Tinderbox

  With the last bodies laid to rest, the story faded from minds. “I remember distinctly on a Monday running into gay friends on the street [Iberville],” recalled John Meyers of the local gay gentry, “cause I was living in the Quarter at the time, and these were gay people, and nobody said a thing about the fire.” Silence extended to fire survivors and friends of the deceased, a response not unusual for victims of trauma. “The following weeks, months and years afterward, I don’t remember much,” wrote Henry Kubicki in a self-published account of the tragedy. “It is as though I stepped out into limbo, not connecting with anybody or events. The malfunction of my memory occurred as though a safety valve had exploded.”47

  The Up Stairs Lounge became a nonentity. People who passed the structure told themselves that there was no tale to be heard about the wreckage. It says something profound that, in a natural storytelling community like New Orleans, one story remained off limits. “I started coming to NOLA [New Orleans, Louisiana] in the mid-1970s,” wrote New Orleans gay Carnival historian Howard Smith. He continued, “The fire was never a topic of conversation.” Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, for whom the fire barely registered, would never reexamine his conduct. “I have a vague slight memory of the event,” Edwards wrote in an email for this book, “but frankly do not remember that gays very [much] amount [to] the people involved.”48

  ON JULY 17, New Orleans detectives Schlosser and Gebbia received yet another tip. That day, according to the police report, Deputy State Fire Marshal Edward Hyde notified detectives that an Up Stairs Lounge survivor with critical information had been located and interviewed at a Baton Rouge hospital. The survivor’s name was Michael Scarborough. To pique police interest, arson investigators showed the detectives a typewritten statement from Scarborough, in which the witness admitted to a physical altercation with someone in the bar just prior to the blaze. While being ejected from the establishment, Scarborough had heard this person say something to the effect of “I’m going to burn you all out.” Looking at a series of mug shots following this interview, Michael Scarborough identified Roger Dale Nunez as the person with whom he had fought.49

  After driving to Baton Rouge, Schlosser and Gebbia met with Scarborough, who gave testimony consistent with his prior statement and described Roger Nunez as a “white male, with medium dark complexion, brown hair, not real long” who was thrown out from the bar “thirty or forty five minutes prior to the fire being discovered.” The NOPD now had a witness from inside the Up Stairs Lounge who could describe suspicious behavior pointing to motive (anger) and opportunity (timing) to set the fire, as well as a description that closely matched with Claudine Rigaud’s description of the suspicious customer at Walgreens. Schlosser and Gebbia concluded their interview with Scarborough, noting that the witness “could add nothing further” and then concluded their investigation. As detectives, they simply stopped pursuing new leads.50

  In the final pages of the New Orleans Police Department’s “General Case Report,” filed on August 30, 1973, the detectives describe no attempts to locate Roger Dale Nunez outside of New Orleans, even though a lead available to the state fire marshal on July 13—an address used to register a vehicle owned by Roger—existed. For reasons ultimately unknowable, the NOPD closed a criminal case having never interviewed a person whom a witness identified as screaming “I’m going to burn you all out” moments before a fire and who multiple witnesses identified as saying “I just made it, from the fire” or “I got out of the fire” afterward while covered in what looked to be soot.51 That the twenty dollars gifted to Roger Nunez by Donald Landry, which Roger had drunkenly accepted and then broken into smaller increments, matched the amount dropped in the Up Stairs Lounge staircase never interested detectives or became an avenue of inquiry. These oversights call into question whether the missing testimony of Steven Duplantis would have changed the police officers’ actions. Instead of locating Roger at his mother’s house in Abbeville, the NOPD would spend the next six weeks compiling a report. The final, sixty-four-page document, which could be described as rigorous prior to Roger Dale Nunez’s discovery on July 2 and cryptic thereafter, seemed incomplete.52

