Tinderbox
Page 28
Leagues away from New Orleans, national Gay Liberation groups continued their push for the expansion of civil rights for gays and lesbians. On January 18, 1977, the Dade County Commission, with jurisdiction over Miami, approved an ordinance to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This legislation, heralded as a victory for gays in Florida, led to an unanticipated backlash from conservative Christians on a level not seen in American politics since Prohibition. Prior to the passage of this ordinance, Gay Liberation’s greatest adversaries had been members of law enforcement, such as Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis or New Orleans police major Henry Morris. But, with the triumph in Dade County, Gay Liberation inspired a new political nemesis: the thirty-six-year-old Bible-thumping singer Anita Bryant.27
Bryant’s antihomosexual Save Our Children coalition arrived on the scene as a veritable hurricane and effectively manipulated fears of pedophilia to push for an overturn of gay rights in Dade County. Bryant, who had been second runner-up at the 1959 Miss America pageant and was now the lipsticked spokeswoman for Florida orange juice, deftly used her media savvy to become the voice of an American public previously too mortified to discuss homosexuality. Within weeks, her campaign had garnered more than 64,000 signatures to put the question of gay nondiscrimination on the ballot, so that voters could decide whether to approve or repeal the ordinance.28
Bryant was winning, and winning handily, in a newfound game of identity politics. Frequently citing her four school-age kids as exemplars, Bryant claimed that the new law “discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community.” Homosexual rights, in Bryant’s view, were part of a conspiracy to corrupt the nation’s young. Her fear of homosexuals preying upon children was founded in the faulty concept of “gay recruitment,” or the idea that homosexuality was not a biological orientation but a debauched lifestyle that the vulnerable could be seduced into joining.29
With her folksy aphorisms, Bryant made a compelling case that since homosexuals can’t reproduce, they need a continuous supply of fresh blood for their aberrant practices. No gesture of legitimization for gay citizens seemed too slight to escape her penchant for public shaming. When President Carter invited two dozen leaders from the National Gay Task Force, including Troy Perry, to the White House in March 1977, she issued sharp words: “I protest the action of the White House staff in dignifying these activists for special privilege with a serious discussion of their alleged ‘human rights.’ ” That Carter stayed at Camp David while White House aide Midge Costanza met the gay leaders did not assuage her. “Behind the high-sounding appeal against discrimination in jobs and housing, which is not a problem to the ‘closet’ homosexual,” she continued, “they are really asking to be blessed in their abnormal life style by the office of the President of the United States.” With Carter’s absence, Troy Perry privately rued that he missed an opportunity to tell a president about the Up Stairs Lounge fire.30
Bryant’s crusade in metropolitan Miami triumphed on June 7 when voters repealed the gay nondiscrimination ordinance by a two-to-one margin. “Anita Wins, Gay Rights Defeated,” read the front-page headline of the Chicago Tribune. St. Paul, Minnesota; Eugene, Oregon; Wichita, Kansas; and Seattle, Washington were all considering similar rollbacks. Mainstream Americans, it seemed, had beaten back sex radicals through the commonsensical voice of a mother figure. Jubilant, Anita Bryant danced before cameras at the victory rally and told The New York Times, “All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help, we will prevail.”31
Gay Liberation leaders rebounded with ire. Sensing weakness in an opposition built around one core personality, gay groups retaliated directly against Bryant and strategized ways to kneecap her where it counted: in her professional ability to reap rewards from her celebrity. The National Gay Task Force called for a universal boycott of orange juice. Seventy percent of Bryant’s concert bookings canceled, and Bryant adapted by accepting what few performance opportunities she could get, including a Shriners’ concert in Chicago and events in Southern cities like Houston and New Orleans. On June 14 in Chicago, three thousand Midwestern gay men and lesbians encircled the Shriners’ concert at the Medinah Temple chanting “Pray for Anita.” In Houston, two days later, eight thousand people marched with Troy Perry to an anti-Bryant rally outside the annual convention for the Texas State Bar Association at the Hyatt Regency, where she had booked her concert.32
In New Orleans, organizers had the benefit of national momentum to plan a fitting welcome for Bryant. Indeed, Gay Liberation’s successes in Chicago and Houston helped closeted New Orleanians develop an appetite for politics. The city’s Municipal Auditorium had already agreed to host Bryant as part of an orchestra series called the Summer Pops, so gay activists like Bill Rushton seized the opportunity for a political head-to-head. Rushton met with leaders of seven gay and lesbian organizations to found the Human Equal Rights for Everyone (HERE) coalition to oppose Bryant. Seven of the city’s gay Carnival krewes joined. In this campaign, Rushton worked with the benefit of an “inside man” at the Municipal Auditorium in Roberts Batson, who managed the venue. “I knew I was gay from when I was eight,” explained Batson, a gentleman cut from a similar cloth as Tennessee Williams. In a show of cross-movement solidarity, the National Organization for Women and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference also endorsed HERE.33
