Tinderbox

  REVEREND PAUL BRETON joined the task force at the Marriott. He hugged Troy Perry and introduced himself to fire survivor Ricky Everett, who still appeared dazed. “I remember being with them a lot and staying at the hotel with them,” recalled Ricky, “I don’t know how many nights. Anyway, I was kind of like, how you say, the pawn in their hand.” With Breton in tow, the group of leaders drove to Charity Hospital to minister to the dying.18

  These terminal patients remained in the newly opened burn ward. Their condition was so dire that they could not be transported. Five survivors had already been treated and released from Charity Hospital, including Rusty Quinton. Seven others, who continued to require intensive care, had been shuttled elsewhere throughout the state. For example, Michael Scarborough went to West Jefferson Hospital across the Mississippi, while Jeanne Gosnell was taken to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in the Uptown district, near the Audubon Zoo.19

  Gosnell had lost consciousness several times, and she hadn’t seen her best friend Luther Boggs since she’d gasped into an oxygen mask while sitting beside him on Iberville Street. No one would update Gosnell on Luther’s condition for fear that the shock would kill her. Hospital orderlies were instructed to not bring her any newspaper clippings as she underwent a series of painful skin-graft surgeries. Before the fire, Gosnell had a well-paying job as an office manager in a real estate firm. Over the weeks to come, news would reach her through coworkers paying occasional visits that her old position was being filled. “I’m not gay,” Gosnell later told The Advocate. “I found I didn’t have any [of my] so-called straight friends coming to ask me if I needed money, or what they could do to help.”20

  Back at Charity Hospital, Paul Breton and the other gay leaders registered as chaplains. They walked to the burn unit, where the conditions of survivors Luther Boggs, Jim Hambrick, and Larry Stratton, who all happened to be military veterans, were alarming to behold. “They told me,” recalled Perry, “and they told others, ‘You can pray, but you can’t touch them.’ ” The men gasped for breath beneath germ-protected tents, with large portions of bone and muscle tissue exposed. Like punctured gloves, their bodies leaked blood,21 which orderlies struggled to refill in an endless process of dripping fluids that reddened the bandages and gauze.

  Breton and Kight donned sanitary masks as they prayed with twenty-four-year-old Larry Stratton, whose open wounds covered 80 percent of his body surface. Dabbed with salve, this survivor of the fire seemed to glow in fluorescent light. “Next time I go out drinking,” Stratton joked, “I’m wearing an asbestos jock.” Jim Hambrick, in critical condition, flowed in and out of consciousness. The gay leaders learned that he was scheduled for surgery to remove both of his hands, which were blackened by gangrene.22

  Near Jim Hambrick lay Luther Boggs, who at forty-seven had recently left the employ of the Pan American Life Insurance corporation. This was terrifying for a man with flesh dangling from his face, and he repeatedly voiced anxieties over his mounting medical expenses. Fluids building in his skull caused brain damage and memory loss, which resulted in Luther’s continually forgetting that he was a military veteran entitled to federal benefits. Boggs asked Paul Breton if someone could help him with arranging job interviews from the burn ward so that he might find new employment. Perry and Breton humored him by agreeing to make inquiries.23 Nearing death, it was clear that a man of industry like Luther Boggs did not want to be perceived as a burden.

  IN RESPONSE TO CALLS for an apology from Major Henry Morris’s comments about “queers” and “thieves,” the New Orleans Police Department assigned Frank Hayward, the information officer and City Hall liaison, to discuss the Up Stairs Lounge. “They got their PR person out in front of it,” recalled Perry. Behind the scenes, the city Human Relations Committee sent a note of admonishment to the police chief for Morris’s “queer bar” quotation in the States-Item.24 These back-of-the-class messages between city agencies demonstrated how City Hall was, in fact, cognizant of the fire but unwilling or unauthorized to speak openly.

