Tinderbox

  Following his disappearance, Baril was removed as a trustee of the memorial fund, and his name was disassociated from the national MCC church body and the New Orleans GPC. The circumstances of Baril’s exposure and ejection remained hush-hush: Troy Perry and fellow leaders probably wished to avoid highlighting the mistake of giving Baril responsibilities. Perhaps they hoped to limit the legal fallout of Baril’s misappropriations, which could tie up donations in an inquiry and prevent the money from reaching fire victims. In the defense of Troy Perry and John Gill, the appearance of an out personality like Lucien Baril, willing to be photographed and quoted, must have seemed like a godsend to gay leaders seeking assistance on the morning of June 25, 1973.5

  Nevertheless, Baril’s actions now jeopardized their emergency efforts, including the memorial fund and the existence of the now-penniless MCC of New Orleans. Writing Paul Breton, Morty Manford made oblique mention of Lucien Baril: “Troy and I had dinner Sunday night and spoke a bit about happenings in New Orleans.” Breton responded: “I talked with Troy over the weekend. He clued me in as to what was happening in New Orleans. It’s an unfortunate situation, but on the other hand, it’s easy to see how something like that can happen within our community.” Absent a financial infusion, the MCC of New Orleans faced the prospect of eviction from 1373–75 Magazine Street, thus losing every penny invested into the converted residence by Bill Larson, the deceased pastor. With Baril’s unmasking, faith in the MCC evaporated, and membership rolls for the local church dwindled from fifty to below fifteen. The national MCC Board of Elders downgraded New Orleans back to the status of a “mission.”6 The congregation was now crippled, through fire and embezzlement.

  Deacon Courtney Craighead attempted to step in and steady the flock, but his efforts couldn’t find footing. He was still processing his own trauma and would do so for decades. Stung twice in quick succession, by the fire and his parents, Courtney suppressed his agony. “He had pain at home,” observed Henry Kubicki. Courtney developed a habit of stockpiling his garbage and bottling his urine, according to Henry. Henry felt that his friend was “crashing the religious rail” and hoarding: two behaviors now closely associated with memory fixation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although such diagnoses did not exist in 1973. Even Vietnam vets of this era would be emasculated for displaying outward symptoms of post-traumatic stress, and PTSD wouldn’t be listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980.7

  As a result, Courtney never received a medical diagnosis for his behavior. No counseling services would be offered to fire survivors at Charity Hospital, and Courtney did not seek them out personally for fear that a psychologist would diagnose his “homosexual disorder” and use legal loopholes to commit him to a facility. The talented deacon, college educated and licensed as a radio technician, soldiered on with what Henry called a “pittance of a job.” Courtney worked as a janitor, mopping up messes at the Cenacle Retreat House in Metairie, Louisiana, for not much more than minimum wage. It was a protracted act of self-sabotage, of sadness seeking its own level. All was not dour, however, for the deacon. He relished the prospect of the 1974 Carnival season, and he obsessively prepared his Mardi Gras costume. In close to every facet, Courtney Craighead lived a life too distracted in these months to help a struggling church.8

  It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that New Orleans congregants appealed to national leaders for help. In the GPC’s Causeway newspaper, Richard Vincent, a Dallas pastor assigned to rescue the flock, assessed that “a preliminary check of the Church records indicated an indebtedness of almost $2000.” Vincent stated that “the first goals would be to seek funds to pay off all outstanding debts,” in spite of the goodwill donations that the church had received after the fire. “Until different facilities are located,” noted the story, “the MCC-New Orleans will continue meeting at its present location.”9 Within weeks, however, the bottom fell out, and Bill Larson’s congregation lost the building.

