Tinderbox

  LAGPAC rallied in response and demanded meetings with Police Chief Morris and New Orleans Mayor Morial. Both officials complied and claimed to be caught off-balance by the actions of police rank and file. However, reportedly Henry Morris at first defended the arrests by telling a LAGPAC representative, “Four or five of you on the street is okay, but there are just too many of you; you need to get off the streets.” LAGPAC leaders, of course, immediately compared this statement with Morris’s “queer bar” comment from 1973, although they did not cite additional memories of the fire after retrieving that relevant detail. Charges were dropped, and Morial made the following statement: “It is and has been the official policy of this administration not to discriminate against anyone on the basis of … sexual orientation.” Morris asked LAGPAC, in writing, to “strive to work together for future better Community relations” rather than “trying to specifically concentrate on past instances.”8

  Quietly, in an act of charity unbeknownst to LAGPAC members or City Hall, Roeling Mace and Vic Scalise, two local gay leaders, donated burial space—an expensive proposition in a city with limited room for elaborate death rites—to the MCC. Mace and Scalise allocated one slot in a communal crypt for the ashes of Bill Larson. The pastor’s ashes had sat in an urn inside the MCC altar for the previous eight years, during which the itinerant church had often struggled. The fear of losing or misplacing his remains was always present, especially when the congregation relocated or new pastors took charge.9 But this endowment would provide the fallen pastor with a permanent resting place.

  The donors—who, it’s worth noting, were founding members of the gay Mardi Gras Krewe of Amon-Ra, a group with which MCC Deacon Courtney Craighead and Buddy Rasmussen were affiliated—had evidently tired of waiting for the national MCC to fund this venture and acted independently. Bill Larson’s ashes were entombed at New Orleans’s St. Roch Cemetery #1 on September 9, 1981. Afterward, the pastor’s crypt failed to receive a stone plate bearing his name, as the endowment did not make those funds available. Larson’s grave would, thus, be an unmarked one—unknown, except for those who attended the small burial service or sought paper records.10

  Although Bill Larson never held the title in his life, he was entered into cemetery rolls as “Rev. William R. Larson,” his designation of “Reverend” reflecting a posthumous elevation11 (although neither Troy Perry nor MCC elders explained when Larson was awarded the title). Here, in the annals of these burial grounds, Larson was recognized as he wished to be: an ordained minister and member of the clergy.

  LOCAL ATTITUDES TOWARD outness began to change as gays and lesbians advanced their status from invisibles to vocal members of the body politic. “Gay Fest,” a celebration of homosexual pride, was held at Armstrong Park in 1981 and emceed by an aspiring comedienne named Ellen DeGeneres. “It became much more tolerant,” recalled Cabildo Gallery owner Joseph Bermuda in the Quarter, “but gays always were singled out.” Leon Irwin III, the former Louisiana Democratic National Committeeman who by 1981 was chairman of the Downtown Development District for New Orleans, was outed on local TV when he was filmed soliciting a male prostitute as part of an investigative series called “Cruisin’ the Streets.” Consequently, Irwin spent a few sheepish weeks out of town, but he would neither be arrested nor shunned for the incident, which metamorphosed over time into another piece of New Orleans lore.12

  Some gay men who shied away from activism felt compelled to get involved. Steven Duplantis joined LAGPAC in 1982 and ran for the office of treasurer—a reversal from his refusal to self-identify or give testimony about Roger Dale Nunez in 1973. For months after the fire, Steven had sat at his desk at Randolph Air Force Base wondering if this was the day that military policemen would usher him to his court-martial for fellating a fellow serviceman. His paperwork to transfer to the Louisiana Air National Guard was kept “in process” for months. Finally, Steven mustered the courage to press an audience with his commanding officer. “Okay, I know all about your paperwork,” said the man tauntingly. Steven finally wrote an uncle, an air force general in the Pentagon, about the holdup. Days later, he miraculously received his transfer to the air guard—a reserve militia under state authority.13 Thus did he escape his federal inquisitors.

