Tinderbox

  Perhaps the combination of this desire to share with a fear of being hurt, a condition of inner struggle that William Faulkner once termed “the human heart in conflict with itself,” explained why not one member of the MCC of New Orleans initially volunteered for Dexter Brecht’s Up Stairs Lounge memorial committee. “There were a lot of broken people before the fire and after the fire,” explained former congregant Henry Kubicki. Brecht was forced to move forward alone. “My feeling was that the church was at a place, at that time, where it really needed to embrace a sense of its calling,” he recalled, “and have sort of a resurrection experience.”6

  And resurrected it had been. A small revolution had transpired under Reverend Brecht’s watch. In 1998, two important events marked the fire’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and the Times-Picayune devoted multiple pages to the tragedy and the purpose of its legacy. First, about one hundred people gathered at the U.S. Mint on June 23 for a state-sponsored panel called “Remembering the Up Stairs Lounge Fire.” The event was put together by Louisiana State Museum curator Wayne Phillips, who felt that the tragedy deserved a greater observance after its omission from his museum’s 1991 exhibit. At the panel, Courtney Craighead openly recounted his experiences. Clancy DuBos recalled the story of walking into the burn wards of Charity Hospital as an eighteen-year-old intern for the Times-Picayune, and he also read a letter from his Times-Picayune mentor, John LaPlace, who had reported on the tragedy. LaPlace had kept a secret he now wished to unburden: “There is also an unwritten, personal chapter to this story—a chapter that I have shared with no one until today,” he wrote. “You see, the Up Stairs Lounge several nights earlier had been but one of several stops on my regular pub crawl through the French Quarter.”7 With this admission, LaPlace at last confessed that he had been an Up Stairs Lounge patron, one long compelled to keep silent.

  Then folks regrouped the next day in the grand ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street. Supporters read messages of recognition from U.S. Congressman William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, and a proclamation from the mayor of New Orleans. Reverend Troy Perry—back in New Orleans after an absence of at least a decade—led the benediction. “Before the fire it was okay to be gay on Bourbon Street,” he preached, “but go two blocks in either direction, and you could get your head bashed in.” In November 1997, Perry had been an honored guest at President Bill Clinton’s White House Conference on Hate Crimes. There, Perry had submitted a report cataloguing twenty-six attacks on MCC congregations between 1973 and 1996. The worst of these incidents had caused the deaths of “the church pastor, an associate pastor and ten members of the congregation.”8 This was the story of the Up Stairs Lounge, successfully brought before a president of the United States for the first time.

  His success in getting the message to President Clinton made Perry ready to face his Up Stairs Lounge legacy—and perhaps put the controversy to rest. Standing beside Perry in the ballroom, Dexter Brecht had thanked attendees for their visibility, so that “another Up Stairs Lounge fire can never go unnoticed again.” For the second portion of the Up Stairs Lounge service, Troy Carter, the first black New Orleanian to represent the French Quarter on the City Council since Reconstruction, led the crowd onto Bourbon Street for a “jazz funeral,” a traditional Creole mourning ritual. With its two-part “first line, second line” structure, a “jazz funeral” blended Catholic and voodoo death rites with the city’s iconic music to symbolize New Orleans’s unique relationship to this life and the next.9

  Mourners of the Up Stairs Lounge marched behind Councilman Carter and a brass band. For the “first line,” the band played a dirge called “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” while select members of the procession held up placards with victims’ names. Troy Perry had the sign for Adam Fontenot. Dexter Brecht bore a placard for Glenn Green. Reaching the crossroads near the Jimani tavern, above which the Up Stairs Lounge once stood, mourners dropped flowers beside the unmarked side door. Despite Brecht’s desire to place a metal plaque at the site, the building owner, Henry Granet, had voiced strong opposition (Granet was recovering from an injury when reached for this book and unable to comment on these details). So the faithful observed a moment of silence. “Let’s go back now and celebrate our community!” Brecht then announced. Trumpet and trombone broke into upbeat ditties like “When the Saints Go Marching In,” drawing a cheer. Handkerchiefs waved to bid farewell to the deceased. A “second line” then commenced.10