  TAKING ADVANTAGE OF the opportunity to jab the New Orleans Emergency Task Force in the wake of Baril’s exposure, an anonymous man in New Orleans claimed that he had written a $10,000 check for Up Stairs Lounge victims, which he said that a trustee of the memorial fund had endorsed. “But never did we receive such a sum,” Morris Kight would later write, “and our many calls for a photocopy of the check before and after failed, because we could never find the person.” It should be noted that there is no record of a check for $10,000 in the receipts journal for the national fund, which received an outside audit. Nevertheless, the anonymous man or men would continue to call up New Orleans radio shows to voice the same complaint. “Often the shows were run by homophobes,” Kight noted, “who would then tell of how horrible it all was that we should do that.” Ray Broshears, a gay minister in San Francisco, also made accusations against fund trustees. The assault on the gay leaders escalated, during which many who had, or had not, given to the memorial fund felt justified in heaving brickbats at Morris Kight and Troy Perry. A gay Louisianan wrote The Advocate to censure its coverage of the fire, which he claimed was harming his ability to heal. Another letter from Tampa ripped into Perry, accusing the minister of wasting America’s time during a TV appearance.10

  Between July and September, it had appeared that Up Stairs Lounge would inspire a unified gay rights movement in America. Lucien Baril’s embezzling and disappearance, however, provided ammunition to critics and brought an ignominious end to the New Orleans Emergency Task Force. More gay gathering places would come under attack, some within weeks. The MCC of San Francisco church burned to the ground, and a gay meetinghouse in Hawaii was destroyed by fire for the fifth time in two years. On October 2, the Indianapolis Police Department sent officers into an MCC prayer meeting and pronounced the faithful under arrest for “frequenting a dive”; Reverend John Gill flew to Indiana to lend his assistance.11

  In New Orleans, the Gay People’s Coalition dissolved shortly after losing its headquarters in the MCC building. Without GPC volunteers to petition officials, the proposed city-funded “Taskforce on Gay Problems” vanished from the Human Relations Committee agenda. City business resumed with its usual vigor. After several meetings between an architect and the mayor’s office, the handsome Louis Armstrong Memorial Park, patterned on the Tivoli Gardens of Copenhagen, received approval from the City Planning Commission, with a $5.9 million budget.12 In November Moon Landrieu easily won renomination for the 1974 mayoral election, taking 407 of 419 precincts with almost 70 percent of the vote.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER New Orleans police closed their case, deputy state fire marshals finally found the time to pursue the lead about Roger Dale Nunez having been stopped in a car in Morgan City. Tracing the car’s license plates to Abbeville, the investigators contacted the local sheriff’s office and confirmed the car’s registered address of 305 South Valery Street, Roger’s mother’s house.13

  On September 18, authorities issued a subpoena to question Roger and picked him up. Considering that investigators thought it necessary to serve a subpoena, it’s clear that neither the local sheriff nor the fire marshals were aware of the outstanding warrant for Roger’s parole violation. This warrant authorized more than just Roger’s presence for questioning; it demanded his arrest. The New Orleans Police Department, whose headquarters were across the street from the courthouse where the warrant was issued, also seemed to be out of the loop on this discrepancy, but the NOPD wasn’t participating in this roundup anyway.14

  Roger soon sat in the company of arson investigators at the Abbeville sheriff’s office. After a few inquiries, the fire marshals asked him if he would be willing to take a polygraph. Roger agreed. Because the Abbeville sheriff did not store such equipment on-site, investigators exploited a loophole by taking the suspect into custody and driving him more than a hundred miles to access a polygraph machine—from a rural police station to NOPD headquarters. Undoubtedly, this change of venue gave the fire marshals a psychological edge. They made R
oger wait over a lengthy drive. Reaching the police station and ascending into the bunkerlike chambers of the Detective Bureau, the marshals found an empty interrogation room and sat the suspect in a chair. A police polygraphist stood at the ready to confirm or deny the veracity of Roger’s words.15