  In response to the note of censure, Officer Frank Hayward opened his first press conference about the fire with a statement that declared the States-Item attribution to be false: Henry Morris, he claimed, never said what reporters had heard and written down. This accusation of journalistic malfeasance occurred despite Times-Picayune reporter Chris Segura having also heard the remark from the mouth of Major Morris. Indeed, when Segura’s own publication declined to print the exact quotation, Segura chose to tell The Advocate, which published the phrase in a follow-up story several weeks later.25

  Next up at the conference, a second police officer, who went unnamed in newspapers but admitted to making the comment about homosexuals carrying “false identification” to the States-Item, apologized to the gay community and attempted to clarify his words: “The ‘transient’ lifestyles of many of the bar’s patrons might make identification difficult.” Evidently, this officer felt that the presumption of homosexuals living in a “transient” manner—a term commonly applied to vagrants—was less mendacious than the claim that homosexuals hid their law-breaking habits. The denial of Morris’s statement, followed by the apology from the unnamed officer, who framed his regret as a case of misunderstanding, gave the NOPD the appearance of propriety while avoiding any admission of wrongdoing.26

  Officer Hayward then made an announcement that seemed to pacify nerves. He unconditionally repudiated WVUE’s “scoop” from the previous evening: there was no merit, Hayward said, to the “Black Mama White Mama” report, declaring it a hoax. Law enforcement had not been in communication with any multiethnic vigilante groups. The anonymous tipoff, WVUE’s Alec Gifford would later admit, turned out to be nothing more than a crank call. After this admission, there would be no protests of WVUE by greater New Orleans. The station would not swiftly move to correct the misreport or offer an apology to homosexuals.27 Some members of the public were, in fact, appreciative that someone had tried to scare the gay activists into silence.

  That a local news station possessed free rein to broadcast a blatant falsehood one day after a deadly event further established the degree to which homosexuals were not afforded the deference of average citizens or considered to be part of the body politic. Meanwhile, at City Hall, PR Director Winton Lill seemed preoccupied with getting away from New Orleans after the family wedding. On June 26, 1973, he submitted a proposal for a city-funded road trip to conduct research on domestic “pleasure parks” for the Armstrong memorial project. While men were agonizingly dying at Charity Hospital, with bodies unnamed and unclaimed at the morgue there, these were the concerns that took priority.28

  CHAPTER 9

  Fun House

  Tuesday Afternoon–Wednesday Morning,

  June 26–27, 1973

  Troy Perry and the others left Paul Breton, a pastor skilled in the administration of last rites, at the hospital to minister to the terminal patients. Breton’s assignment was a grim one: to offer comfort to men in agonal states while colleagues attempted to heal the rest of a fractured community. Morris Kight returned to the Marriott determined to invent a new system of emergency assistance. On a piece of Marriott poster board, which served as the place mat for his hotel desk, he sketched an outline for what he called the New Orleans Community Disaster Relief Committee.1

  Kight envisioned a grand union, the first of its kind during Gay Liberation, which would integrate the work of MCC churches with various gay and nongay political groups to merge community organizing with a national fund-raising operation. Perry enthusiastically signed on with Kight’s expanded plan and phoned The Advocate to describe the founding of a National New Orleans Memorial Fund for gay fire victims, which would pair with his “National Day of Mourning, for this coming Sunday in all gay organizations all over the country.”2

  Meanwhile, the struggle to identify bodies in the hospital morgue exhausted authorities, who were loath to spend the extra time on the deceased. NOPD Sergeant Joseph Vitari told the press exaspe
ratedly that “dental charts, that and fingerprints, would be the only true way to identify these people.” Describing efforts to coordinate with the FBI in Washington, D.C., Vitari continued, “It’s impossible for a mother to look at her son and say that’s her son; that’s how badly burned the bodies are.” Paul Breton, having worked with the government of the District of Columbia and, in his words, “knowing the standard percentages of successes in cases of this sort,” estimated that the Orleans Parish coroner would be “very lucky to identify fifteen of the victims” and would be “very lucky in being able to have ten of the fifteen bodies claimed for burial.”3

  Buddy Rasmussen, the bartender of the Up Stairs Lounge who had saved twenty-odd patrons, disappeared after giving his full account of the blaze to police detectives. Buddy was emotionally crippled, and he spent most waking hours with Bill Duncan, a close friend.4 Buddy barely left Bill Duncan’s apartment, which was situated on Iberville Street catercorner from the blackened edifice of his former workplace.