Rod Wagener, who, as most industry colleagues knew, lost Bud Matyi at the Up Stairs Lounge, risked the closet and his career by shepherding the passage of an American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) resolution to ban any union member from participating in the Bryant concert. This maneuver had potential to scuttle the concert because Bryant was an AFTRA member. Wagener, however, was abandoned by AFTRA allies, who reconvened under pressure to lift the ban. “No one really knew what they were voting on before,” explained an anonymous board member who changed positions.34
Paul Killgore, a New Orleanian who’d attended the St. Mark’s memorial service in 1973 but abhorred the political scene, got involved with HERE. “I was so incensed at the time,” he recalled. HERE secured permits from City Hall for a protest rally, to be held at Jackson Square at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 18, and Bill Rushton retrofitted an activist headquarters out of the Vieux Carré Courier offices. Through Rushton’s diligence, HERE printed and mailed 8500 rally posters around the country. “Miami, come help us demonstrate for human rights,” read one notice. “Housing will be provided. . . . For more information contact Bill Rushton.” More than a thousand additional posters went up in local bathhouses and gay bars—the very businesses that had refused to post Troy Perry’s Up Stairs Lounge memorial flyers four years earlier. For HERE organizers, Bryant put a name and a face on a previously featureless set of adversaries bearing an elusive prejudice. Such opposition, when cast in the open, made itself vulnerable to critique. Responding to the surge in activism, Leonard Matlovich, the discharged army sergeant who outshone even Troy Perry in national celebrity by 1977, agreed to come to New Orleans.35
June 18 arrived in New Orleans with a torrential storm—weather so inhospitable that HERE organizers wondered whether anyone would turn up for their event. With less than an hour to go, skies cleared, and more than two thousand demonstrators materialized in Jackson Square, as if out of nowhere. They emerged from restaurants and side streets into the rally point before St. Louis Cathedral. Alarmed at the mob of gays and lesbians amassed in front of their basilica, Catholic authorities phoned the city, and police snipers posted themselves at key vantage points. “They were on the roofs of the Pontablas, the Cabildo and the Presbytere,” recalled gay activist Roger Nelson, noting the historic buildings that overlook Jackson Square. “They were on mounted patrol, in squad cars up and down the adjoining streets and at every gate to the park. I think they expected trouble. Instead they got peace.”36
Leonard Matlovich took the bullhorn and spoke loudly, his presence lending power. He asked
the protesters to follow his lead. A river of bodies surged out of Jackson Square down St. Ann Street toward the Municipal Auditorium. “Out of the closets and into the streets!” they shouted, conjuring a favored chant from pride parades. “Out of the closets and into the streets,” shouted Stewart Butler and Alfred Doolittle. “As we’re going along, kind of like the pied piper,” recalled Paul Killgore, “there are these people joining us.”37
Gay men strode down the so-called lavender line of St. Ann Street, which had invisibly cordoned off their folk from straight revelers for years. “Nervous eyes peered out of bars, while others braved the streets to follow the march,” reported the Picayune. “Balconies all over the Quarter were lined with detached supporters of the movement.” Protesters reached the barrier of Rampart Street and turned left, soon amassing at their destination.38
In a final act of intimidation, police officers attempted to scatter the crowd outside the Municipal Auditorium by threat of identification. They pulled out cameras, instead of nightsticks. “There are all of these policemen with these video cameras taping all of this video,” recalled Paul Killgore. “All of these policemen taking these still photos of all of us that are participating. So, whatever happened with those, I will never know.” But the multitude stayed put, shouting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Anita Bryant’s got to go,” with individuals raising their middle fingers at the officers pressing click, lighting up flashbulbs and threatening to “out” them for their impudence.39
Reporter Alan Citron, covering the event for the Times-Picayune, deemed the rally “the biggest gay rights protest in the city’s history.” Tapping reservoirs of courage, most of these thousands stood unaware of a smaller groundswell that had occurred just up Rampart Street, four years prior, at St. Mark’s Methodist Church. Mourners of the Up Stairs Lounge had gathered there and faced other cameras.40 From those leaps in 1973, trailblazers like Bill Rushton, Paul Killgore, and Stewart Butler had motivated others to take the same journey.