  As the deputy state fire marshals prepared to conduct the interrogation, neither Charles Schlosser nor Sam Gebbia, the NOPD detectives assigned to the Up Stairs Lounge case, made themselves available. Nor did any other detective pop into the room and participate, though this was the “Detective Bureau.” This interview of Roger Nunez would remain absent from all police documents of the Up Stairs Lounge investigation, despite the NOPD’s insistence in its “General Case Report” that “any future developments in this matter will be covered in a Supplemental Report.” NOPD detectives would never find themselves able to question Roger Nunez while he lived or compile a “supplemental report,” even though he walked into their offices and identified himself, while a nearby court demanded that he stand before a judge.16 This wanted man, for whom they had searched the city since July 7, went ignored on their doorstep. The failure to acknowledge him reveals the NOPD in dereliction of the basic functions of a law enforcement agency, whereby “officers of the court” have a sworn duty to serve court orders such as warrants. Furthermore, Roger’s going unnoticed in these circumstances calls into question whether he received preferential treatment from police, perhaps due to some unseemly aspect of the Up Stairs Lounge case, and challenges the sincerity of NOPD efforts to find a culprit for what amounted to thirty-two homicides. No deadlier incident would strike New Orleans in 1973.

  The fire marshal investigators finally conducted an unimpeded interview of Roger from 6:25 to 6:55 p.m. on September 18. Since his release from Charity Hospital, Roger had been living in Abbeville and working as a deckhand at a place called D&B Boat Rentals. While at the boat company, Roger claimed to have survived an offshore accident. “I got a hit on the head, pretty bad,” he told the investigators, “and that’s what started me having more frequent seizures, than normal.” Roger had left Charity with metal braces on his jaw and claimed to have traveled out of town no more than two or three times: once to a nearby orthodontist, who removed the braces, and once for a religious meeting in a town called Grand Coteau, home of a nunnery and a famous Catholic shrine for healing. He did not recall the documented trip to Morgan City.17

  Roger recalled seeing Gene Davis around ten days after the fire, which would have been around July 7, something Davis did not mention in his July 9 statement to the NOPD. And Roger just could not piece together his visit to the Up Stairs Lounge on June 24, though he’d already admitted this to the fire marshals on July 2.18 “No, sir” and “I don’t know” were his preferred answers:

  Q:Were you in the Upstairs [sic] Lounge on Sunday, June 24, 1973?

  A:I could have been, sir. I don’t remember for sure. I have been there before on Sundays for what the Beer Bust was.

  Q:Were you there between the hours of five and seven fifty, P.M.?

  A:I don’t know sir.

  Q:Did you have a fight in the Upstairs Lounge on Sunday, June 24, 1973, sometime before 6:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.?

  A:I don’t think so. I could have. I don’t know for sure.

  Q:Do you know if there was a fire there?

  A:Yes, sir, I do know there was a fire there.

  Q:Do you know who set the fire?

  A:No, sir, I do not.

  Q:Did you set the fire?

  A:Oh, no, sir.19

  Puzzlingly, Roger did not remember owning the 1966 Plymouth Fury registered in his name or driving the car in July. Additionally, he did not remember transferring ownership of the vehicle to his mother shortly before she moved to Dallas, which had just happened in early September. Fire marshals found and produced a bill of sale for Roger’s purchase of the Fury. They found Roger’s application for a Louisiana driver’s license, in which he denied having a history of epilepsy, a condition that Roger admitted to in reference to his accident with D&B Boat Rentals. They also found Roger’s act of donation, which gifted the car to his mother, all of which he disavowed from memory.20

  Concerning the night of the fire, Roger couldn’t recall being with Mark Allen Guidry inside the Up Stairs Lounge and claimed not to know Mark Allen Guidry’s full name. He wasn’t sure how he had broken his jaw, although he was certain that it was not in a fight: “It’s not my nature to fight. I never fight.” Roger’s previous statement to the fire marshals on July 2 about “a fight with three Negroes on Iberville Street … who took his wallet and knocked him down” was not recollected. With regard to the fire scene on Iberville Street, Roger said that he could not remember those late hours or recognize the name Buddy Rasmussen.21

  With his boat injury, mentioned but unverified near the middle of the interview,22 Roger provided justification for memory gaps, which he cited often. Yet how could he forget owning a car for a period of several months but remember his employment at D&B Boat Rentals, where he had driven that car on workdays? How could Roger recall precisely how he had experienced an accident at D&B Boat Rentals involving a broken cable but forget the circumstances of another injury that had put him in the hospital? For an impaired human being with random access to memory, Roger did seem to recollect details that would help his position while being unable to recollect details that might draw him into entanglements.

