Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  On that Wednesday, some younger reporters appeared to be in open rebellion with editors about the loss of front-page coverage. In a little-seen article buried on page fourteen, Times-Picayune journalist Vincent Lee reported on the founding of the National New Orleans Memorial Fund and used the word “gay” three times in his first one hundred words. This story was the newspaper’s first use of “gay,” outside of a proper noun (such as Gay Liberation Front) or quotation marks, a break from restrictive style conventions.20

  From New York City to Chicago and Los Angeles, news of the Up Stairs Lounge all but disappeared, and the Associated Press and UPI newswires redirected their reporters to other stories. “Because these were negligible people of society, people just didn’t seem to care,” commented the fire witness Milton Mary. “I often wondered, ‘What happened to them?’ ‘Did they arrest anybody?’ There was not that much news that I can recall.” States-Item photographer Ronnie LeBoeuf remembered the sudden diminution in coverage. “Oh, they buried it,” LeBoeuf insisted. “They buried it.”21

  Troy Perry was moved to make a grand appeal to Edwin Edwards, the Democratic governor of Louisiana. The previous day, Edwards had offered a nonspecific statement about fire safety in an article about the Up Stairs Lounge.22 The gay leaders sent a long telegram to the governor:

  June 27, 1973

  Governor Edwin Edwards,

  The tragic fire of June 24th in the Up Stairs Lounge in the French Quarter which has taken the lives of 29 women and men shocked and now saddens the nation.

  Many of the fatalities were Gay women and men who compose an important part of the human community. Consequently, Gay churches and organizations as well as non-Gay churches and organizations around the country will be observing a national day of mourning Sunday, June 1, 1973. Money is coming from all over the world to help bury the dead, pay the hospital expenses of survivors and build a memorial chapel. Blood is being collected all over the nation and shipped into New Orleans for the disaster survivors. The heartfelt sympathy and love of America has focused here in Louisiana at this time of need.

  We respectfully call upon you to join in this spirit of compassion and love by declaring Sunday, June 1, 1973 a state-wide day of mourning for the victims of the New Orleans fire catastrophe. . . . 23

  Edwards, who while a congressman had bravely voted to extend the Voting Rights Act to safeguard the black vote in Louisiana in 1970, did not respond to this telegram, and so Morty Manford telephoned him personally. A secretary for the governor answered, and the conversation became stilted when Manford identified himself as a gay activist.24

  At first, the secretary informed Manford that the governor’s office hadn’t received the telegram. Manford offered to read the text aloud for dictation. As if avoiding a trap, the secretary then told Manford that she had just found the communiqué. When asked if the governor had an official response, the secretary answered that Governor Edwards did not. When Manford requested to speak to the governor himself, the secretary told him that the governor was not in the office. When Manford finally asked if he could arrange a phone call with Governor Edwards at a future date, the secretary told him that the governor would not be in the office next week. As Paul Breton noted, “Newspapers in the following week reported several items on the governor’s actions from his office in Baton Rouge.”25

  This pattern of obfuscation made it clear to Manford and Perry that the governor had no interest in joining their cause. Edwards’s circumvention of the New Orleans Emergency Task Force—with maneuvers requiring more legerdemain than Mayor Moon Landrieu’s avoidance from Europe—came after the governor had already associated himself with fire safety. However, in Edwards’s careful framing of the issue, he did not state precisely which fire had motivated his concerns, nor did he utter the words “homosexual” or “gay.”26

  As negotiation sputtered with the governor, a group of gay entrepreneurs reached out to Troy Perry and insisted upon a face-to-face meeting. After Monday’s “Black Mama White Mama” report, a series of threatening calls resulted in policemen being stationed near French Quarter gay bars. Gay patrons at these “guarded bars” reported harassment from the officers. This atmosphere of hostility metastasized to the point where some patrons no longer felt safe, and bar crowds decreased to about one half of their usual size. “My concern was that if people started raising holy hell about all this,” remembered Café Lafitte patron John Meyers, “and Troy Perry came down and did this that and the other, that we were going to risk the unspoken agreement we had with city authorities and the police.”27

