According to gay lore, DeLarverie’s very punch outside the Stonewall Inn sparked a revolt against the New York Police Department in what became a violent demonstration. It drew hundreds of supporters and lasted for several days. Sundry groups, representing the bar’s fractured culture, rallied in defiance of their persecutors.37 The anger that had ignited the Stonewall Inn differed markedly from the camaraderie of the Up Stairs Lounge, whose patrons were more content and wished to have fun in their out-of-the-way refuge, until that refuge was obliterated.
ON THE PHONE to Atlanta, Ronnie Rosenthal spoke frantically to his pastor, Reverend John Gill.38 The two were close, and Ronnie broke down as he recalled details.
Dozens of gay men had burned, Ronnie related, in a blaze that appeared intentional. People had only seconds to get out, though many didn’t. Gill listened without interrupting. Once Ronnie finished, the pastor hurried back into the church hall and announced to the MCC of Atlanta that a disaster had befallen their gay brethren in New Orleans. All joined hands in a communal prayer. But Gill couldn’t hazard what to do next. He had never confronted such a catastrophic situation as a regional leader for the MCC, a role that had broadened his pastoral duties beyond Atlanta to gay churches across the Deep South.39
He picked up the phone again and dialed the only man he knew with such expertise, calling upon the founder and leader of his church, his friend and mentor Reverend Troy Perry. He had to try several times. Then, realizing the time difference between Atlanta and Los Angeles, Gill realized that Perry wouldn’t be home because it was still gay pride Sunday in California.40
THOUSANDS GATHERED WITH the MCC of Los Angeles at Santa Monica State Beach. Waves crashed, and gay lovers chased each other in the surf. Some strummed guitars and sang songs by a campfire. Troy Perry’s impromptu “free wiener roast,” it seemed, had succeeded in restoring a semblance of goodwill.41 Attendees recall men suggestively licking ice cream cones or chomping on hot dogs. There would be no Christopher Street West–sponsored parade this year, but Perry gazed at the men and felt some modicum of gay pride.
He arrived home around midnight to find a note thumbtacked to his door. “Where are you?” it read. “They had a fire in New Orleans. People from all over the country are trying to get in touch.” The phone rang, as if on cue, as Perry entered his living room. It was John Gill, his pupil: “Troy, at last! I’m about to catch a plane to Louisiana.” Gill told him what he knew, mentioning the fire was at “a place called the Up Stairs.” Perry froze, remembering a visit he’d paid to that very bar a few months before. Indeed, he had stopped in New Orleans to support the interim MCC pastor there, Bill Larson. Perry could picture the red interior of the bar, where congregants had brought him after some good Sunday “fellowship.”42
“Oh, God!” Perry exclaimed. This was only the latest in a spate of fires—often deemed “of suspicious origin”—of MCC buildings around the country. First, the mother church for the MCC of Los Angeles had been burned to its foundations in late January, with arson suspected. In March, the MCC in Nashville had gone up in flames, with arson again a possibility. The Up Stairs Lounge, Perry figured, would make the third such location to vanish since the New Year. He recalled how the Up Stairs Lounge had held frequent prayer meetings. Throughout 1972, the MCC’s national newsletter In Unity had listed 604 Iberville, the bar’s street address, as the place to send church mail.43
For Perry, the inspection of such burnt-out rubble, the causes of which “couldn’t be determined,” was becoming a regular task. He collected his emotions and listened to John Gill, but in his head he was already running with the presumption that the Up Stairs Lounge fire was yet another arson.44
“Can you meet me in New Orleans?” Gill asked.
