Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  “Coroner’s assistants would untangle bodies two at a time,” wrote the Times-Picayune. They took breaks to retch out nearby windows. Prying the stack of seventeen corpses in the corner, and deciding which piece went where, was a horrific task—in fact, a guessing game.5 Firemen and policemen pitched in to help the coroner and his team. They began by clearing the front door and bathroom of bodies and proceeded through the bar area toward Chartres Street, gathering and reassembling body parts on top of the bar. Each carcass, completed as best they could, was then photographed and searched for identifying artifacts—jewelry, trinkets, or pieces of wallet. Each was then zipped in a bag. A fire engine with a sixty-five-foot arm raised and lowered a metal basket, and black rubber sacks descended, one by one. Three Catholic priests turned up on the street in time to offer “conditional absolution” over the bags as they were lowered. They made a sign of the cross in the air more than twenty times.6

  After the priests performed their duties, authorities piled the body bags into ambulances and drove them to the Charity Hospital morgue. Since this was an unconventional destination, drivers radioed back several times to make sure. Generally, victims of a disaster or mass incident went to the public morgue; however, the coroner shrewdly assessed that that facility lacked the space to handle this volume of death. Removing bodies methodically, starting with sections nearest to the front door, resulted in leaving the shriveled remains of Bill Larson exposed in the Chartres Street window for more than four hours, from 8:00 p.m. until after midnight.7 Hundreds of onlookers saw him in that state.

  When Buddy Rasmussen and bar owner Phil Esteve were finally permitted inside, they could barely recognize the place. But they did notice something peculiar. Evidently, even though only police, fire, medical first responders, and news reporters were allowed inside the structure, the night’s earnings had gone missing. “Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recalled Bob McAnear, the former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, the police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” Up Stairs Lounge historian Johnny Townsend, who interviewed Phil Esteve in the 1980s, in part corroborates this account in his Let the Faggots Burn: “Phil Esteve rushed over to the bar that evening but couldn’t go in until the following day. Then, he says, he watched as investigators tore names off of checks and took money from the cash register which they never turned over to him.”8 Esteve is now deceased and unable to speak to these details himself.

  But money was indeed unaccounted for. “Whether it was because it was a gay bar or that insurance would cover it, so it wouldn’t be missed, there are those who would take advantage of the situation,” McAnear contended. “It would be difficult to break open those machines without more than one person being aware.” The night’s monetary haul from the beer bust was gone, not in the safe. Buddy and Phil both felt the pressure to pretend that no other crime, other than the fire, had occurred that Sunday night.9 Besides, if anyone had filed a complaint about such missing funds, it would have been the word of two homosexuals against the officials.

  RONNIE ROSENTHAL KEPT faithful watch over Ricky Everett that night, although neither of them had suffered physical injuries. Pale and faint, Ricky had at times seemed functional in his conversations with the police. Smoke stuck to his clothing, and black ash hid in his hair. As soon as Ricky found his composure, shock would hit him again, and he’d almost collapse in a surge of grief. At 7:00 p.m., Ricky had a bounty of friends. An hour later, so many had vanished. Ricky wasn’t sure which pals, besides pastor Bill Larson and Deacon Mitch Mitchell, he’d never see again.10

  The police told Ricky that if he was up to it, they’d need his help identifying the bodies. Ronnie and Ricky caught a ride in a squad car and wandered down into the Charity Hospital catacombs. The room was cold and quiet but for the tremor of refrigeration equipment. Each numbered corpse was removed from its transport bag and placed on a six-foot-long metal tray.11

  Ricky tried his best to match these bodies with friends he had known hours before. Unfortunately, most faces were melted away. Only three or four were recognizable. Ricky had to examine carefully to notice details like tattoos.12 The coroner’s reports don’t reveal how much Ricky aided this process, but by Monday morning a tentative list of thirteen victim names would be released to the public.13 The roster included Ricky’s friends John Golding, Horace Broussard, and Mitch Mitchell. They were thus outed in death. Many of the injured, forced to show IDs to receive treatment at Charity Hospital, were also named in morning coverage in a story cowritten by the closeted Times-Picayune journalist John LaPlace, who would have agonized over the repercussions of printing surnames and ages.14