  Perry and Morris Kight presented themselves at the appointed place and hour. They were eager to meet New Orleans’s gay businessmen but shocked by what they encountered. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences,” one business owner shouted, censuring the activist leaders from the get-go. Perry had, by his very presence, flaunted a counternarrative about sexual liberation that upset the predominant hierarchy. The minister, who had hardly slept since Saturday, was encountering gay-on-gay oppression of the kind he’d once faced as a closeted youth in Florida. These reprimands, Perry admits now, struck a sore spot. He called the men “greedy” and reprimanded them for aligning themselves with the authorities, much like how the mob-related owners of the Stonewall Inn—prior to the Stonewall Riots—had ingratiated themselves with the New York Police Department.28

  Indeed, many gay entrepreneurs in New Orleans kept their businesses operational in defiance of local law by accepting the occasional police raid and agreeing to pay bribes, which owners justified disbursing, and officers justified accepting, through the incongruous logic that only well-run gay businesses could afford to make payments. Putting a hand on Perry’s shoulder, Kight stopped the preacher from shouting and redirected the conversation back to the “people’s shrine” growing outside of the Up Stairs Lounge—attempting to rouse a sentiment about New Orleans having heart. Yet the meeting ended with no accord between Gay Liberation and the gay businessmen. Perry wouldn’t attend a secret summit again, while Kight traveled back to Los Angeles to open a checking account, register a post office box, and sign the legal documents that officially created the memorial fund.29

  CHAPTER 10

  Firetraps

  Wednesday Afternoon Through Friday,

  June 27–June 29, 1973

  Agitated by his meeting with the gay businessmen, Troy Perry made new plans to hold a larger Up Stairs Lounge memorial on Sunday, July 1, his proposed National Day of Mourning. Perry asked Reverend Bill Richardson for permission to hold a second event at St. George’s Episcopal Church. “I had to decline,” wrote Richardson in a 1991 letter of remembrance about the fire. For Bill Richardson, a pastor at loggerheads with his flock, the request seemed just too burdensome.1

  Earlier that week, as a result of his hosting the first memorial in the chapel, Richardson received an unexpected call from his boss, Bishop Iveson B. Noland, the head of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. Noland, a signatory member of the antihomosexual organization Morality in Media of Louisiana, began their conversation by crinkling a newspaper into the phone.2 Richardson recalled the discussion:

  “Is it true that the service was at St. George’s Episcopal Church?”

  “Yes, Bishop, it was.”

  “Why didn’t they have it at their own church?”

  “For the simple reason their own small church holds about eighteen persons. Without any publicity we had over eighty present.”

  “What am I to say when people call my office?”

  “You can say anything you wish, Bishop,” he replied, “but do you think Jesus would have kept these people out of His church?”3

  With that comment, the bishop cut in and chastised Richardson, a cleric who had acted against superiors. Noland issued a stern warning to other Episcopal churches: none was to host another gathering for the MCC. Condemned from above, Richardson was also besieged from below when his church board pulled its support and censured him for his moral leniency. Only
one member of St. George’s vestry of elders supported his decision. He received “hate calls” and threatening letters.4

  Pilloried by his flock, Richardson decided to pen an open bulletin. In writing, he acknowledged the “uproar caused by the Memorial Service” for those “who died in New Orleans worst fire last Sunday night.” Still, Richardson argued, “God’s Church exists to help all people, regardless of who they are or what they do.” The pastor ended this letter with an ultimatum to church members, many whom he had pastored since the 1950s:

  If any considerable numbers of St. George’s members still feel that our Church is to minister only to the select few, and not the whole community, then I shall seriously consider resigning as your rector in the near future, so as the Bishop and the Vestry can look for someone else.

  William P. Richardson, Jr.

