Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  Other gay men had been exiled for similar issues. For example, after Up Stairs Lounge victim Glenn Green’s “undesirable discharge” from the U.S. navy, Glenn had attempted to return to his family in Walled Lake, Michigan. He was rebuffed, however, by his older brother Mahlon, a local politician who viewed Glenn’s record of sexual immorality as a scandal that could be used by political opponents of his “Go for Green” campaigns. Glenn had ended up moving to New Orleans without prospects, but he made quick friends and began a habit of regularly telephoning his niece Mary David long distance to show that he was okay.25

  Admittedly, other cases of estrangement could not be blamed entirely on the families. Up Stairs Lounge victim Ferris LeBlanc hadn’t spoken to his relatives in California since 1970 because of a financial dispute. Although the LeBlanc clan had accepted Ferris’s homosexuality and even welcomed one of his previous lovers into the family—a gesture of openness rare at the time—trouble began when that relationship ended and Ferris started courting a new gentleman named Rod. A dispute involving Ferris and Rod’s failure to honor debts to Ferris’s grandfather caused a falling-out that ended in small claims court. Ferris and Rod skipped town rather than pay a settlement. Although the gay couple eventually split up, Ferris’s sister Marilyn LeBlanc suspected that her brother was still ashamed. She hoped and wished that time would heal the rift.26 Sadly, that was no longer possible.

  REVEREND TROY PERRY rushed into the double-parlor of the MCC ofNew Orleans. The AP reporter had cleared out by then, and Perry assumed the stance of a shepherd protecting his flock. The rumble of the air conditioner provided an eerie hum for the room, which was now occupied by about a dozen “fire-stricken” men slumped in folding chairs.27 Deacon Courtney Craighead, as well as Lucien Baril, greeted the preacher.

  In the back rectory, a telephone rang incessantly, and volunteers like Ronnie Rosenthal answered the succession of calls. Each new voice came with the alarm and paranoia of an uncle or a mother posing almost unspeakable questions. These were family members who might have a son in New Orleans, a son who, they hinted, might be a member of their church. Many admitted that they had dialed the MCC because it was the only number in the phone book for a gay-affiliated organization that wasn’t a gay bar.28

  To help these families, the MCC kept a running file of confirmed survivors and victims. Ronnie Rosenthal also took on the unenviable duty of calling families to inform them that their son was dead or missing. “The saddest part,” said Ronnie, “was when we tried to call someone’s parents to let them know what happened, and they could care less.” Some families just couldn’t face the shame of claiming a homosexual loved one as one of their own. “All of us understood why a lot of the families didn’t come forward,” recalled John Meyers, the Café Lafitte patron, “bemoaning it but, nonetheless, understanding it.”29

  For local gay men, the telephone became a preferred means of getting updates, given that city departments were refraining from comment and the news media seemed more intent on appeasing conservative tastes than providing clarity. “There was a dearth of information as to what exactly had happened,” admitted Meyers. This phone network became a vital tool for friends and for parents of gay or suspected-gay children. Word spread far and fast. “I know that we first found out about it from phone calls,” recalled former Up Stairs Lounge patron Paul Killgore, who resided with his boyfriend about eight miles from the Quarter.30

  George Robert Sirois, a closeted construction worker in Massachusetts who made pilgrimages to the Big Easy with his mutually discreet “buddies,” got the call from more than fifteen hundred miles away. His friends at the Up Stairs Lounge had perished. Some of these acquaintances, Sirois was told, hadn’t yet been identified. Sirois was devastated, but he was also a married Vietnam veteran with a child. To come forward with any possible names would be to out himself. Larry Bagneris, a New Orleans native who had fled to Houston to embrace a fully out lifestyle, received an unexpected phone call from his mother in the Big Easy, filled with spoken and unspoken meanings. “I remember my mom saying to me on the phone,” he said, “when she was telling me this awful story, ‘But these were people that shouldn’t have been treated that way,’ which was encouragement to me to come out [of the closet].”31