  Ricky called his mother from the hospital to let her know that he was alive. “She knew I was going to the bar,” said Ricky, “but she hadn’t seen the TV yet, and so I thought, ‘Oh, I better call her, just in case.’ ” Reports of the bar’s incineration were circulating widely. Though Ricky’s sexuality remained a matter undiscussed, his mother was familiar with men like Buddy from calling the Up Stairs Lounge, and Ricky suspected that some part of her must have guessed his inclinations. Ricky had planned eventually to come out formally, but the fire had forced his hand. Telling his mother what had happened would result in her asking why he frequented such a place. The truth, Ricky felt, would come easiest from him. He dialed her number, and she sounded relieved at first.15

  Afterward, Ricky and Ronnie went to the MCC church, where survivors and friends were gathering for an overnight vigil. Ronnie telephoned his employer in Atlanta. Choosing his words carefully, Ronnie informed the man that he’d be out of town for a few extra days. “I told him that I was in a fire in New Orleans,” Ronnie recalled, “a lot of people died, and I’m here to help out for right now.” His employer didn’t take the news happily, but agreed to his request for extended time off. “I didn’t tell him about it being a gay bar or anything like that,” Ronnie noted. Like most gay men of the time, he wasn’t out to his employer, and avoiding this detail very likely saved him his job.16

  Ronnie then dialed a second number long-distance. He knew so few people in New Orleans. The fire survivors needed more help than he could provide, so he called his pastor, Reverend John Gill of the MCC of Atlanta. “He couldn’t have called his mother in those days because his mother didn’t know he was gay,” explained Dan Bugg, later Ronnie’s partner. Gill’s booming Georgian congregation, with more than two hundred members and a twenty-person gay men’s choir, happened to be holding a “movie night” in their church at that late hour. In Atlanta, a phone rang in the vestry, and the person who answered rushed in to summon the minister. The disturbance drew murmurs, but Reverend Gill could immediately hear the anguish in Ronnie’s voice.17

  STEVEN DUPLANTIS FELT power beneath his feet as his Buick Wildcat purred down the interstate. He was young and handsome, and he had just gotten away with yet another rendezvous off base. Dials glowed on the car stereo. He passed by Lake Charles and didn’t think twice about stopping home. There was no time, in any case.18

  As he sped over a bridge, a newscaster interrupted the music to announce that there had been a fire in the French Quarter. “Oh no!” Steven thought. The music resumed, and anxiety crept in slowly as Steven turned the facts over in his head. He couldn’t shake what that guy had said before Buddy threw him out of the bar: “I’m going to burn this place to the ground.” Had anyone else heard it? Steven had passed the message to Stewart and Alfred, but did they really listen? Five hours into the drive, Steven hit the outskirts of Houston, and another newscast broke in to report that the fire in New Orleans had hit the Up Stairs Lounge, with many dead. Steven’s eyes blurred instantly. He steered to the shoulder to avoid sobbing himself into a highway accident.19

  “That was the hardest drive I’ve ever had to go through, from Houston to San Antonio,” Steven recalled. “I was crying. I didn’t know at the time that I heard this that Stewart and Alf
red had left [the bar].” There was no question in Steven’s mind exactly what had happened. That guy, after being punched to the floor, had gotten up and done exactly what he’d threatened. “I knew for a fact that it was that guy,” Steven insisted. “I knew it was the fire that that guy said he was going to do. That was a given: I never, ever doubted that.”20 Had Stewart and Alfred left before it all went down? Steven replayed their last conversation in his mind, as best as he could remember.