“I’m on the first available flight,” Perry answered.45
Perry called Delta Airlines to reserve a seat for a morning flight and packed his bags. When he couldn’t sleep, he picked up the phone and started dialing. He phoned one of his contacts at the Los Angeles Times, who assured him that the paper was covering the tragedy.46
By 1973, Troy Perry was no stranger to the press. He had been featured and quoted in at least two nationally reported stories: “Homosexuals in Revolt,” which appeared in Life magazine, and “The Militant Homosexual,” for Newsweek. That kind of visibility made him an anomaly among gays, who would mostly equate a call from a journalist with a visit from the Grim Reaper. Perry was one of the few homosexual Americans unafraid of his name and picture appearing in print. He dialed The New York Times after The Advocate, aware that sunlight would soon reach the Eastern Seaboard. He called through the night, alerting those on his Rolodex of the crisis in New Orleans.47
Perry tried his ally Morris Kight at home. Then, remembering the rigmarole with Kight and New York City, he attempted to track him down on the East Coast. In Manhattan, the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade had been a marked success. Parade master of ceremonies Vito Russo introduced Morris Kight to New Yorkers as “the dean of the Gay Liberation movement, the silver thread which stretches from L.A. to New York.” Kight had taken the podium and brought greetings from Advocate publisher Dick Michaels and Reverend Troy Perry. In a stirring speech, Kight memorialized dead brothers and sisters of the gay struggle and cried out, “Never again, never again can they take our children, our lives, our houses, or deny us a job.” Feeling celebratory, Kight pulled an all-nighter at gay bars across town. Around five in the morning, he headed back to the apartment of fellow gay activist Morty Manford in Greenwich Village.48
Marty Manford’s work with the Gay Activists Alliance had led to coordination and outreach between Manhattan’s gay community and the West Coast, as well as the South. The twenty-two-year-old New Yorker had been present at the Stonewall Riots and the gay student protests at Columbia University in 1968. Manford was also by then no stranger to conservative forces attempting to beat back any political display. In April 1972, while protesting an event at the New York Hilton, Manford had been assaulted by Uniformed Firefighters Association President Michael J. Maye.49
In an attack witnessed by no fewer than four New York City officials, Maye had kicked and shoved Manford onto a downward-moving escalator, where Maye then stepped onto Manford’s groin and ground his boot heel several times. Manford subsequently had filed assault charges against Maye, but a local criminal court judge had thrown out the case before it reached a jury, acquitting Maye due to “variances, incongruities, differences” in the brave testimonies of city officials who came forward to testify against him. Manford had called the decision “an affront to the American principle of equal application under the law.”50
Manford, by serendipity, was the person Troy Perry reached on the phone while attempting to contact Morris Kight. When Kight returned to the apartment, it was Manford who delivered the news about the Up Stairs Lounge. Kight was due back in Los Angeles that evening, but he agreed to change his plans. “I used my airline ticket that took me to New York, which had been contributed by friends … to bring me and Morty Manford to New Orleans,” Kight explained to The Advocate. “We had $6 left when we got there.”51 Thus, in a roundabout way, Ronnie Rosenthal’s call to John Gill for aid had alerted a national network.
Sympathetic publications were now on alert, and prominent leaders from some of the most visible gay organizations in the United States—Troy Perry, Morris Kight and Morty Manford—were en route. Such a response was unprecedented. Before this horrible fire, local gay populations had each been responsible for advocacy in their respective turfs, with little overlap. But that was about to change, with leaders from across the United States wanting to help. Activists agreed to rendezvous in the afternoon at the Marriott on Canal Street.52 The organizers of Gay Liberation were set to descend on New Orleans—a city with no visible gay leadership, little taste for activism, and less experience with modern gay politics.