  P.S. I love you all, even if you violently disagree with me. But remember, we must try not to be Pharisees, thinking we are better than others.5

  WITH RICHARDSON STEPPING out of the fray, Perry began to search for another house of worship—ideally, a church in the Quarter willing to host several hundred outspokenly gay men. It was a tall order, but he first approached the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. After all, several of the dead had been baptized Catholic, Perry argued.6 Ed Martinez, a journalist for the alternative weekly Nola Express, quoted an anonymous New Orleans priest as saying, “The rules are the rules; if they find one Catholic, or several, among the dead, we’ll bury them. But that’s all.” The archdiocese was not interested in performing any such services for non-Catholic Christians. Neither Archbishop Philip Hannan, the three Catholic priests who had provided “conditional absolution” rites outside the Up Stairs Lounge right after the fire, nor any of the Catholic chaplains who’d ministered to survivors in Charity Hospital had commented publicly about the incident. The Archdiocesan Human Relations Committee, a religious group that adjudicated Catholic civil rights matters (and not associated with the municipal body of the same name mentioned earlier), told journalist Bill Rushton that “they had seen no reason to issue any sort of statement on the matter and that they had no plans to do so.” In this way, the archdiocese denied the use of Catholic facilities and refused to hold funerals for the non-Catholic dead—and then denied their denials by refusing to acknowledge their decisions as named sources for the record.7

  Silence and inaction was generally out of character for the archbishop. Philip Hannan was a man of high principles drawn to the limelight on momentous occasions. While serving as an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., he had become spiritual advisor to President John F. Kennedy. After Kennedy’s assassination, Hannan had delivered a moving homily at the requiem mass on November 25, 1963. Following the Rault Center blaze, he had offered effusive sympathies in the Times-Picayune. Less than six weeks later, in the standoff between the gunman and police at Howard Johnson’s, Hannan proffered himself as an intermediary for a potential hostage exchange and, afterward, spent nine hours at Charity Hospital consoling survivors and comforting families. By all accounts, he was a remarkable human being.8

  Yet, when the gay leaders called the archbishop’s office to request a consecrated space for a memorial, they were met by what Paul Breton described as an “officious priest.” This subordinate denied all requests abruptly and refused them the opportunity to speak to the archbishop. John Meyers, then a Catholic seminarian, recalled these events with indignation. “It was the demeaning of these deaths,” Meyers agreed.9

  A Vieux Carré Baptist church likewise rejected Perry’s entreaty for use of their building. Perry recalled how they “laughed in my face.” The board of a nearby Lutheran church, according to Paul Breton, “pompously informed our contact that … [they] would not authorize the usage of their church for our people, but to contact the comparative black congregation well outside the French Quarter since ‘they are more tolerant of aliens there.’ ” Denied a house of worship, Troy Perry briefly considered performing the service outside. While exploring this possibility, Clay Shaw stepped forward.10

  Arguably the most famous homosexual in New Orleans, Shaw was aware of the destruction of the Up Stairs Lounge. Having judiciously sought a quiet life after his trials, Shaw had initially chosen to remain silent as controversies swirled about the fire victims, and by this point he was also fighting lung cancer. Still, he was attempting to make a final mark upon his city through the opportunity afforded by Mayor Landrieu to work on the French Market Corporation. Overcoming legitimate anxieties, with French Market renovations beginning soon on July 13, Shaw notified Perry that, if no other alternative could be found, his contacts at the Vieux Carré Commission (VCC), a municipal body that oversees the French Quarter, were willing to close off a block of Iberville Street and permit the delegation to hold a memorial near the bar.11 Such a bold move was not just professionally dicey, in that it could imperil his post with the French Market Corporation, it was also a political risk. Shaw’s outreach was not echoed by Leon Irwin III, the closeted Louisiana Democratic National Committeeman, or other closeted gay men who benefited from the power structure.

