Tinderbox

  Journalist John LaPlace, DuBos’s mentor at the Picayune, wrote two Up Stairs Lounge stories but failed to disclose to readers that he frequented the Lounge while making his regular rounds through gay establishments in the Quarter. Such information would have revealed his status in the closet and endangered his career, and so he concealed his personal connection to the victims as he covered the story dutifully and sympathetically, though occasionally outing men and pretending that his subjects were not also his friends.3

  Some publications relied on euphemistic language to convey the nature of the bar in question. For example, the front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, “Twenty-Nine Die in Bar Fire,” relied heavily on a dispatch from the Associated Press newswire, which had avoided using the word “homosexual.” Instead, the Los Angeles Times called the Up Stairs Lounge “a popular place on Sundays,” which left open the anachronistic suggestion that its vigorous business on the Lord’s day might attract a clientele at odds with the Christian faithful. In other words, “a popular place on Sundays” provided a means for the conservative reader to suspect that the bar was less than reputable. The same phrase “a popular place on Sundays” also appeared in the Long Island newspaper Newsday and the Chicago Tribune.4

  Only a few publications elected to print the then-controversial word. With Roy Reed’s special report, entitled “Flash Fire in New Orleans Kills at Least Thirty-Two in Bar,” The New York Times joined The Washington Post as the only major newspapers to convey the bar’s “homosexual” clientele that morning. Through Reed’s story, the Times also became the only paper outside the state of Louisiana to assign a reporter to the unfolding incident. Other major-market publications relied on commercial newswire services—printing articles directly from the Associated Press or UPI under contractual agreement, which was common practice for smaller publications with limited budgets but more questionable for publications with resources for national reporting like the Chicago Tribune. By contrast, just seven months earlier, when a fire claimed the lives of two men and four women—whose sexualities weren’t in question—at the Rault Center in New Orleans, the Illinois newspaper had found the budget to send staff to Louisiana for original reporting.5

  This time, on June 25, 1973, the lead story in the Tribune, entitled “Twenty-Nine Die in New Orleans Fire,” knitted together dispatches from multiple newswires to deliver an account of the Up Stairs Lounge blaze that included no unique quotations or enterprising coverage. At the time, the Tribune was known to be conservative, and it had barely covered Chicago’s own flourishing homosexual community. For example, the city’s first gay pride parade, in 1970, had received just three inches of text on the paper’s twenty-seventh page.6

  There was a certain distaste in newsrooms across the United States when dealing with the topic of homosexuality. Even in Roy Reed’s report in The New York Times, the single mention—“A neighboring bartender said the place was frequented by homosexuals,” a sentence that sounds innocuous today—must have resounded negatively with his editors. According to former Times journalists Jeff Schmalz and Russell King, most gay and lesbian journalists in the Times newsroom were deeply closeted in the early 1970s. Managing editor A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal was known to intimidate reporters covering the homosexual community. “We’d done a piece about a gay cruise on the cover of the travel section; there was a lot of shouting about it,” Schmalz told The Advocate in 1992. “Abe thought it was a total mistake, and that we never should have done it. And we’d used the word gay. He said we could never use that word again.” In defense of the Times, its coverage of the Up Stairs Lounge was far more exhaustive than its coverage of the Stonewall Riots in its own backyard: just four years earlier, in 1969, the paper’s headlines had bemoaned, “Four Policemen Hurt in ‘Village’ Raid,” and scolded the “Hostile Crowd,” while the stories discussed how “hundreds of young men went on a rampage” that blameless cops were forced to rout.7

  Whether because of their own biases or in an effort to spare the sensibilities of its readers, the Times editors buried that sole mention of “homosexual” in Roy Reed’s story by placing it ten paragraphs deep into the article, where—according to the “inverted pyramid” format of newswriting—the least important information should appear. In so doing, they also ensured the offending sentence would not appear in the portion of the story on the front page, but after the “jump,” or continuation of the story in a deeper section of the paper. In this case, the jump was to page sixty-six, and many readers would not be interested enough to shuffle the sections, find the rest of the story, and follow the tale to its finish. In exactly the same way, The Washington Post subverted the importance of the word “homosexual” through the page placement of its front-page story on the New Orleans tragedy: the term appeared only after the jump to page twenty-two.8 Using this layout technique, a casual reader skimming headlines and perhaps only reading the front-page text wouldn’t have to stumble upon the disconcerting term.