  Unhappy with the interview, the marshals signaled that it was now time for Roger Dale Nunez to face the lie detector. But the police polygraphist informed them that he couldn’t perform such a test. He explained that he wouldn’t be able to get an accurate read because of the suspect’s epilepsy. The anticonvulsant medication in Roger’s system, Dilantin, lowered stress and blood pressure to such a degree that a lie detector was ineffective. With that, the deputy state fire marshals were done.23 They drove Roger all the way back to Abbeville. The investigators had finally had their day with him, but they had little to show for it.

  In October, the Louisiana state fire marshals found another way to test Roger’s truthfulness. The solution was an investigatory tool called the Dektor Psychological Stress Evaluation (PSE), a voice-mediated test billed as effective even for people with epilepsy. The Dektor PSE was designed to hear stress in vocal chords when the brain was forced to contradict a statement it knew to be false. Fire marshal investigators again drove to Abbeville, once more without NOPD counterparts. There, in the suspect’s hometown, they commenced a Dektor PSE test for Roger, who by this stage had retained the services of a local attorney. Roger often spoke unevenly.24 His voice possessed a pitchy, neurasthenic quality.

  To get a baseline for stress levels, Roger spoke into an ultrasensitive microphone and was instructed to answer both yes and no to direct questions. According to the fire marshal report, “Mr. Nunez showed stress to pertinent questions about the case.” When investigators instructed him to answer no to the question “Did you set the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge?,” Roger’s stress levels spiked, and the test administrator made the note, “Stress indiacting [sic] that he is lying. He does have knowledge of the crime.” When instructed to answer “No” to the question “Did you set the fire in the stairway?,” Roger’s stress levels spiked again, and the administrator wrote, “Stress indicating that he is lying. Hard Stress.” Roger would answer just thirteen questions—lasting fewer than ten minutes—before his attorney advised him to end the assessment.25 They rose abruptly and left.

  Although Roger’s Dektor PSE might seem damning, the results only provided a semiempirical measurement of stress in his vocal chords. Because the PSE required a trained Dektor administrator to interpret the data, the test was prone to subjective interpretation, much like the polygraph, and therefore difficult to present as legal evidence.26

  AT ABOUT THE same time, a small uprising took place in America’s mental health establishment. When seventeen thousand psychologists assembled in Montreal for the American Psychological Association’s 1973 convention
, gay and lesbian psychologists made themselves visible to their colleagues for the first time. An organization called the Association of Gay Psychologists, heretofore operating behind closed doors, took the radical step of holding an open forum and set forth an agenda that “homosexuality be recognized as a viable alternative life-style rather than as a sickness.” This advocacy reflected a fundamental pivot for a clinical field that had at best contributed to homosexual stigma and, at worst, used that stigma to turn “sexual psychopaths” into permanent patients or human test subjects, à la the electrode experiments of Dr. Robert Heath at Tulane University.27

  Shortly after the revolt of psychologists, psychiatrists followed suit. That December, the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association approved a proposal to remove homosexuality as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the medical volume cited by not just doctors but also preachers and politicians as reason to oppress homosexuals. “In the past,” the resolution noted, “homosexuals have been denied civil rights in many areas of life on the ground that because they suffer from a ‘mental illness’ the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate their competence, reliability or mental stability.” The psychiatrists had also considered strong counterarguments. While a significant proportion of homosexuals, the proposal noted, are satisfied with their orientations, another proportion of homosexuals wish to be treated.28

  Given this rationale, the proposal to remove homosexuality created, with the same stroke, a new condition: sexual orientation disturbance, defined as “individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward people of the same sex.”29 For some gay activists, the delisting of homosexuality on the DSM represented a milestone. For others, it was a Pyrrhic victory, which ensured that clinically assisted attempts to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals would go forward with the same moral and legal impunity.