  Along with filling gaps in information, these phone calls heightened fears and engendered accusations of discrimination by religious groups when it came to delivering death rites for the deceased. “We started getting phone calls that there were families of Catholic victims that were upset because they were being denied opportunities to have funerals in their parish churches or even being denied burials in Catholic cemeteries, where they had their plots,” relayed Paul Killgore, who recalled these rumors with the caveat that he had heard them second- and third-hand. “I never spoke to any family members that relayed that to me,” he continued. “I was getting that from friends of mine.”32

  TROY PERRY ESTABLISHED his lead status among the local MCC congregants. Outranking Courtney Craighead by several echelons in the church hierarchy, Perry assumed this leadership role without debate—a peremptory gesture that, no doubt, displeased Courtney. The deacon, however, preferred to remain in some gradation of the closet, and even he had to admit that a tragedy of this magnitude required a spokesperson. Perry asked for testimony about the fire, and congregants, perhaps more than a little star struck by a preacher they’d read about in magazines and in the autobiography he’d published the previous year, shared what they knew. Lucien Baril gave his account of the past twelve hours.33

  Many were moved by Baril’s eloquence, even though he acknowledged that he had not been at the Up Stairs Lounge because of a “toothache.” His speech must have impressed Troy Perry and validated John Gill’s faith in the young man he called “deacon exhorter.” On the spot, Perry accepted Gill’s recommendation that Baril be elevated to interim worship coordinator for the MCC of New Orleans—Bill Larson’s former role. It was a position that, by rights, could have gone to Deacon Courtney Craighead. But, since Courtney didn’t wish to make his sexuality an issue by becoming a “gay minister,” he didn’t object.34

  Perry learned from Baril how, earlier that morning, Courtney Craighead had contacted Reverend David Solomon, the congregation’s former pastor, and made arrangements for Solomon to conduct a memorial service for fire victims at nearby St. George’s Episcopal Church that evening. Perry announced that he would also lend his voice to the service. He and John Gill then led a group prayer for strength in the days to follow. There were so many unknowns. Folks hadn’t seen Deacon Mitch Mitchell since his rooftop escape, although Ricky Everett insisted that Mitch had gone back into the bar. Nor could they remember whether a congregant named Tad Turner had visited the Up Stairs Lounge that Sunday. Someone remembered seeing Rusty Quinton limping down Canal Street after the fire, as if lost.35

  MCC congregants invited Troy Perry to stay in the rectory, but he declined. “We decided any efforts on our part to assist the local gay community would be better undertaken where the atmosphere of grief was not so overwhelming,” the preacher would later write. Gill and Perry headed downtown and checked in at the Marriott Hotel on Canal Street. Their view from the tenth floor overlooked Iberville Street, so they faced the husk of the Up Stairs Lounge. Wisps of ash and smoke still rose from the building, kicked up by the occasional breeze.36

  For the next few days, their pair of adjoining rooms would serve as headquarters for an ad hoc team of gay leaders, who dubbed themselves the New Orleans Emergency Task Force. They would attempt to bring prominence to a tragedy that, it soon became clear, most preferred to hustle past. Soon Morris Kight and Morty Manford, invigorated from their travels, arrived at the hotel. When Manford had told someone at the New Orleans International Airport that he was in town for the tragedy, the person had responded, “Only some faggots got burned.” Morris Kight waved a copy of the States-Item, New Orleans’s afternoon newspaper, which enjoyed a more liberal reputation than the Times-Picayune.37

&nbs
p; Kight thrust the paper into Troy’s hands. Emblazoned in large text was the headline “Twenty-Nine Dead in Quarter Holocaust.” The story used hyperbolic language and metaphors to evoke the visceral horror, with phrases like “bodies stacked like pancakes” and workers struggling “late into the night pulling the bodies apart.” The States-Item took the additional step of flouting local mores by printing the word “homosexuals” on its front page, in the process becoming the first local newspaper to do so.38

  The featured photograph was that of an unidentified male hanging lifeless, seared to a window. Perry knew, from what he’d heard at the MCC church, that this was pastor Bill Larson. Cameras had flashed over Larson’s corpse, Perry reflected. People had recorded these images in a near-automatic series of clicks and flashes that neither the police nor the fire department had tried to stop. They let the man hang exposed to the elements, and here he was: burnt up and on display without name. In a column beside the picture, thirteen tentatively identified victims were listed—Bill Larson was not among them. Inside the paper, the injured were also tallied.39