SOMETIME IN THE wee hours of Monday, New Orleans police detectives Charles Schlosser and Sam Gebbia detained David Dubose
, an eighteen-year-old Up Stairs Lounge patron. Police had located Dubose at the Golden Slipper Lounge on Rampart Street, precisely where James Smith had dropped him following their romantic rendezvous at Smith’s apartment. Dubose admitted to throwing beer mugs at the Up Stairs Lounge, and the detectives brought him in for questioning. At New Orleans Police Department headquarters—a bunkerlike building on South Broad Avenue, located near the criminal courthouse—officers interrogated their suspect.53
Speaking without a lawyer, the young interviewee broke down and confessed his involvement in setting the Up Stairs Lounge fire. For a brief moment, Schlosser and Gebbia thought they had Dubose on the hook for the crime of arson and many more cases of involuntary manslaughter. They had an admission from a chief suspect, case closed. Something, however, must have sobered in Dubose before he signed a written confession, because the eighteen-year-old then recanted, denying that he was aware of or had played any part in the deadly fire.54
Having verbally confessed but then denied his confession, Dubose placed himself in a tenuous position. Police administered a polygraph test to clarify the matter, and the results showed conclusively that Dubose “was telling the truth in that he had not set the fire or brought any gasoline to the Up Stairs Lounge.” In their report, the detectives noted that no other evidence, besides his being ejected from the bar, existed to implicate the teenager in the crime. With no probable cause to hold Dubose, they released him. Later, the NOPD visited the Walgreens on Iberville and interviewed the cashier Claudine Rigaud about the gay man with shaking hands who’d angrily purchased the medium-size bottle of lighter fluid, because the smallest size was sold out. Her description of a male in his midtwenties did not match David Dubose.55
REVEREND JOHN GILL’S plane from Atlanta touched down in the Big Easy shortly before dawn. Passing a newsstand, Gill scanned the early editions and saw headlines about the Up Stairs Lounge. He dashed to a cab and headed toward a totally unfathomable situation.56
That Monday began like any other day in New Orleans. Streetcars rolled down St. Charles Avenue, hauling commuters and the odd tourist. Workers lit industrial boilers at the Jax Brewery. Twenty-four-hour bars57—the mainstay of a city with an altogether different relationship to alcohol than most—flipped off their fluorescent signs and opened their doors for the pre-work rush.
There were no top-of-the-morning press conferences from city officials to discuss the previous night’s calamity. Winston Lill, director of public relations for City Hall, was preoccupied with plans for his daughter’s wedding at the Trinity Episcopal Church the next Saturday. Announcements and pictures had been posted in the Times-Picayune, and Lill described himself, in a letter to a local bank executive, as “worn out, broke, and emotionally exhausted.”58 Journalists accepted this distraction and knew to lay off him. Such was their esprit de corps.
Mayor Moon Landrieu, Lill’s boss, was out of town. Subordinates knew to treat that time away as sacrosanct. The mayor was not to be roped into a local mess. And New Orleans residents weren’t rushing to Charity Hospital to donate blood for the fifteen injured at the Up Stairs Lounge in the same manner that crowds had overrun the facility that January to provide blood for thirteen wounded following a disaster called the “Howard Johnson’s sniper incident.”59 The straight world, which had momentarily gazed into the abyss, regained an air of detachment.
Reverend John Gill proceeded to the MCC church. He reached the Creole cottage on Magazine Street a little before 6:30 a.m. From the rectory, he phoned The Advocate in Los Angeles. Gill put Lucien Baril, a lay leader of the congregation, on the line and introduced him as the man who would be “basically taking over leadership of this church.” The boyish-looking Baril, who wrote under the name Thomas L. Baril, gave Gill the impression of being a long-standing member of the flock, although, in truth, he had been an MCC member for only a few months. Baril reiterated to The Advocate how “I will be worship coordinator … on John Gill’s recommendation, waiting for confirmation from Reverend Troy Perry.” Apparently, upon hearing through the grapevine of the fire and pastor Bill Larson’s death, Baril had seized the moment by packing a bag and moving into Bill Larson’s rectory—claiming that he had been living there all the while, with “Rev. Larson, myself and my lover,” as a renter.60
STEWART BUTLER, WHO wasn’t out with coworkers at the engineering firm where he worked, showed up at the office that morning and attempted to conceal his sorrow with busywork. “It was a hard, hard thing to do and not show any reaction,” Stewart recalled. News reports on the fire came hourly, with likely names of the dead. “Everybody in the office is fucking talking about it,” recalled Steven Duplantis. “And Stewart’s got to listen to it like he doesn’t know nothing about it.”61