  Steven had long since moved back home to Lake Charles and mended relations with family, who learned to be accepting of his lifestyle. His weekend sprees with Stewart Butler and Alfred Doolittle—coinciding with his one-weekend-a-month duties at the Louisiana Air National Guard station in New Orleans—became wilder and more convenient. At the culmination of his military career, Steven Duplantis would receive an honorable discharge for more than a decade of service.14

  GAYS PLANTED CIVIC roots just in time to face an almost biblical pestilence. The local gay weekly Impact christened 1983 “The Year Many Would Like to Forget,” the year of the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) outbreak. Persistent rumors of a “Rare Cancer Seen in Forty-One Homosexuals” were reported in The New York Times as early as 1981; this metamorphosed into declarations of a “Homosexual Plague” by Newsweek in 1982. Alarm bells sounded in Louisiana with talk of “gay-related immune deficiency” (GRID), a name abandoned when the disease spread to heterosexuals and received the more familiar abbreviation AIDS.15

  To conservative alarmists, this new illness confirmed everything that Anita Bryant had tried to forewarn. Although isolated cases of a disease attacking the immune system had been documented since the late 1960s, little federal funding had been allotted for studies that might have connected those cases, which had mostly involved homosexuals and other “undesirables.” According to figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control at the time, eight reported cases of AIDS in 1979 swelled to more than twelve hundred by the end of 1982, with about a 60 percent death rate. One could rarely find a news story about homosexuality in this era that did not also include some degree of AIDS coverage.16

  The first AIDS victims, often visually identifiable through purple Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, became what Time called “The New Untouchables,” and the U.S. Public Health Service almost immediately began counseling gay men not to give blood donations. Between the delisting of “homosexuality” as a mental illness in 1973 and the AIDS outbreak, it thus took only a decade for gays to be restigmatized by the medical establishment. Blood drive efforts for gay emergencies, such as those for the Up Stairs Lounge victims, became a thing of the past.17

  By April 1983, about five new AIDS cases were being reported every day in the United States, and five individuals in New Orleans had already died of the illness. “Gays’ Disease Spreads to Heterosexuals,” ran a particularly charged Times-Picayune headline. Crowd sizes in gay bars trickled off. The Canal Baths in New Orleans announced its closing after attendance fell. “We’re throwing in the sponge,” said the owner, attempting humor. Blood donation centers in New Orleans sat empty, as state officials told the Times-Picayune that people were “deathly afraid” of blood-borne illnesses. One study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported by the Picayune, concluded that children could get AIDS from “routine close contact” with infected members of a household.18

  A gay and lesbian coalition called the NO/AIDS Task Force filed articles of incorporation in June 1983 to stem the tide of discrimination. That October, the new group sponsored a candlelight vigil in Jackson Square, and Mayor Ernest Morial participated as a keynote speaker. Indeed, the mayor took the podium and readily admitted, “There has been an unwillingness in certain quarters to do the research necessary to address this dreaded disease.” His words encouraged activists to make further moves to beat back the silence. According to a 1984 survey, nearly 73 percent of gay New Orleanians remained closeted in the workplace, with more than 55 percent reporting that “it would be a problem at work if their sexual orientation were known.”19

  As the AIDS debate grew more heated, with some surveys suggesting that more than 40 percent of Americans favored limiting the civil rights of AIDS patients, the
death toll mounted. Morty Manford and Leonard Matlovich wasted away and then perished. Activist Bill Rushton contracted the virus, which eventually killed him. His Times-Picayune obituary declared him dead of a “long bout of liver trouble,” thereby closeting a gay pioneer in the grave. Up Stairs Lounge survivor Jason Guidry faced a quieter, but no less agonizing, fate. Bishop Finis Crutchfield, who bravely supported the Up Stairs Lounge victims at St. Mark’s Methodist Church, contracted a mysterious illness and then succumbed. United Methodist Church leaders initially counseled his family not to discuss the cause, which was listed on the death certificate, a public document, as AIDS.20