  This sensitivity surrounding a word that, as Roy Reed later observed, was “a crucial detail” revealed prejudice in shaping the public’s understanding of a national incident. That a specific group had possibly been targeted, by whom, and for what reason were not questions that readers could ponder as they learned about a random bar fire.9 Deprived of the homosexual context, readers could not be expected to glean anything from the graphic pictures of burnt corpses, which, astonishingly, did not pose the same threat to so-called considerations of taste as one printed word.

  Locally, most New Orleanians absorbed the homosexual subtext from barroom humor and corner gossip—jokes that portrayed the fire victims as incompetent criminals or femme clichés dying in caricaturish ways. “I remember, at the time, people called it the ‘gay bar fire,’ ” said Clancy DuBos, “as opposed to just a fire at a bar.” Just as Henry Kubicki had heard the Cuban man at the Marriott commissary laughing about “barbequed queens’ asses,” similar quips spread from block to block. “Did you hear the one about the flaming queens?” and “I hope they burned their dresses off” both circulated widely. One punch line involved the Up Stairs Lounge and a popular brand of children’s breakfast cereal, through which a few fairies had burned into some Crispy Critters. Several morning radio listeners recalled a popular news/talk personality suggesting that the best way to dispose of the dead “fruits” was to “bury them in fruit jars.”10

  Obviously, much of this humor revealed homophobic feelings. “I was out of town on a case when the fire occurred,” recalled Bob McAnear, the U.S. Customs officer who knew the Up Stairs crowd. “A large part of law enforcement officers made derisive remarks based on what they knew of the reputation of the gays that most people encounter in the Quarter.” States-Item reporter Lanny Thomas observed how, although “the fire, to no one’s surprise, has been the conversation topic in bars throughout the Quarter—straight, gay, hippie, dives, the jet set,” the chatter “has not really touched the hearts of the city because it did happen in a gay bar.” The prospect of vaudeville “nancys” dying in a fiery panic provided comic relief for New Orleanians, who were otherwise unable to face the discussion of “out” homosexuality in their town. “Most of the people were glad,” remembered Joseph Bermuda, who opened his Cabildo Gallery to the usual cast of bohemians that Monday. “They were not charitable. They didn’t feel sorry or bad about it. It’s like, ‘Oh, they got burned, wellllll.’ The feeling was they had it coming. There was no regret. That’s what I remember from the people around my shop, ‘They deserve it; those fruits, they deserve it.’ ”11

  Such sophomoric attitudes were hardly anomalous in the early 1970s, or even offensive to the tastes of the era. In 1969, Time had published a poll in which 63 percent of Americans surveyed considered homosexuals to be “harmful to American life.” Four years later, attitudes had hardly changed. Meanwhile, Deliverance, the hit 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s novel, had included perhaps the most prominent depiction of male-male sodomy in a piece of American art to date.12 In its visce
ral homosexual rape scene, a pair of backwoods mountain men hold at gunpoint two “city boys” on a canoeing trip. One mountain man then forcibly sodomizes his victim while demanding that he “squeal like a pig.” The trauma ends when the rapist is felled by an arrow from the bow of a friend (Burt Reynolds), another of the quartet of weekend adventurers roughing it in the wilderness. After the rapist dies, survivors of the ordeal choose to bury the stranger and continue on with their trip rather than report the incident and spark a scandal.