Meanwhile, Steven himself had made it back to Randolph Air Force Base and dashed into the office tower where he worked. Although his uniform was impeccably clean, he had not had time to shower. Fortunately, no one at the base had heard about the Up Stairs Lounge yet, so he had nothing but private thoughts to plague him. “That was a hell day,” he recalled. When Steven finally got back to his barracks, he made the phone call he dreaded. Stewart picked up, and Steven bawled into the receiver. He started apologizing before Stewart could even understand what for. Steven reiterated what he had heard out of the mouth of that guy, who’d been ejected by Buddy Rasmussen and Hugh Cooley right before he left for Texas.62
Then Steven tried to explain to Stewart the mitigating circumstances in his life, with the May setup and his commanding officer possessing the power to deny his transfer and commence a court-martial for a sex crime. No one could catch wind, Steven told Stewart, of his being in a New Orleans gay bar on the night of June 24. “Stewart begged me to come back over and talk to the police,” recalled Steven. Steven cried all the more: “I said, ‘Stewart, if I do that, my military is finished.’ ”63
HENRY KUBICKI OPENED his eyes to another day. He firmly believed that his universe remained fundamentally unchanged. The night before, Henry had been exhausted when he finished his shift at the Marriott. He used the employee exit and sprinted to catch the St. Charles streetcar home. This route had caused him to bypass the fire scene at the corner of Iberville and Chartres. “I still had no idea what was going on,” Henry recalled. Ricky Everett hadn’t been home when Henry reached the apartment, but Henry had just assumed that his roommate must still be “trolling the bars” with Ronnie Rosenthal, the out-of-towner.64
So Henry casually readied himself for work. He showered and shaved. Nothing could prepare him for what happened as he walked to a newsstand for the morning paper. Henry read and reread the headline “Twenty-Nine Killed in Quarter Blaze,” emblazoned on the front page of the Times-Picayune. The words stung. Accompanying the text was a picture of Rusty Quinton wiping ash from his face.65
That image of his friend, reified in black and white, assaulted him. Henry wandered home in a daze. He sobbed alone with his coffee and eggs. Even if he could help, he didn’t know how. Henry grabbed for the telephone, which Ricky had installed about a week before to talk to boyfriends. Henry’s income was too meager to pay for even a portion of a phone bill, and so the phone was exclusively for Ricky’s use. But the emergency situation warranted a breach of roommate etiquette. Henry phoned the MCC church. The line was busy. He dialed another number. “I couldn’t find Courtney Craighead, cause he was working, or he died,” recalled Henry. “I couldn’t get ahold of Ricky Everett. I couldn’t get ahold of Bill Larson. I couldn’t get ahold of Mitch Mitchell.”66
Panic mounted with each failed attempt. Henry knew that he couldn’t spend all day on the phone. He had to leave for work within minutes, to punch his time card or lose his only source of income. Hoping that Ricky wasn’t dead, Henry left a frantic note for his roommate to call him at the Marriott immediately. He dabbed his face and tried to put himself back together as he threw on his work uniform. Though his hands were shaking, Henry knew that, as a dishwasher, he wouldn’t be able to get time off today, no ma
tter the circumstances.67
So Henry Kubicki, Steven Duplantis, and Stewart Butler all clocked into work that Monday. They kept their “straight faces” intact and minimized chitchat, with Stewart slumped at a desk, Steven punching digits into a military computer, and Henry lost at a kitchen sink. Most painfully, Stewart and Henry were forced to mask their emotions as coworkers joked crassly about the fire—they couldn’t risk being outed by association.68
CHAPTER 7
Liberation Descends
Monday Morning,
June 25, 1973
As the week began, media establishments grappled with how to report a calamity involving a community that wasn’t supposed to exist. The sexual “otherness” of the Up Stairs Lounge victims flummoxed editors and journalists, challenging a taboo about whether to hide or include homosexuality as a story element and then what precise language to use. Journalists struggled to perform their due diligence in reporting the high death count, even as articles lit up newswires and traveled across oceans, as far as The Irish Times in Dublin, The Times in London, the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.1
Some publications chose to play it safe by avoiding all mention of homosexuality. The Oregonian in Portland, the State-Times in Baton Rouge, and The Times in London each declined to do so. Egregiously, the Times-Picayune did not print the word “homosexual” in any of the three front-page stories on the Up Stairs Lounge it ran in its Monday morning edition. “The Times-Picayune was a very, very conservative paper, both politically and in terms of how it approached things,” noted Clancy DuBos, who was interning there that summer. “They didn’t take risks at all, and, it [the word “homosexuality”] should not have been a risky thing for them, but they would have seen that as taking a risk at the time or just something that they don’t do.”2
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