  Recalling the twenty-fifth anniversary, Brecht said, “That was the first time that the community of New Orleans publicly, in a demonstrative way, acknowledged this event.” The newspaper coverage, the symposium, and the jazz funeral had made a splash, undoubtedly, but Brecht still believed that only a permanent marker would make the memory of the fire endure. Brecht would not be satisfied so long as the attainment of a “living memorial”—Troy Perry’s goal as early as June 25, 1973—remained elusive.11

  In the new century, Brecht made yet another attempt to establish an Up Stairs Lounge monument. He formed a new committee and invited Jack Carrel, director of the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of New Orleans, to join. Brecht also welcomed Donald St. Pierre—an Uptown businessman who in 2002 had raised eyebrows by participating in a commitment ceremony with his lover. Rounding out the anniversary team, Brecht appointed Wil Coleman, a thirty-something MCC congregant and lightning-rod personality with a mohawk, as head of fund-raising. As Coleman was no stranger to rivalries among the city’s gay cliques, Brecht must have sensed in Coleman a voice for the next generation, a person who might take on the role of being a public advocate for the tragedy. “What is this really about?” Coleman had asked Brecht. “Why don’t you do the research?” Brecht beseeched. Dexter Brecht’s memorial committee met throughout 2003 and eventually received city approval to place a bronze plaque on a portion of the municipal sidewalk.12

  It goes without saying that, since 1995, when Dexter Brecht first spoke as champion of the Up Stairs Lounge, homosexuality had made the leap from fringe culture into the mainstream. By 2002, according to National Opinion Research Center surveys, nearly one-third of Americans believed homosexual relations to be “not wrong at all,” a gain from the mid-1990s and a nearly a threefold increase from 1973. In 1995, Andrew Sullivan, the editor in chief of The New Republic, had published Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, in which he contended that many gay and lesbian Americans would make legal, lifelong commitments if permitted to do so and that society would benefit. Ellen DeGeneres, a former New Orleanian and newly out lesbian, shook the world when her sitcom character came out of the closet on prime-time television in 1997, declaring herself to be gay before 42 million viewers. Yet setbacks were inevitable. The federal Defense of Marriage Act, enacted in 1996, had already precluded the possibility of same-sex marriage by barring federal recognition of such unions and allowing states the right to refuse to recognize the same-sex nuptials of other states, territories, and governments. Network execs canceled the Ellen show. An HIV-positive student at the University of Wyoming named Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered—lured, beaten, and left for dead—in October 1998, much like Fernando Rios in 1958 New Orleans. Unlike Rios, Shepard would be mourned by the nation.13

  A SIZABLE CROWD buzzed in the reception hall of the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans on June 22, 2003. Reverend Brecht, his short-cropped gray hair reflecting the heartache of a long struggle, seemed radiant in their presence. Stewart Butler nodded back from his seat. Former fire chief William McCrossen sat nearby as an honored guest. His mere presence moved many, as if the eighty-nine-year-old ex-fireman was making not just a personal statement but also an act of atonement on behalf of city leaders from the 1970s. Guests Reverend Troy Perry and Reverend Bill Richardson, the long-retired minister of St. George’s Episcopal Church, also stood at the ready to preach. Gazing at faces in the Ritz-Carlton, Richardson felt vindicated that the Up Stairs Lounge continued to matter to others.14

  Ricky Everett, nonetheless, was abse
nt. He still struggled with the onslaughts of memory and therefore stayed away from events like this one. Henry Kubicki lived in town and wanted to attend but couldn’t, having contended with too much woe as a caregiver for Up Stairs Lounge survivors like Courtney Craighead, as well as for dying friends during the AIDS crisis.15 Returning to the MCC, Henry knew, would bring back too many faces from the past.