  An entire chapter of Buddy’s life—his triumph in building a profitable business with the bar’s owner, Phil Esteve—had been reduced to cinders. Adam Fontenot, his great love, was also gone forever. Through the dull throb, Buddy could hear the hubbub at the Chartres Street intersection, where the detritus and rubble of the Up Stairs Lounge attracted large crowds. Motorists in packed cars drove past the site as if it were a fun house. Tourists lined up and nosed past the doorway to the stairwell holding cups of open liquor, a practice synonymous with New Orleans. The Jimani bar, untouched on the first floor directly below the rubble, had already reopened to serve passersby.5

  A man by the nickname of Chuckie reportedly went up and down Iberville collecting donations for fire victims and then pocketed the proceeds. In the midst of this bedlam, Morris Kight attempted to hold a wreath-laying ceremony. “More flowers have been arriving, just anonymously arriving,” Kight told The Advocate. “People have begun bringing them from their gardens.” The longshoremen Smokie and Cocoa, whose third-floor residences sustained heavy smoke damage from the Up Stairs Lounge fire below, began posting a guard to prevent acts of vandalism.6

  Spectators argued with one another. “It’s the Supreme Court caused that,” opined a tourist to a Times-Picayune reporter. “That’s right. That’s right. They gonna have to start shooting them to stop that, and the Supreme Court won’t let them.”7 The man’s comments, a propos of which Supreme Court ruling or who needed to be shot, were unclear, but his outrage affirmed the belief that no good came from pandering to homosexuals. A woman of about fifty openly criticized Up Stairs Lounge patrons in front of a States-Item reporter:

  I understand they could eat and drink all they wanted up there for $2.00 and Lord knows what other activities. The Lord had something to do with this. He caught them all in there and punished them.8

  A second woman interrupted and contended, “They were human. God made them, too, and they didn’t deserve to die like that no more than you.” Despite this rejoinder, the overriding notion that justice had been served in the bar’s obliteration was typical and acceptable. In 1973, only about one in ten Americans perceived homosexual relations to be “not wrong at all,” according to a University of Chicago survey.9 Few ideas could be called less popular.

  Reactions of the survivors differed. For Buddy Rasmussen, the prospect of going home to his residence at 923 St. Andrews Street, where he had shared a domestic world with Adam Fontenot, remained too agonizing. Ricky “Regina” Soleto took the opposite tack: she fled from the fire scene and took refuge in the apartment that she had shared with Reggie Adams at 1017 Conti Street. There, she kept laying her lover’s clothes out on the bed, expecting him to return each morning. All the while, just a few buildings down from Buddy on Iberville Street, Roger Dale Nunez shivered on Cee Cee Savant’s couch.10

  At 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, Perry and the other gay leaders held a second news conference at the Marriott. Lucien Baril, the newly named MCC pastor, described the devastation to his congregation, while Morris Kight announced that the American Red Cross had agreed to a “blood banking” system through which any concerned person could give blood at any Red Cross facility in America and credit the donation to “Holocaust Victims, Up Stairs Lounge, New Orleans, care of Charity Hospital.”11

  Then Kight took a breath and changed subjects: “We are creating a National Memorial Fund and asking people who have human concerns to donate.” No campaign in the history of Gay Liberation had previously requested funds explicitly or created a national infrastructure to receive them. The move would make gay leaders instantly accountable. The homophile movement, after all, had virtually imploded through the backbiting that sprung from a smaller drive for a failed U.S. Supreme Court case in 1970. Vouching for Kight, Perry reiterated that the editorial board of The Advocate had agreed to act as custodian for the National New Orleans Memorial Fund and accept emergency donations. “We’ve been building for five years,” Kight said. “We’ve been building to a sense of national brotherhood and sisterhood, and that has happened. And now we have that strength. We’ve taken that space, that room, and when this enormous tragedy occurred, we came from all over.”12

  With this statement, the Gay Liberation movement transcended regionalism and rancor to reach cohesion on a single topic, other than the Stonewall Inn, for the first time. Political groups, including the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), joined forces with service groups, including the Gay Community Services Center of Los Angeles (GCSC), and religious networks, extending from the MCC to the recently formed New York Gay Synagogue. They harnessed the platform of The Advocate, the most read gay news source, while allying with nongay relief organizations like the American Red Cross.13