  Misinterpreting Morial’s show of support as blanket sponsorship of the homosexual agenda, LAGPAC proposed an ordinance to expand human rights protections for gay men and lesbians. Stewart Butler and Roberts Batson lobbied the New Orleans City Council and created draft legislation by 1984. Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry Jr. personally endorsed their work. Barry cited several instances of discrimination against homosexuals in a packet on New Orleans gay history. However, the handout conspicuously omitted the Up Stairs Lounge fire as such an event. Mayor Morial would never offer the same endorsement. LAGPAC’s campaign became quashed when Archbishop Philip Hannan registered his condemnation. Hannan, a political heavyweight in a heavily Catholic city, sent letters of admonition to all City Council members. Additionally, the archdiocese alerted church groups, at least one Catholic elementary school, and many parish priests, with instructions to rally the laity.21

  On April 12, 1984, the LAGPAC ordinance failed to pass, by a vote of three to three. Councilman James Singleton, unreachable on military leave, absented himself from having to cast the tiebreaking vote. Mayor Morial could not be reached for comment later, although a high-ranking official told the Picayune that, “if the mayor had pushed it, the ordinance would have passed easily.” Councilman Joseph Giarrusso, a former New Orleans police chief who’d boasted of his officers making 217 “homosexual arrests” in 1965, voted no and claimed that the ordinance would result in “reverse discrimination” against heterosexuals.22

  After LAGPAC’s loss, Rod Wagener established a new political lobbying group for “human rights.” Even though Wagener planned to advance a homosexual agenda, he evidently felt that the term “human rights” was more palatable for New Orleanians. Wagener christened his organization the George Steven Matyi Private Trust, misspelling the middle name of his dead lover. In its first three years, the trust spent $500,000 lobbying for gay causes. Wagener published a political pamphlet on June 24, 1988—the fifteenth anniversary of the immolation of Bud Matyi at the Up Stairs Lounge. In this report, Wagener declined to cite the Up Stairs Lounge at all or invoke its memory to highlight discrimination.23 This can be taken as proof that Rod Wagener, like many, continued to suffer in code.

  Building courage slowly, Wagener eventually found himself able to declare his sexuality, albeit in an indirect way. He agreed to an expansive, on-the-record interview about his shared past with Bud Matyi to Johnny Townsend, a groundbreaking historian just beginning to research a book about the Up Stairs Lounge fire. “A people cannot exist as a people without a history,” Wagener told Townsend. Wagener hoped to live long enough to see this book published, but he would die in 1991—twenty years before Townsend’s Let the Faggots Burn appeared.24

  Meanwhile, LAGPAC rallied back. In 1986, it proposed another municipal ordinance, and the measure received sponsorship from Johnny Jackson, a black councilman. Archbishop Hannan again opposed the measure. On December 4, after hours of debate in which more than 120 people spoke for and against, the ordinance was soundly defeated by a vote of five to two—an even wider margin than in 1984. Councilman Jackson pounded on his podium and asked, “Why is this not a civil matter?” Councilman Joseph Giarrusso, voting no for a second time, lectured LAGPAC that it had failed to prove how homosexuals were subject to discrimination.25

  In fact, no local law offering protections to homosexual residents would pass until after Rich Magill, a close ally of Stewart Butler, dedicated two years to assembling data that disbelievers like Giarrusso would accept. Magill’s comprehensive and excoriating study on the closet and homophobia, entitled Exposing Hatred: A Report on the Victimization of Lesbian and Gay People in New Orleans, Louisiana, was published in 1991. In its eighty-nine pages, it delineated a campaign of brutality against homosexuals in the so-called live-and-let-live Big Easy. Nearly 80 percent of the survey respondents reported some form of antigay victimization in their lives: rape, harassment, vandalism, police abuse, bomb threats, and arson.26 In a move that surprised many and angered a few, Magill chose to dedicate his study to a lost set of victims:

  Remembering the 32 people lost in the Up Stairs Lounge Fire on June 24, 1973 604 Iberville at Charters, French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana … 27

  This was the first attempt in nearly twenty years to bring the fire to wider attention. Beside each alphabetically listed victim, Magill included the person’s age at time of death and a brief description. Indeed, the memory of the dead had lingered all this time. Magill knew that the fire remained an untended wound. For years, Stewart Butler tried to share his stories with those who would listen. The burnt-out shell of the Up Stairs Lounge had never been reoccupied by another bar. Empty for much of the 1980s, the space had only been recently converted into administrative offices for the Jimani tavern—still in business on the corner, one floor down.28