  Steven had told them, “Y’all need to leave here.” Stewart had responded, “Oh, you’re crazy!” But Steven retorted, “Stewart, not this time.” Next, Steven turned to Alfred, and he listened intently, though with a glaze in his eyes. Steven remembered kissing them both and skedaddling down the staircase.21

  Survivor’s guilt was inevitable. Why did he have to abandon them, just then? Steven tried calling Stewart’s house from a pay phone along the highway, but no one answered. He didn’t know how to help. He couldn’t just go to the police with an anonymous tip. His testimony was far too specific. “There was no way I could do it,” said Steven. “I felt bad about not being able to do it. But I knew that if I did that, everything for me would have just stopped, with the military and all that.” The night advanced as Steven drove farther from New Orleans and back to his other life. Any statement to the NOPD, he knew, would make his clandestine trip a matter of record. He was already skirting trouble.22 Steven, despite Stewart’s invitations to share his troubles, had managed to keep a secret from Stewart and Alfred over the weekend. Steven had kept quiet because every trip to New Orleans functioned as respite from his worries. But, in fact, he was under investigation in Texas—he had pushed the fun too far.

  Back in May, something had happened to Steven on the border road at Randolph Air Force Base. Military policemen (MPs) had entrapped him with another man using a common deceptive tactic that involved deploying a military spy, who pretended to be homosexual, against a suspected gay person.23 If a gay serviceman like Steven took the bait, and was drawn into a sexual encounter, MPs would then charge the suspect for criminal sexual behavior.

  Steven’s lure was a strapping, straight-acting officer who had suddenly transferred into his department. The spy, with a face like a porcelain doll, took a sudden interest in his coworker. He and Steven made eyes and flirted and eventually found time alone in a car. “It was a beautiful, star-filled night,” Steven recalled. “Out in the middle of nowhere on the end of the Air Force base in Seguin, Texas. Oh, lord, it was beautiful. Course, all he wanted was a blowjob, and he was good. Oh, I gave it to him.”24

  Early the next morning, Steven received a phone call at his desk. It was his buddy, the closeted Office of Special Investigations (OSI) officer, who asked him pointedly, “What did you do on the perimeter road last night?”25 Steven was taken back. How could anyone have guessed what happened in the dark just hours before? Then Steven stood up and noticed how his admirer, the straight-acting officer, was missing from work. It dawned on him. Steven’s tryst-mate, who willingly accepted the oral gratification, had set him up.

  In military logic, receiving fellatio from another man didn’t make the recipient a suspect; only the giver was the target. Odds are, the spy had neglected to report how he had been fellated to climax. Steven surmised that the guy hadn’t acted out of hate: “It was more like, ‘Okay, well, I can get a promotion for doing this, all right? So I find somebody who’s gay, they’re going to reward me.’ And they would.”26

  “I’m going to have to really work to keep you out of this,” the OSI officer continued, “but, if you’re going to continue, better get out.” Steven knew his friend meant, by “better get out,” better leave the air force. Because this conversation took place on an official telephone line, and could possibly be tapped or overheard, so much else was left unspoken. Later, over beers at a gay bar, the OSI officer made things more explicit. “They set you up,” he told Steven. “There’s somebody on your base that set you up. They’re trying to prove it. They are after you.”27

  As Steven drove that final leg to San Antonio, his friend’s words came back to him, intermixing with the radio announcement about the Up Stairs Lounge as well as that weirdo’s use of the word “burn.” Night then became twilight, finally dawn. Heeding his friend’s warning, Steven earlier that June had submitted a request for transfer to the Louisiana Air National Guard, an air force reserve unit headed by the state governor. “Air Guard don’t care about gays,” Steven explained bluntly. The Vietnam-era draft had ended in early 1973, and Steven could technically do as he wished with his military career. But papers were still pending. The only thing gumming up the works was the signature of his commanding officer. “All that was going on,” recalled Steven. “So that was a really hard weekend.”28

  FAR WEST OF NEW ORLEANS, turmoil marked the emergence of a gay political consciousness in Los Angeles. The Christopher Street West parade, Los Angeles’s annual gay pride march down Hollywood Boulevard, had, as previously mentioned, been called off. The cause was infighting—chiefly, the sparring between parade cofounder Morris Kight and conservative allies of the Mattachine Society, a California-based homophile group, over how to censor content and tame such displays as had defined previous parades.29