  That the first prolonged and vivid depiction of male-male sex in a major American film was a terrifying rape, the payback for which was death, confirmed the image of same-gender sex as strange and frightening intercourse, performed by the wicked upon the unsuspecting. Deliverance, it should be noted, continued to play in New Orleans into June of 1973. The Deliverance rape sequence “contributed to an enduring popular association of homosexuality with sexual deviance and violence,” writes historian Thomas Borstelmann in his The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality.13

  That media professionals and members of the public then be asked to express sympathy for a bar full of so-called sex predators struck many as hypocrisy. The fire had not just claimed lives, the logic went; it had fleeced out criminal wrongdoers in the midst of their iniquities.

  AFTER HIS INITIAL phone call with The Advocate, Reverend John Gill attempted to notify sympathetic organizations of his presence in town. He called Tulane University’s Gay Student Union, the city’s one active Gay Liberation organization, and discovered that the group went dormant over the summer. Gill did reach Bill Rushton, the twenty-five-year-old editor of the Vieux Carré Courier.14

  Gill alerted Rushton, who was an outspoken homosexual, to the groundswell of activism building around the fire. Rushton hurried over to the church on Magazine Street to cover events as they unfolded. Gill didn’t have much luck with his other contacts. The Women’s Work Collective of Louisiana didn’t step forward to offer assistance. Local lesbian leaders had distanced themselves from the politics of gay men following the collapse of the New Orleans chapter of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971. “Gay women active in the GLF felt a void,” wrote Mary Gehman in the New Orleans feminist newspaper Distaff. “The organization addressed itself mainly to the problems of male homosexuals, the vice squad (which did not threaten lesbians) and the gay male bars. When the women’s movement began to appeal to women of all backgrounds, gay women joined in large numbers. They saw themselves oppressed first as women and secondly as lesbians.”15

  National and local civil rights organizations didn’t raise a commotion over the Up Stairs Lounge either. The Chicago Daily Defender, one of the nation’s premier African American newspapers, neglected to report the Up Stairs Lounge as news, although there was a black victim: Reggie Adams. By contrast, earlier that year, the Defender had chosen to report news from New Orleans: the Howard Johnson’s sniper incident, which involved a black shooter. By 1973, many black leaders in the Big Easy had been loosely assimilated into City Hall through the Human Relations Committee, a civil rights commission that Moon Landrieu had championed into being. By design, half of the committee’s appointed members were black, although the presiding chairman, Monsignor Arthur T. Screen, was a white Catholic priest appointed as representative of the archdiocese by Archbishop Philip Hannan himself. The Human Relations Committee, which maintained an answer desk at City Hall, in Spanish and English, for housing or immigrant issues, did not exactly leap at the opportunity to help gay fire victims or the MCC. New Orleans’s contingent of Black Panthers, following an armed standoff with the NOPD in 1971, ran a covert operation not easily contacted by outsiders, much less white homosexuals without black power credentials.16

  Quickly exhausting his list, Gill understood the stark degree of isolation of the local gay population. Even though open avenues of communication between black and white residents had been established by 1973, none existed between out homosexuals and heterosexuals. It was obvious to Gill that, besides the ragtag members of the city’s decimated MCC church, there would be no organizations with which to coordinate. He and Troy Perry would be alone in their management of the crisis.17

  When Perry landed in New Orleans that morning, Gill drove out to meet perhaps the most recognizable gay man in America, with his dark pompadour and pork-chop sideburns. Perry, who was thirty-two, looked younger in person. “Gill informed me,” Perry later wrote, “that in New Orleans there was a near vacuum of gay leadership that needed to be filled.” Local constituencies would later disparage Perry for this assessment, but he remains adamant about the state of gay New Orleans in 1973. “There was nobody else,” he insisted in an interview for this book.18