  Reverend Brecht began the service by evoking the dark times. The crowd recited a responsorial psalm: “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast.” Perry, deferring to Brecht, told the story of the “crisis week” in his eulogy. In response, the crowd said a hymn: “We shall not give up the fight we have only started.” At the culmination of the service, Deacon Courtney Craighead led participants outside, toward the fire site. Others followed, single file. Courtney’s transformation, epitomized by this act, moved Brecht deeply in that he “was there as a representative of folks that had actually been through it,” a role that the deacon had once been reluctant to assume.16

  Stewart Butler let his imagination wander as he headed with Courtney through the Vieux Carré, which seemed to yield to their shared grief. Puffs of flower and fern and the breath of banana trees from secret gardens and inner courtyards, hidden between buildings, wafted through passageways. Stewart could never forget that Sunday evening—walking those steps down Iberville to the inferno. Everyone, it seemed, avoided the sight of the Lounge after a few days. Not a single city official attended either of the two memorial services, Stewart recalled. Now, the New Orleans Police Department, the institution that never named or charged a culprit, was a corporate sponsor for Up Stairs Lounge events.17

  Courtney Craighead held his hand up when he reached Iberville and Chartres, as if to quiet the procession. Health complications compelled Courtney to accept the occasional guidance of his companion, Charlene Pitre, who stood close by. Nearing the golden age of his life, Courtney Craighead had retired and discovered pride in being a gay deacon, a pride reflected in his willingness to express such tenderness on Iberville, where he once feared to be seen. Observing Courtney, both Brecht and Troy Perry could recall the words in the Gospels that Jesus spoke to raise a man who had been dead for three days: “Lazarus, come out!”18 This was the very symbol that Brecht had invoked, and hoped for, in 1995. Within two years, however, Courtney Craighead would die prematurely, at the age of sixty-five. Funeral rites would be held on June 24, 2005, the thirty-second anniversary of the fire, at the House of Bultman funeral home—the site of Bill Larson’s wake. Dexter Brecht and Henry Kubicki gave eulogies.19 In a sense, the three original deacons of the MCC of New Orleans—Bill Larson, Mitch Mitchell, and Courtney Craighead—would finally rest in peace.

  Brecht marshaled his emotions when they reached the location, an unmarked door near the corner where a small wedge of sidewalk lay beneath a flapping white sheet. “We were not supposed to be blocking the street,” he recalled, “but we did spill out into the street at that point.” Brecht stood between the covered object and the bar’s old door, with Troy Perry to his right and Wil Coleman to his left—three generations of Up Stairs Lounge activists. Together, they lifted a veil to reveal gleaming bronze embedded in the sidewalk brick.20 Upon the plaque shone thirty-two names held together by an upside-down triangle and set between two fleurs-de-lis with these words:

  At this site on June 24, 1973 in the Upstairs Lounge, these thirty-two people lost their lives in the worst fire in New Orleans. The impact went far beyond the loss of individual lives, giving birth to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights movement in New Orleans.21

  Looking at the marker, Brecht had to catch his breath. “To actually see the plaque,” he recalled, “to see it there.” Brecht sprinkled holy water on the metal surface. Just as he did, well-wishers tossed yellow chrysanthemums, and someone read out the names. “This was our birthing process,” Brecht told the crowd. “This was really where we became a people.” With this dedication, the Up Stairs Lounge achieved new status. The fire became one of the first historically significant events in the gay rights movement—the other being the Stonewall riots—to receive a permanent monument in a public place by 2003. It had truly become a “living memorial,” etched into the fabric of New Orleans. “It, somehow, refused to die almost,” Brecht recalled.22

  The plaque itself weighed several hundred pounds. Its dimensions were thirty inches by thirty inches. Pouring the bronze had cost about $2200, with the materials and labor to install it in the sidewalk totaling a few thousand extra. Yet, the marker had taken three decades to appear. This monument held unique meaning for the MCC, for families of the Up Stairs Lounge victims denied dignity and restitution, for those fire survivors lost to the subsequent AIDS epidemic, and for those inside the bar who had become ashes. It meant a great deal that the plaque could transmute what had once been an historic abyss, a source of unspeakable pain, into a story that others could remember.23

  Members of the procession then returned to the Ritz-Carlton for a small luncheon. William McCrossen, weathered from the heat but nonetheless energized, spoke from his wheelchair. He apologized for the way the city had treated the victims and survivors of the fire. Stewart Butler respired audibly and put his head in his hands, as if relieved of a weight. No mayor of New Orleans had yet to make the same gesture as the fire chief. Although other officials issued proclamations, only McCrossen undertook the task of reckoning with his actions in person.24

