastor Bill Larson and the rest from the Fatted Calf. Witnesses recalled how they all looked primed for fun.4

  Ricky Everett, with out-of-towner Ronnie Rosenthal, snagged a table in the dance area so that they could talk with fewer interruptions. In an era when televisions had fewer than eight channels, bars were forums where people commonly struck up banter easily with strangers. “I just never could sit still in a bar,” explained Ricky. “I was too hyper.
I would have a cocktail and, if I was not having a conversation, then I’d drift off to another bar.” Bartenders would often serve as conduits by making quick introductions. Ricky called Buddy Rasmussen a renowned “promoter” of dialogue, capable of juggling multiple exchanges and a telephone conversation at once. Buddy’s talents worked to Ricky’s advantage. Ricky’s mother, who lived across the river, was known to call the Up Stairs Lounge with messages. As a self-confessed “mama’s boy,” Ricky was still in and out of the family home as a tenant, and his mother insisted that Ricky give her a place to call when he was out, in case of emergencies. Despite all the shenanigans surrounding him in the bar, Buddy was known to play it cool when the phone rang. He kept people’s cover. One time when Ricky was out barhopping, Ricky felt a tug on the shoulder from a cute stranger—just over from the Lounge—who leaned in and whispered a message from Buddy Rasmussen: Call your momma, Ricky.5

  Today, Ricky relaxed in a nook with Ronnie. Closer to the bar, Luther Boggs leaned on Jeanne Gosnell, his best friend and occasional beard—a female companion used as a ruse to conceal one’s homosexuality. They sat near the couple Reggie Adams and Regina and the inebriated Adam Fontenot. Perry Waters, the gay dentist, joked with a group. Was that sweet-voiced Francis Dufrene in from Harahan? Dufrene was known to catch two buses from the suburbs to reach the bar. He lived for these nights. And there was Willie Inez Warren, a gay mother “hen,” and her two “gay for pay” sons, the part-time hustlers Eddie and James; they were considered shabby but honest folk, always off duty at the beer bust.6

  Worlds inevitably intermixed. Stewart Butler chatted with Horace Broussard, Mitch Mitchell’s lover and Stewart’s regular barber. “That’s where I’d make a barber appointment,” recalled Stewart. “I’d just made an appointment with him that night.” Jason Guidry, sometimes called the “bar dingbat,” was present as well (Guidry was a very common surname in Louisiana, and Jason was no relation to the hustler Mark Allen Guidry). The place seemed to darken a bit toward the grand piano in the corner, which was lit up to provide a stage for performers. Some of the windows on the Chartres Street side were shuttered to accentuate the feeling of privacy. Patrons like John Golding, who’d recently celebrated twenty-five years of marriage to his wife, appreciated these precautions.7