  Meanwhile, as Gill was picking Perry up, reporter Eric Newhouse of the Associated Press appeared on the porch of the MCC cottage and talked his way through the front door. Deacon Courtney Craighead gave Newhouse an interview on a set of lawn chairs by the empty altar. Newhouse was curious about the personal life of pastor Bill Larson, the man reputedly photographed in the Chartres Street window. “What was he doing at the bar?” Eric Newhouse asked Courtney. “Had he made arrangements to go see friends?” Recoiling from these questions, which baited Courtney into admitting that Bill Larson was a homosexual hanging out at a gay bar, the deacon answered noncommittally, “Oh … I don’t know.” Then a crew from WWL-TV was at the door, and Courtney had to plead for no cameras.19

  CONFUSION STILL REIGNED at Charity Hospital, where friends and family members awaited answers. Concerned parties, often refusing to give their names, overloaded the phone lines with questions about who had died. “The principal problems came from hysterical parents suffering from poor communications with reclusive sons,” explained Bill Rushton in The Advocate, “whom the parents feared might be among the victims.” A librarian working at the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter received a call from a woman who wouldn’t identify herself but kept asking about the fate of her estranged gay brother. This caller believed her brother was employed at a local museum, and she wanted to know if her brother was at work that Monday. Sadly, the librarian couldn’t help with such vague information, nor could she make an accusation that would possibly out a colleague.20

  Throughout New Orleans and the rest of the country, it wasn’t uncommon for gays to be so alienated, especially from blood relatives. Many homosexual adults had been teenage runaways, adolescents who left home without a forwarding address or a note of explanation. Cities, particularly, had long been places where the banished sought relief. Some clans had gladly parted ways with troubled offspring. For example, Brendan Flaherty, the eighteen-year-old coat check boy at the Stonewall Inn, had originally fled his hometown of Boston. “I was just so relieved I wasn’t in that oppressed world,” he said. “My parents had put me into two mental institutions and put me in prison and then put me into a school for incorrigibles, which were runaways, which you could do back then in the sixties.” Others had escaped sexual abuse. For example, David Williams, who tended bar in New Orleans gay hangouts starting in the 1970s, recalled his father lending him out as a six-year-old “lot lizard,” or rest-stop prostitute, in rural Georgia to truckers who would pay for the privilege of “being nice” to him.21 Other gay men and women had run away preemptively, before conservative family members could discover what they were and attempt draconian measures through doctors. Most who went running did not wish to be found.

  Some connections between gay men and their families were severed on moral grounds. For instance, MCC pastor Bill Larson had suffered a difficult relationship with his mother, Anna Howell. Despite losing custody of her children to the county and the scandal of her forced marriage to Bill’s stepfather in 1930, she had seemingly reformed and been welcomed into sewing and artistic cliques for upright women in Hamilton, Ohio. Howell nonetheless renounced her son upon his 1947 divorce: having never been divorced, only widowed, she considered the dissolution of a marriage to be a disgrace. Strikingly,
she made this judgment despite her failure to raise Bill from age three to fifteen—even though, according to public records, she seemed financially able to do so during much of this period.22

  During the boy’s long stay at the Butler County Children’s Home, Howell showed little interest in fostering her son. Time and again, she offered excuses when the boy asked to visit her in town. The boy struggled in the context of a communal upbringing. As a ten-year-old, he was frequently disciplined for early signs of a “sex problem,” with a penchant for “wrestling,” being “particularly disgusting while boys are waiting for baths,” and being the sort of “sissy” who “abuses himself.” Not all, however, was misery for the “artistic boy.” Young Bill displayed an early flair for singing and composing on the piano, wrote original plays, and exhibited a passion for the Bible that led a staff member to testify, “He really seems quite interested in doing some type of religious work in his adult life.”23

  After his divorce, Bill moved to Chicago and reinvented himself as “Ros Larison,” nightclub singer and entertainer,24 but Howell’s disapproval of her youngest child only deepened. Ros Larison’s final transformation to Bill Larson, the gay pastor in New Orleans, likely occurred years after their severance of relations.