  On the report’s final page, in the concluding paragraph, the NOPD blamed witnesses who came forward for providing testimony that was “conflicting in content” and filed away the “fire of undetermined origin.” Despite the discovery of a canister of lighter fluid in the bar stairwell, this official document declined to acknowledge that the fire was “deliberately set,” a piece of language later used specifically in a separate report on the Up Stairs Lounge by the National Fire Protection Association, a trade association providing standards for fire safety. In addition, the police report wildly mischaracterized the testimony of attorney Harold Bartholomew, who attested to suspicious characters shouting “I’m telling you, you better get out of here!” before running away from the Up Stairs Lounge, when they concluded, “with all the persons interviewed, none observed anyone leaving or entering the stairwell just prior to or after the discovery of the fire.”53

  The NOPD’s closing of the Up Stairs Lounge case drew no headlines, however, as the report was not made available to the public and would not be for several years. Soon afterward, in a criminal courthouse located across the street from police headquarters, Judge Frank J. Shea issued a warrant for the arrest of “Nunez, Roger Dale.” This order of the court authorized state and local authorities to locate and make a lawful arrest. However, this warrant wasn’t for anything to do with the Up Stairs Lounge. Evidently, the slow gears of justice had been grinding to address the violation of Roger’s one-year probation from early 1973, following his guilty plea for the “unauthorized use” of a credit card and subsequent failure to honor terms of parole. Nunez, sought for questioning in relation to the June fire, was now officially declared a “probation absconder” for a completely different crime.54

  AROUND THIS TIME, New Orleans Archbishop Philip Hannan published his first words about the Up Stairs Lounge. Coming unexpectedly, his commentary went unnoticed by the public and the general press. Hannan’s remarks appeared in the July 19 issue of the Clarion Herald, a weekly newspaper for Catholic parishioners. In a human-rights-themed tract for his regular column, “The Archbishop Speaks,” Hannan bemoaned how “there have been a number of flagrant invasions and disregard for human rights.” He suggested how “as persons believing in the dignity of every man and woman (born and unborn), our faith in God impels us to express again our belief in human dignity.”55 Hannan then rebuked Communist oppression of religion and criticized the use of deadly force by police in Baton Rouge. In his final paragraph, located after a page jump, the archbishop pivoted to another topic:

  Meanwhile, the last report on the fire of the Up Stairs Lounge reveals that now 32 victims had been claimed by this disaster. The report and opinion of the fire chief that arson could have been or probably was involved makes all the more deplorable this holocaust of human lives. In the spirit of deep Christian concern and compassion, we offer prayers for the repose of the souls of the victims and the consolation of their bereaved families and friends. We pray also that the loss of their lives will lead to effective measures to prevent similar tragedies.56

  With these four sentences, delivered nearly one month after the fire, Hannan openly acknowledged the catastrophe. His up-to-date citation of the number of dead, his use of the word “holocaust” (a term favored by the States-Item), and his mention of arson demonstrated a fluency with current events that suggested a man who followed the news closely. His examination of the fire within the context of human rights was also telling. While avoiding the word “homosexual,” Hannan finally expressed sentiments that Troy Perry had spent the week of June 24 begging for him to say. But the timing had a nullifying effect. Decades later, gay and lesbian activists would ask Archbishop Hannan to apologize for never issuing a statement of sympathy after the fire. To these criticisms, Hannan, who would die and be interred at St. Louis Cathedral in September 2011, respond
ed by denying his silence—once even speculating that a subordinate, “who thought he knew my mind,” wrongly turned the MCC away from St. Louis Cathedral. Hannan, however, would never cite his July 19 column in these disavowals, which had a strange way of simultaneously absolving and implicating him.57

  HARDLY PLACATED AT the time was a select cluster of the New Orleans gay community. These newly outed gays, roused by the St. Mark’s memorial and calling themselves the Gay People’s Coalition (GPC), met with police to tame speculation and dispel fears of “vigilante action” surrounding the alleged racial profile of the Up Stairs Lounge arsonist. The GPC then posted a “Rumor Control” statement in Quarter bars: “There is no truth whatsoever to recent rumors of an identified suspect in the case of the Up Stairs Lounge fire.”58 The GPC also petitioned the mayor’s Human Relations Committee (HRC) with a proposal for organizing a “Taskforce on Gay Problems”:

  On June 24, the gay community faced the worst tragedy in its history—and the community-at-large responded only with embarrassed silence.