  Folding his hands, he offered to answer any questions. Someone asked if he knew the person responsible for the blaze, and McCrossen told a puzzling story about a woman who had visited him many years before. She said she was a Catholic sister, the retired fire superintendent told listeners, who forsook her vows and left the order. A pain had seemed to enfold her, and, for the shame, she was moving away. But she wanted to clear her conscience by telling authorities about a confession she had heard from a young man’s lips. These chilling remarks, he related, had come from a confused soul who later took his own life. This young man, McCrossen revealed, had told her how he started the Up Stairs Lounge fire. Evidently, the fire chief had responded by hugging the woman and then letting her walk away.25

  On that day in 2003, the octogenarian could not recall the name of the sister or of the young man who had confessed to her. However, these details seemed to match with Mary Stephen Ledet, who left the Sisters of Christian Charity in 1974 and moved to Florida, as well as with Roger Dale Nunez, who conferred with Sister Ledet before his suicide in November of that same year. It does indeed seem that Ledet chose to leave her religious order shortly after Roger’s suicide. She eventually married and then died in 2007. As these interactions had happened decades before, McCrossen’s narrative, as if from beyond, could provide no official closure. The Times-Picayune, covering the anniversary, would neglect to include any of this interlude. Yet with this telling, William McCrossen, who would himself die the following year, momentarily stunned his listeners. Many then leaped to their feet and hugged one another, as if finally given something like an answer.26

  Sitting off to the side at the luncheon, Wil Coleman chatted amiably with Troy Perry. “I, of course, was familiar with Troy and what that church movement had built,” Coleman recalled, “not just in New Orleans but beyond that.” Coleman looked Perry in the eyes and said, “You know, someday, I hope I can do something that matters like you.” Perry blushed and was deeply moved. He then pulled Coleman close and whispered something into his ear. “But you already have,” the preacher said, aware that Coleman had played a major role in fund-raising for the plaque.27

  Just four days later, in an event that seemed related existentially, the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality.28 The decision Lawrence v. Texas, handed down on June 26, 2003, declared unconstitutional the sodomy laws that had rendered consenting sexual acts between members of the same gender illegal. The conservative justice Antonin Scalia, writing in dissent of the 6–3 ruling, leveled the accusatio
n that the Court had “signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” Overlooking the condescension in the phrase “so-called,” Scalia was not incorrect, for the legalization of same-sex marriage was already winding its way through the courts and would be decided on June 26, 2015—twelve years to the day from Lawrence v. Texas. With decriminalization, the state-sponsored oppression of homosexual relations seemed all but deposed by decree, and homosexual citizens abandoned secrecy in greater numbers, even on corners like Iberville and Chartres (where men once ran up stairs to find refuge), speaking at last their names.

  Notes

  Preface

  1.Lizette Alvarez and Richard Pérez-Peña, “Orlando Gunman Attacks Gay Nightclub, Leaving Fifty Dead,” The New York Times, June 12, 2016 (www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting.html); Del Quentin Wilber, “The FBI Investigated the Orlando Mass Shooter for Ten Months—and Found Nothing,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2016 (www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-fbi-investigation-mateen-20160712-snap-story.html); Gal Tziperman Lotan, Paul Brinkmann, and Rene Stutzman, “Witness: Omar Mateen Had Been at Orlando Gay Nightclub Many Times,” Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 2016 (www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/os-orlando-nightclub-omar-mateen-profile-20160613-story.html).

  2.Sky Swisher and Marc Freeman, “Court Records Shed Light on Orlando Shooter’s Employment History,” Sun-Sentinel, June 13, 2016 (www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/fl-orlando-shooter-lucie-court-file-20160613-story.html); Charlotte Alter, “Ex-Wife Says Orlando Shooter Might Have Been Hiding Homosexuality from His Family,” Time, June 15, 2016 (http://time.com/4369577/orlando-shooting-sitora-yusufiy-omar-mateen-gay/).

  3.Caitlin Doornbos, “Autopsy: Pulse Shooter Omar Mateen Shot Eight Times,” Orlando Sentinel, August 5, 2016 (www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/omar-mateen/os-pulse-shooting-mateen-autopsy-20160805-story.html).