  Reading further, Perry saw no words of indignation from civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or Jesse Jackson’s Chicago-based Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity). But Perry had grown accustomed to fellow human rights movements giving little or no support to homosexuals. Larry Bagneris—a black as well as gay New Orleanian—cited antigay Christian dogma as partial explanation for this oversight. “There was no acceptance of gay rights because of the black churches,” he said, yet “the civil rights movement began in the black churches.” Bayard Rustin, who was known as the Socrates of the civil rights movement and who organized the 1963 March on Washington, remained a closeted homosexual—mum about his private affairs—almost a decade later.40

  Perry seethed when he saw the language used to describe fire victims. “We don’t even know if these papers belonged to the people we found them on,” said Major Henry M. Morris, who complained about the subversive nature of gay culture. “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar,” the police officer continued. Providing context to these “queer bar” claims, another officer offered, “It is not uncommon for homosexuals to carry false identification, which could complicate the identification procedure.” Would such accusations against the dead be tolerated if the victims had been considered upstanding? “This slander,” said Morris Kight in his professorial style, “must not go unchallenged.” Kight called around to local television stations and scheduled a press conference for five that afternoon.41

  Equally deplorable to Perry was something he’d expected to see in local coverage but did not: comment from city leaders about the death toll that Fire Superintendent William McCrossen had already pronounced “one of the worst in New Orleans history.” Yet, even though McCrossen would call the fire gruesome and deadly, his public statements fell short of defending the dignity of those who had died. Mayor Moon Landrieu had offered no statement of sympathy for the victims. Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards was also wholly missing from coverage, and Archbishop Philip Hannan, whom Catholic admirers sometimes called the “Pope of New Orleans,” offered no prayers or condolences. “Many gays held prominent positions in city and state offices,” explained Bob McAnear, the U.S. Customs officer. “This [their closeted status] may have been the reason none of the city or state officials would make any public statements of empathy relating to the victims or survivors.”42

  Such silence from on high struck Troy Perry as suspicious—particularly for Mayor Landrieu, whose personal politics and past responses to local disasters merits deeper analysis. After more than a decade in elected office, Landrieu had established proficiency in crisis management. A charming fixture of liberal New Orleans, he was so beloved by civil rights groups that Ku Klux Klan sympathizers had nicknamed him “Moon McCoon” and subjected him to death threats.43

  Landrieu dressed the part of the pragmatic dreamer, a principled man who made things happen, with glistening blue eyes offset by a seersucker suit and thick glasses. Following the Rault Center fire in November 1972, the mayor offered heartfelt remarks of sympathy for victims (“Mourned not only by those who knew them, but by New Orleanians in all walks of life”) and left a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Indiana—“one day early,” according to the Times-Picayune—to lead his grieving city.44

  During the January 1973 Howard Johnson’s sniper incident, Landrieu participated in on-the-ground efforts to end the standoff between policemen and the disaffected gunman, who was shooting from the rooftop of a Howard Johnson’s motel steps from City Hall. This shooter, a former military serviceman named Mark Essex who’d attended Black Panther meetings in New York, was on a mission to kill. Bullets flew around the mayor, one of which struck and killed Deputy Police Superintendent Louis Sirgo. Landrieu called Essex’s mass shooting of civilians and law enforcement officials “perhaps the most tragic criminal act in the history of New Orleans,” declared a citywide state of mourning, and proclaimed that January was National Volunteer Blood Donor Month “in lieu [sic] of the emergency situation that occurred Jan. 7.”45

  Almost six months later, in the wake of the Up Stairs Lounge fire, Moon Landrieu remained in Europe, on vacation during those first critical hours after the city’s deadliest fire on record. As Landrieu was reachable via telegram or long-distance telephone call to hotels on his itinerary, it’s difficult to conceive of a circumstance in which neither members of his office nor his fire chief, William McCrossen, failed to inform him of the situation. Furthermore, even if Landrieu were inaccessible by these methods, both the International Herald Tribune (an American-owned and -oriented, Paris-based newspaper) and The Times of London reported on the fire and were available on European newsstands.46