  It was a dark history, certain to fester, which made Magill’s decision to include the dedication a measure of last resort, but the effect of the fire’s presentation in this report—up front, right after the title page—created a whole new consciousness. Running one’s eyes over the thirty-two names was like gazing upon a row of gravestones. City officials were now forced to acknowledge that antigay bias existed and even came with a body count. With the Magill report in hand, Councilman Giarrusso expressed satisfaction. The City Council at last voted to approve an ordinance protecting sexual minorities.29

  The latent memory of the Up Stairs Lounge had won the sympathy of a majority of elected leaders and helped secure new human rights protections. Yet, despite the resulting victory for gay citizens, there continued to be no public remembrances for the Up Stairs Lounge, even two years later, on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre. That back-alley bar on the border of the French Quarter remained in a condition that Deacon Courtney Craighead would later verbalize: in a historic closet.30

  CODA

  Second Line

  June 22, 2003

  The day arrived like a prodigal son, long absent from home, but it looked just like any other day of the week. Horses and buggies lined up in Jackson Square. Tourists headed to Café du Monde for morning beignets and café au laits. Residents watered plants on balconies, which drained to cobblestones below and gathered in puddles. The city, in its never-ending cycle of bloom and decay, seemed to be able to stanch the march of time, and yet renewal was in the air as Reverend Dexter Brecht readied himself for the fire’s thirtieth anniversary.1

  So much had happened since Dexter Brecht began his mission to revive the fire’s history, by making the tragedy the centerpiece of his MCC service in 1995. Courtney Craighead did not volunteer to join his committee, as the deacon had hinted in an interview with reporter Mark Thompson from the Times-Picayune. Thompson had respected Courtney Craighead’s request for anonymity as a source and quoted him merely as “a deacon,” although there were no other deacons for the church, in the ensuing story.2 Twenty-two years after the fire, it had still behooved Courtney to shield himself in such a manner.

  Considering that his name had been published widely in the 1970s, a request for anonymity in the 1990s appeared like a token gesture masking deeper torment. Fire survivors like Courtney had managed on their own, in their own ways, and sometimes did not. Formerly a socialite who behaved like the grown-up version of the boy scout that he had been, Courtney had retreated for decades from bar life and thrown himself headlong into chu
rch ministry. “That was his real identity, as a deacon of MCC,” said Reverend Brecht. “That’s really who he wanted to be.” Such pain, even when sublimated by prayer, would not vanish, and Courtney had engaged in many private counseling sessions with Brecht to cope.3

  Nevertheless, with the story’s publication in 1995, Courtney Craighead did begin to identify himself more readily with the past. “I think my continuing to talk about the event,” recalled Brecht, “and holding him up as an example as one of our forebears in the development of queer culture in New Orleans made him more comfortable with being able to talk about it and be recognized.” For the first time, the deacon called himself a “survivor” at public events. He gave an on-the-record interview to the Times-Picayune in 1998, during which he admitted how many “were, in effect, outed by the fire.” These were meaningful signs to fellow congregants that their deacon deemed the fire less excruciating to remember. Even with this progress, Courtney chose to speak guardedly, telling the Picayune in this interview that the fire “should not be politicized.”4

  When a museum approached the deacon to give his testimony, Courtney agreed to do so under the condition that, according to the curator’s notes, the tragedy was “not seen as a ‘hate crime,’ ” and that the event didn’t become “a media circus or political issue.” This was a sentiment shared by many Up Stairs Lounge survivors, who were cautious about their pain being co-opted. “The Up Stairs Lounge was not a gay rights tragedy nor did it ever play a part in any gay rights movement,” explained Ricky Everett. “The gay pride or gay rights thing was a lie perpetrated by Troy Perry at the time of the fire. He was attempting to use that tragedy to promote gay pride.”5 Indeed, MCC pastor Perry’s role in the Up Stairs Lounge aftermath remained the subject of debate for decades.