  Troy Perry thanked Clay Shaw and let him know that he intended to honor his gesture by using the VCC only as a backup option.12

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, June 28, the Up Stairs Lounge returned to the front page of the Times-Picayune. This time it was a different sort of story—absorbed into a public safety debate about fire hazards and deathtraps in old neighborhoods. The front-page headline read, “Disaster Waiting to Happen: Quarter Firetrap Crackdown.” It suggested, without attribution, that the Up Stairs Lounge was but one of “literally dozens of firetraps, unsafe buildings and unsound structures.” Commenting on the deterioration, Assistant State Fire Marshal Timothy Driscoll blamed the VCC, the local preservation commission that also happened to support Clay Shaw and his efforts to rehabilitate the French Market.13 The VCC’s jurisdiction extended from the west side of Esplanade Avenue to the east side of Iberville Street.

  Driscoll issued several jeremiads against the VCC, portraying it as an organization that endangered citizens by preventing efforts to condemn unsafe structures. As a prime example of VCC ineptitude, Driscoll pointed to the Safari Lounge at 706 Iberville—a popular black gay bar (according to the 1972 edition of Bob Damron’s Address Book) that the Times-Picayune described as “a second story walk-up similar to the ill-fated Up Stairs Bar where 29 persons were killed in a Sunday night fire.” Tellingly, the Safari Lounge’s even-numbered address placed it on the west side of Iberville Street, like the Up Stairs Lounge, and outside of VCC influence. Driscoll’s linking the Safari to the VCC constituted an obvious glossing of fact. “Life is more important than the preservation of old bricks,” Driscoll added.14

  In response, VCC Director Wayne Collier told the Times-Picayune and States-Item that forces were “trying to pass the buck for a fire that occurred outside of the Vieux Carré Commission’s jurisdiction.” Focusing on the Up Stairs Lounge, Collier paid no heed to Driscoll’s attacks on the Safari Lounge, which was ordered closed by inspectors despite the bar owner’s insistence that his business had received no code violations and was not under investigation. When backed into a corner by a state agency, VCC director Wayne Collier then became the first public official in Louisiana to make a statement about the Up Stairs Lounge. He called it a “hideous fire” and claimed that the attacks “divert positive attention from the holocaust.”15

  It’s worth noting that the assistant state fire marshal did not include gay-friendly bars closer to the Up Stairs Lounge, like Gene’s Hideaway or even Wanda’s, in his attacks, but these were establishments owned by Gene Davis, the well-networked businessman (nonetheless, Davis had operated another Iberville Street bar without fire insurance in 1970). In effect, the immediate response to the Up Stairs Lounge fire was the closing of a nearby bar known to black gay travelers, which even The Advocate did not suspect might be a gay establishment. Reports also surfaced of Blake Arrata, the New Orleans city attorney,
suing the two pornographic movie houses near the Up Stairs Lounge for obscenity. One of these theaters elected to shutter permanently rather than face a legal case.16 A cleanup of the Quarter seemed imminent, either through a firetrap investigation or morals crusade.

  In the meantime, the New Orleans police investigation hit a snag when test results came back from the crime lab. Specimen 4, which consisted of “one metal 7 oz. container marked ‘Ronsonol Lighter Fluid’ ” found and tagged in the Up Stairs Lounge staircase by Major Henry Morris, which could potentially link a source of accelerant to a person, dusted “negative for fingerprints.” No one who touched that can had left any traceable residue. With this finding, Specimen 4 was reduced to circumstantial evidence, disconnected from human contact. In the police report, it was never underscored how the policeman who had called the Up Stairs Lounge a “queer bar” was the same one who managed this vital piece of evidence, which ultimately proved useless. Even though the can had been found on a staircase step, a clever defense attorney could now argue that it may have been dropped there at any time and date prior to the catastrophe. Strangely, there is no record of the two ten-dollar bills, found half-burned near the can of accelerant, ever being tested for fingerprints. (These bills would sit in an NOPD evidence locker until August 2005, when they were contaminated in the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.) Whoever set the fire, in other words, got lucky several times with forensics.17