  But the time for silence and embarrassment is ended.59

  Perhaps Mayor Landrieu, a lifelong Catholic, read Hannan’s words in the Clarion Herald, or perhaps he had merely been biding his time to expend some capital. On Monday, August 6, the New Orleans Human Relations Committee agreed to an hourlong meeting with the Gay People’s Coalition. Considering that chairman Monsignor Arthur T. Screen, a Catholic priest answering to Archbishop Hannan, ordinarily set the HRC agenda, it’s clear that a high-ranking advisor like Landrieu vouched for the GPC to get the group on the calendar. Hearing testimony from MCC pastor Lucien Baril, Bill Rushton, and a lesbian spokesperson named Celeste Newbrough, the HRC then passed a resolution to devote six months of city-funded study to issues faced by local homosexuals. “The idea,” said an anonymous committee spokesperson, “is to get people to see that homosexuals are not just freaks they see on the street, but people they work with and respect.” The HRC also announced a local strategy to “get as many gay people as possible to declare that they are gay,” while qualifying that “this will either cause a great deal of embarrassment or cause them to be accepted.” Afterward, the proposed budget for the “Taskforce on Gay Problems,” which would pass in front of the mayor’s desk, received approval to move forward. Perhaps Landrieu had been moved by a tragic event, though not so moved as to align himself with homosexual activists in public, which remained beyond the reach of a politician facing a reelection campaign the next year. Within weeks, Landrieu also announced a Veterans Outreach Program to “locate and aid the veteran” in New Orleans.60 A compassionate and forward-thinking leader of citizens, he was also a man of his times.

  Emboldened by this win, the Gay People’s Coalition grew in numbers and expanded operations. Sharing a temporary headquarters with the MCC of New Orleans on Magazine Street, GPC volunteers started the city’s first gay telephone switchboard for emergencies. Additionally, they established a gay counseling committee to provide psychological services, opened a gay health clinic on North Rampart Street, and started a newspaper called Causeway. Sponsors from the MCC church and the National New Orleans Memorial Fund continued to support these projects, which were the first such services to be offered by homosexuals for homosexuals in New Orleans.61

  On August 15, in Atlanta, Troy Perry delivered a “State of the Church” address to the more than a thousand gay and lesbian delegates gathered for the MCC’s Fourth General Conference. He took a moment to eulogize the Up Stairs Lounge and called “the blaze that wiped out over one-third of the New Orleans congregation” a test of faith and an exemplar of spiritual “refiner’s fire.” Devastated, yet motivated, conference members seized on this message and used it to push for gay-to-lesbian outreach. MCC delegates voted to incorporate gender-inclusive language into their church charter and then elected the first female minister to their Board of Elders.62

  At this conference, Paul Breton ran into Lucien Baril. They rekindled their friendship and discussed the memorial fund. “It seems all is under control there,” Breton wrote in a letter to Morty Manford. “According to Lucien, no family has of yet contacted him for assistance either with funerals or other financial needs.” Baril, Breton observed, was displaying a unique flair for pastoring. Indeed, Baril spoke to The Advocate on multiple occasions about his efforts to place a plaque in memory of the fire victims at a public cemetery. A gay Hawaiian had carved and mailed a commemorative wooden plate in memoriam of the victims, which Baril put on display in his rectory.63 The rising profile of New Orleans had made his church the proverbial talk of the gay world.