  A moment of national unity soon appeared in response to this announcement. A red flyer circulated around New York City. “Tragedy in New Orleans,” it read, “thirty-two Gay people were killed,” with calls to “give blood” at the Sixty-Seventh Street center or “give money” to The Advocate. A National Day of Mourning flyer was seen in Los Angeles, with news that “the GAA of New York City, The GCA [Gay Callers Association] of Chicago, and the GCSC [of Los Angeles] are contacting gay brothers,” with invitations to attend memorial services. In Boston, the newly established Gay Community News made the “Upstairs Tragedy” its top story.14

  UNAWARE OF TROY PERRY’S activities at the Marriott, Henry Kubicki arrived home from yet another shift at that hotel to find an empty apartment. Eerily, all of Ricky Everett’s clothing and possessions were now missing from drawers and cupboards. While Henry was gone, Ricky had returned and taken everything he owned. “That was not a good time for me. I was not responding as well as I should,” Ricky explained, looking back. “It was rather abrupt, and I do remember he was a bit surprised.” Henry’s note to Ricky in the kitchen sat untouched. Either Ricky hadn’t seen it or he couldn’t bring himself to face the darkness by writing a response. “I couldn’t think about it without crying,” Ricky recalled.15 His inability to relate to such devastation was quite natural.

  Henry, sadly, wouldn’t see or speak to Ricky Everett again until 1978, and only then in a chance encounter on Canal Street. For Henry, it was as if the fire had raised a psychological barrier between them—one that severed his dearest friendship. Unbeknownst to Henry, Ricky was in need. Ronnie Rosenthal, Ricky’s primary pillar of support, flew back to Atlanta that Tuesday: Ronnie just had to get back to work or lose his job. Alone, Ricky confronted a world that seemed to be carrying on without any of the pain that consumed him. “When I’d go to sleep, as soon as I’d fall asleep,” recalled Ricky, “all of a sudden, I’d start dreaming and start seeing those people burning again.”16

  Plagued by nightmares, Ricky sought refuge with his mother in the suburb of Gretna. “When I got home, we had that talk,” said Ricky. “You know, ‘Are you gay?’ ‘Yeah, obviously.’ But she accepted me. She loved me even more, I think.” Ricky agreed to keep his things in her home, which, for Ricky, became a place of convale
scence when he wasn’t meeting with Troy Perry. Unlike Stewart Butler or Henry Kubicki, Ricky Everett had coworkers who were considerate of his trauma, even after some of the staff at Schweggman’s grocery chain recognized Ricky’s voice during his Monday TV interview. “They were all sympathetic to me, my employer and fellow employees,” recalled Ricky. “I was fortunate. I’ve been fortunate like that all my life.”17

  Unlike Courtney Craighead’s parents, Ricky Everett’s mother was able to take the shock of her son’s revelation in stride, after tears and some religious debate. She did not make a gesture of revulsion, which, in Ricky’s forlorn state, could have pushed him away. She was undoubtedly grateful to have her son in any condition, even if something of Ricky’s trusting manner now seemed injured, even if he asked why God had spared him from the flames that claimed Bill Larson. “Thank you for saving me,” Ricky would say in his prayers, “but, next time, please let me burn up.”18

  BY WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, the Up Stairs Lounge fire had been dropped from the front page of the Times-Picayune. What was international news only days before now didn’t merit an oversize headline on a local broadsheet. Top stories now focused on Watergate, the possibility of “gas limits” in the upcoming oil embargo, and the passage of a U.S. Senate bill to cut off bombings in Cambodia.

  “The culture at the Picayune, in the newsroom, was very antigay,” recalled Clancy DuBos, the Times-Picayune intern. “There were so many harsh attitudes expressed among old reporters, the old farts I guess.” The fact that Charles Ferguson of the States-Item was traversing Europe with the mayor left that newspaper, and its sister publication the Times-Picayune, open to accusations of bias in that Ferguson, or his editorial colleagues, might not want to portray the mayor’s absence negatively, lest they reveal how a member of the press was involved in delaying him. In the following weeks, Landrieu would maintain such an excellent relationship with the media establishment that he would pay a visit to the Press Club of New Orleans at 339 Chartres, located two blocks from the Up Stairs Lounge catastrophe.19 It’s unknown if the mayor passed the fire site to reach the party.