  AT THE TIME, Moon Landrieu was a man on the rise—included as a possible vice president pick for George McGovern’s 1972 ticket. His name was included among the most powerful Democratic circles. Indeed, through hard work and a knack for making friends, Moon Landrieu had climbed far from humble roots; he’d gone to law school at Loyola University in 1952, when the school integrated by accepting its first black students, Norman Francis and Ben Johnson. Landrieu had been raised to believe that segregation was the norm, but his time in law school with Francis and Johnson became an epiphany, splitting his views from widely accepted racial theories. “I had come to the conclusion that segregation made no sense,” Landrieu said. “It was contrary to Christian charity, contrary to my Catholic beliefs.”47

  Still, Landrieu hesitated to declare himself a civil rights advocate early in his career. “I was smart enough,” he explained in an oral history interview, “to not to want to give my enemies a chance to kill me politically.” Nonetheless, it was Landrieu who led clandestine efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the New Orleans City Council chamber in 1967. He also championed the unanimous passage of the Public Accommodations Ordinance in 1969, which ended the right of local restaurateurs, hoteliers, and bar owners to refuse to serve black customers. As a candidate for mayor in December 1969, Landrieu was asked in a televised debate if he intended to include blacks in top positions of government. “Yes, I do hope to appoint a Negro as a department head,” he responded, “perhaps more than one.”48

  Moon Landrieu had also made small, albeit deniable, gestures in support of closeted gays, coded signals that would have been branded as extreme or even harmful if detected by his opponents. When campaigning on Bourbon Street in 1969, Landrieu had walked into Café Lafitte in Exile and shaken hands with bar patrons. During that campaign, one of Landrieu’s top fund-raisers was Leon Irwin III, a man known—in an open secret among local Democrats—to be gay. “Leon was a much-beloved and flamboyant uptown character,” wrote the local chronicler Dan Baum. “Everybody knew he was homosexual, but nobody ever mentioned it.” As a reward for Irwin’s abiding loyalty, Landrieu included the closeted insurance executive on his confidential “must invite” list of special guests for all
functions sponsored by the mayor’s office.49 Irwin’s appearance on the list, as a “bachelor” among married couples, stood out.

  In 1972, Landrieu threw his support behind a successful campaign to elect Leon Irwin III to the Louisiana Democratic National Committee. Thus, one of the most powerful Louisiana Democrats at the time of the fire happened to be a closeted person.

  That same year, Landrieu appointed the outed businessman Clay Shaw to the French Market Corporation, which provided Shaw with a respectable post that could help repair his reputation and pay his mounting legal expenses. “I knew if I could put him back in public life,” recalled Landrieu, “I would let him [have] or give him back some of his dignity.” Because many homosexuals in New Orleans perceived Shaw’s persecution as a warning of what could happen to them, Landrieu’s appointment of the businessman was seen as form of redemption. “Landrieu’s support of Shaw shines as a beacon,” wrote gay New Orleans historian Roberts Batson in a column for the New Orleans gay weekly Impact, “arguably the most significant political act for gay people in that entire decade.”50

  Nevertheless, Landrieu did not hurry back to New Orleans after the Up Stairs Lounge fire, declare a state of mourning for the victims, or encourage support in the form of blood donations for the injured. Nor did he call for the establishment of a city-supported victims fund, as he had after the January Howard Johnson’s shootings. In fact, he did nothing about the Up Stairs Lounge for weeks—eschewing opportunities to even send a message from afar. Nor did any representative of Landrieu’s administration make any such gesture in his stead. Their restraint from speech took the guise of hierarchical paralysis, as if speaking about the topic would be speaking out of turn. Winston Lill, the City Hall press secretary, didn’t make a statement, and neither did a member of the Human Relations Committee, which was charged with expediting requests for human rights assistance. Unlike the two previous disasters, the city did not plan a public memorial or send representatives to private funerals.51