  On September 11, 1973, Baril offered candid remarks to Joan Treadway, a Times-Picayune journalist writing a groundbreaking, six-part series on homosexuality. According to Baril, congregant numbers were up in his church, jumping “from about six to ten, to thirty-five to fifty.” The Up Stairs Lounge fire, despite culling his congregation back in June, now served as a fund-raising tool and an evocative springboard. The MCC of New Orleans was resilient, Baril insisted, and no fire survivors or families, he reiterated, had yet come forward with requests for monetary assistance.64

  The Advocate printed updates on the rising tally of the memorial fund, which topped $5,000 by July 26 and $15,000 by October 4, with the final amount being $17,299.20. “We are building a national sense of belonging out of this,” wrote Morris Kight to Up North Chicago leader Jack David, who had sent $1,500 from the Windy City. Miami held a “Warehouse VIII Benefit” in early August and gifted $1,370. Friends of Smokey’s Den in rural Springfield, Illinois, gave $308. The Anik Homophile Organization of Toronto gave $42. Reverend John Gill dispatched to Los Angeles all of the moneys collected in New Orleans and deposited for safekeeping by Lucien Baril, totaling $1,109.48. “Never have we had such a thing on which to build Gay Solidarity,” Kight responded.65

  A gay activist in California petitioned John Tunney, his Democratic senator in Washington. “On June 24, 1973, a tragic fire claimed the lives of over thirty people in the Upstairs [sic] Lounge in the New Orleans French Quarter,” read the letter. “Since that time, it has been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to secure comprehensive and/or accurate information regarding the subsequent investigation of that holocaust.” Rather than ignore the communiqué, Tunney passed it along to Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana. Long conferred with the Louisiana state fire marshal, who informed both senators that while the fire “is in the investigative stage all documents contained in the file are naturally not subject to public purview.”66 Thus were even two U.S. senators denied the ability to learn more about the case.

  CHAPTER 13

  Downfall

  September 1973–November 1974

  By early fall, there was increasing evidence that the tragedy had roused a cadre of gay New Orleanians in ways unthinkable just a season before. For example, Lucien Baril’s successes at being an activist minister led to his becoming a featured face and voice of gay life in New Orleans. In late July, Baril had taped a thirty-second “free speech message” for the Gay People’s Coalition (GPC), which aired in prime-time hours on WWL. Following that came a ten-minute taped interview on a public access UHF station, plus a ninety-minute gab session with radio host Joe Culotta. Aware of Baril’s ability to captivate, Bill Rushton campaigned for the GPC to join the Citizens United for Response Broadcasting, a consortium of more than thirty civil rights groups.1

  Baril developed plans for a public service announcement to promote gay tourism. The proposed script, which would likely have been censored due to federal broadcast restrictions, read:

  I like New Orleans.

  Do you know what I like about New Orleans so much?

  It’s the Gay life here.

  You can get any queer you want

  for a day

  for a week

  for a weekend

  Even 10 minutes, if you have no time.

  Gay is Great … 2

  In his enthusiasm, Baril ventured to fantasize that this ad
would be sponsored not by the GPC but by the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, a conservative lobbying group that advocated for downtown corporations.

  The boom fell on Baril quickly. While attending the August MCC conference in Atlanta, a church elder from Dallas shook hands with him and thought that the eccentric New Orleans minister looked somehow familiar. Upon further consideration, the Texan recognized Baril to be a person known as Richard Green, a con artist from the Dallas area. Baril, it turned out, was an impostor with experience inserting himself into trusting groups. “He was a funny little, nelly little fat man,” recalled Ricky Everett. “Young. And he had that charm that just kind of caught everybody.” As so many gay men took on aliases in this era, it was easy for a convicted swindler to blend in. Suddenly, it became terrifyingly clear why Baril had seized leadership of a distracted MCC. With donations pouring into the wounded congregation, Baril had ready access to the MCC church coffers.3

  Alarmed, the MCC church elder alerted Troy Perry and called the authorities. Baril, adept at reading situations, fled. The pastor, styling himself after Alfred Hitchcock and claiming to be of Russian Orthodox descent, absconded from the MCC rectory on Magazine Street with the church treasury. From late June to September, Baril had also been in charge of an undetermined amount of money in the National New Orleans Memorial Fund’s local checking account. Perhaps New Orleans’s philanthropy had been greater than existing records indicate. The $1,109.48 check from New Orleans, sent by John Gill to The Advocate and mentioned earlier, was likely a partial sum; the rest will probably never be accounted for, given that Baril kept the records.4