  The 1972 Los Angeles pride parade had been a social and moral free-for-all, and the result was some notoriety. Marchers embraced public nudity, and spectators waved banners depicting graphic sexual images. Risqué outfits proliferated in a game of erotic one-upmanship. These boisterous expressions created friction with gay parents and their children, who also attended. The pièce de résistance had been a float called the Cockapillar: a giant, papier-mâché monument to the phallus that stretched, like a Chinese dragon, the length of several cars. The Cockapillar even emitted white fluid onto spectators, forcing media outlets to censor their coverage of the day’s events.30

  These expressions of merriment clashed fundamentally with traditionalist gays who sympathized with the Mattachine Society, an older gay group emphasizing public sobriety, which aimed to present homosexuals as suit-and-tie wearing citizens bearing a reasonable argument for “first-class citizenship.” By contrast, Kight and members of Gay Liberation favored a flagrant revolution that would overturn oppressive institutions. Throughout Kight’s long career as a civil rights crusader, he had lived as an out man and put fellow activists “on notice” that they were dealing with a Gay Liberationist.31

  This squabble over the 1973 parade, a contest between two generations of homosexual advocates, ended in stalemate. Once Kight resigned as parade chairman, the parade committee canceled all plans for events that year. Venomous gay conservatives attempted to blame Los Angeles’s lack of a gay parade squarely on Morris Kight. After the cancellation, Kight received an invitation to serve as grand marshal of New York City’s 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day parade, and he jumped at the opportunity.32

  Similarly, the national consolidation of Gay Liberation remained slow going as hundreds of far-flung organizations, many inspired by the Stonewall Riots, struggled to align politically. The importance of Stonewall as a symbol for gays finding common cause with other gays continued to be debated. A 1973 op-ed in The Advocate, “Stonewall ‘Historic’?,” questioned whether the site of the Stonewall Inn was worthy of memorial status. The Advocate, having expanded from a Los Angeles newsletter to a national newspaper by then, boasted a readership of fewer than 35,000.33 Such was the state of Gay Liberation, where small tribes fought protracted turf wars.

  This enmity could filter to the street level, where many gay men still refused to defend one another from physical assault. At 8:30 p.m. on June 21, 1973, for example, a young gay man in Griffith Park, a popular Los Angeles cruising area, was brutally beaten by three attackers while more than a dozen witnesses stood dumbstruck. One assailant shouted, “We’re gonna kill you, fag,” as he stomped the young man in the face. Cruisers scattered rather than help. “We had the bastards outnumbered four to one,” recalled an anonymous witness to The
Advocate, “and no one had the balls to organize assistance.”34 The paralysis felt by observers was emblematic of a moment in which many gay Americans suffered an oppression so ingrained that they could not identify with others like themselves, even those with whom they were physically intimate. The isolation of the closet had reinforced, for many, that theirs was an individual burden.

  The 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn might have ended in a similar way, just like the Griffith Park beating, had a New Orleans transplant and drag king named Stormé DeLarverie not seen a policeman kick her friend onto the cement of Christopher Street. According to DeLarverie’s account, a cop then said, “Move, faggot.” When the officer shoved her, she decked him in the face and drew blood. This punch represented a breach of historic protocol. Police had been a common sight at the Stonewall Inn after all. “The cops would come in and flirt with the drag queens at the bar and then take their take,” recalled Brendan Flaherty, who was an eighteen-year-old coat-check boy at the Stonewall Inn in that era, referring to the payoff arrangement police had with the bar’s owners.35

  Gays, much like blacks in the South, were expected to accept their place and never fight the police, not to mention the mobsters running the bar as an illegal gambling front. “There were people who were beat up,” admitted Flaherty. “But they were beat up by people who owned the Stonewall, and there was some condescension like that. You could feel the hostility. Like, these men were making money off of people that they detested.” One’s favorite gay bar was inevitably a dangerous setting. Flaherty recalled a friend, a drag queen known as Barbara Eden, remarking of a line outside Stonewall: “Can you imagine standing in line to go inside a concentration camp?”36