Inside the auditorium, Anita Bryant crooned patriotic ditties and chanced ironically on a cover of Judy Garland’s ballad “Over the Rainbow.” When the audience ceased applauding, chanting could be heard from revelers outside. During Bryant’s New Orleans appearance, a Florida state official confirmed that Bryant might soon be losing her $100,000-a-year job promoting Florida oranges. “The whole thing is just a mess,” averred Arthur Darling, director of publicity for the Florida Department of Citrus. Later that year, as if a summation of the Save Our Children fallout, Bryant would receive a pie to the face from a gay activist during a televised news conference.41
Roberts Batson still remembers hearing the clarion call of friends in protest as he managed the Anita Bryant concert—on the other side of police barriers. Batson eventually met Leonard Matlovich in person. “You’ve got to come out,” Matlovich implored him. “You’ve got to come out because, now, your parents and friends and loved ones are voting against you because they don’t know you’re gay.” The Municipal Auditorium would later award Batson for his “spirit of commitment and the will to accomplish,” but he could never forget what Matlovich said. Batson would take greater pains to be self-identifying. He eventually left the auditorium and outed himself as a gay activist. “The most skilled and experienced [gay] men and women I knew wouldn’t come forward and lead the way into the political arena, mostly because they wouldn’t come out,” wrote Batson of this period. “They would contribute quietly and from the background, they told me, if others would be out front.”42
CHAPTER 15
Last Resort
1978–1993
Rod Wagener, who had taken a brave stance against Anita Bryant in 1977, suddenly couldn’t get a daytime slot on WGSO, his radio station, despite strong ratings. Sidelined to a less desirable evening time, he eventually received a pink slip in what was called “an economic move.” With his career at a standstill, Wagener decided to abandon all caution and run for a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives, while still in the closet, as a liberal candidate. In the race, Wagener accused one opponent of being “anti-Black, anti-labor and anti-ERA [Equal Rights Amendment].” Despite his local celebrity, Wagener was trounced in the primary.1
The city moved past all the Bryant hoopla, as New Orleans, in the wake of trauma and tragedy, is wont to do. Times seemed to change nationally as Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, of the so-called Christian Right, rose to prominence. It seemed like a new breed of conservatism was blossoming as Southern and fiscal Democrats switched their allegiances. Meanwhile John Lennon was gunned down by a disturbed fan almost exactly two years after gay icon and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk was murdered. New Orleans reentered the public imagination through Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, which introduced the world to a host of immortal characters haunting the Vieux Carré—a city so beautiful it could metaphorically eat you alive.2
Even as New Orleans was growing in legend, however, the city was losing population and economic power. The NBA franchise the New Orleans Jazz couldn’t last more than five years in town before uprooting to Utah. Perceptually, the Big Easy needed a wholesome win, and it found one in 1980. After racking up more than $10 million in costs, Louis Armstrong Memorial Park finally opened. A lineup of jazz legends, from Count Basie to Dave Brubeck, convened at the unveiling, performing on stages nestled between artificial coves in the thirty-one-acre park. Armstrong’s widow addressed a crowd of thousands, and former mayor Moon Landrieu and his successor, Ernest Morial, the former judge and the city’s first black mayor, also made speeches.3
The same year that Louis Armstrong Memorial Park premiered to the public, Regina Soleto legally changed her name to Regina Adams—taking the surname of her murdered beau. It was a gesture meant to honor the love of her life and the role he’d played in her transformation. That way, she could always be his “queen.”4
Shortly after the Armstrong Park showcase, a band of sixty homosexuals, including Stewart Butler and Roberts Batson, founded the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus, more popularly known as LAGPAC. At last, politics-averse New Orleans boasted a gay group working “through the political system to promote full equality and civil rights for all lesbians and gay men.” LAGPAC’s primary objectives were the repeal of all criminal statutes against sexual expression and the passage of a human rights ordinance protecting homosexuals. With national and regional outreach a priority, LAGPAC coordinated with the National Gay Task Force and the Houston Gay Political Caucus to establish a gay vote network.5
Concurrent with these forward strides, an internal memo passed hands at the Louisiana Office of the State Fire Marshal in Baton Rouge. This note, paperclipped to a folder, put an end to the investigation of the Up Stairs Lounge, which had dogged investigators and occupied state resources since the early morning of June 25, 1973. “This report was submitted to the Dist. Att’y,” wrote the chief of the Arson Division. “The suspect at the time, Roger Nunez, has since committed suicide. There was no other evidence or information pointing to anyone other than the above mentioned person. The investigators were completely satisfied that he was the person who set the fire. No charges were ever accepted by the D.A., N.O., LA. It is requested that this file be closed.” No one at LAGPAC, not even Stewart Butler, heard of the Up Stairs Lounge case’s having reached an end, and the state certainly didn’t call a press conference to announce it.6 The final report on the fire, which included the Roger Nunez interview that took place in the NOPD Detective Bureau, was shipped to state archives and microfiched, with the original documents then destroyed. The seven-year search for answers ended not with a proverbial bang but a bureaucratic whimper.
The New Orleans Police Department, likewise, purged all functional memory of the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy. In 1980, the department elevated Henry M. Morris to the role of interim police superintendent of New Orleans. Under Morris, homosexual residents once again became targets of harassment. Anticrime pat
rols would stop more than one hundred male couples in the French Quarter without cause and force them to fill out “Field Identification Cards,” which could be used to identify suspects for future lineups. On the weekend of April 24, 1981, more than ninety gay men and women—including LAGPAC cofounder Roberts Batson—were arrested. Police detained fifty-two men in one evening in a blitzkrieg effort that involved pulling a paddy wagon up to a well-known gay bar. At the station, police charged pedestrians with violation of “obstruction of free passage,” legalese for blocking a sidewalk. A police commander publicly defended the use of this ordinance to “protect the merchants of the city and to alleviate any potential fire hazards.”7 These roundups highlighted the lack of progress made by local gays, despite high turnouts at events like the anti–Anita Bryant demonstrations.