the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt six)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

In the back rectory, a telephone rang incessantly, and volunteers like Ronnie Rosenthal answered the succession of calls. Each new voice came with the alarm and paranoia of an uncle or a mother posing almost unspeakable questions. These were family members who might have a son in New Orleans, a son who, they hinted, might be a member of their church. Many admitted that they had dialed the MCC because it was the only number in the phone book for a gay-affiliated organization that wasn’t a gay bar.

To help these families, the MCC kept a running file of confirmed survivors and victims. Ronnie Rosenthal also took on the uneviable duty of calling families to inform them that their son was dead or missing. “The saddest part,” said Ronnie, “was when we tried to call someone’s parents to let them know what happened, and they could care less.” Some families just couldn’t face the shame of claiming a homosexual loved one as one of their own. “All of us understood why a lot of the families didn’t come forward,” recalled John Meyers, the Café Lafitte patron, “bemoaning it but, nonetheless, understanding it.”

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt five)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

When Buddy Rasmussen and bar owner Phil Esteve were finally permitted inside, they could barely recognize the place. But they did notice something peculiar. Evidently, even though only police, fire, medical first responders, and news reporters were allowed inside the structure, the night’s earnings had gone missing. “Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recalled Bob McAnear, the former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, the police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” Up Stairs Lounge historian Johnny Townsend, who interviewed Phil Esteve in the 1980s, in part corroborates this account in his Let the Faggots Burn: “Phil Esteve rushed over to the bar that evening but couldn’t go in until the following day. Then, he says, he watched as investigators tore names off of checks and took money from the cash register which they never turned over to him.” Esteve is now deceased and unable to speak to those details himself.

But money was indeed unaccounted for. “Whether it was because it was a gay bar or that insurance would cover it, so it wouldn’t be missed, there are those who would take advantage of the situation,” McAnear contended. “It would be difficult to break open those machines without more than one person being aware.” The night’s monetary haul from the beer bust was gone, not in the safe. Buddy and Phil both felt the pressure to pretend that no other crime, other than the fire, had occurred that Sunday night. Besides, if anyone had filed a complaint about such missing funds, it would have been the word of two homosexuals against the officials.

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt four)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

“Coroner’s assistants would untangle bodies two at a time,” wrote the Times-Picayune. They took breaks to retch out nearby windows. Prying the stack of seventeen corpses in the corner, and deciding which piece went where, was a horrific task—in fact, a guessing game. Firemen and policemen pitched in to help the coroner and his team. They began by clearing the front door and bathroom of bodies and proceeded through the bar area toward Chartres Street, gathering and reassembling body parts on top of the bar. Each carcass, completed as best they could, was then photographed and searched for identifying artifacts—jewelry, trinkets, or pieces of wallet. Each was then zipped in a bag. A fire engine with a sixty-five-foot arm raised and lowered a metal basket, and black rubber sacks descended, one by one. Three Catholic priests turned up on the street in time to offer “conditional absolution” over the bags as they were lowered. They made a sign of the cross in the air more than twenty times.

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt three)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

New Orleans had long been a sexual oasis for members of the armed forces like Steven. As a port city, like San Francisco or New York—where generations of “undesirably discharged” homosexuals settled after being kicked off transport ships—New Orleans boasted a lineage of military men on leave seeking gay sex. In fact, Tennessee Williams’ first homosexual encounter was with a G.I. in New Orleans. In 1966, W.F. Charles of the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board wrote the proprietor of Café Lafitte in Exile: “Inspection reports presented to the Board indicate that your establishment is a known hangout for persons of undesirable character.” This letter had the reverse of its intended effect. Tickled instead of intimidated, the owners of the bar framed the letter and put it on display near the front door.

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt two)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

Café Lafitte in Exile, a tavern for the “genteel,” not only survived but thrived in the wake of a 1969 incident in which Laisder Mendoza, the twenty-five-year-old gay son of a Venezuelan industrialist, had gotten into an argument with a lover, exited the bar, and then plowed his pickup truck through the building’s front door, injuring three. Five years earlier, Mendoza had been arrested by the vice squad and booked for “attempted crime against nature,” but, because he was a closeted member of diplomatic society, it does not appear that he received any comeuppance for that charge or for driving his truck through the bar.

Tennessee Williams frequented Café Lafitte in Exile but avoided acknowledgment of his homosexuality because the content of his plays roused enough controversy as it was: he feared it would escalate if his “mad pilgrimage of the flesh” were to become common knowledge. Some critics, such as Time magazine’s Louis Kronenberger, were especially keen to goad Williams as an artist “obsessed with violence, corruption and sex” or a man whose “profanity often seems to relieve . . . [his] own feelings rather than his characters.’” Williams’s dance between out-ness and closeted-ness created paranoia and psychological breaks. Consequently, the playwright suffered a diminution in self-worth. “I once had the idea, the hope, of being a major artist,” he confessed to his lover, Frank Merlo, in 1957. “I know I am a minor artist who has happened to create two or three major works.” At the time Williams wrote these words, he had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Still, the playwright Williams, the shipping titan McDonogh, and the diplomat’s son Mendoza had all been moneyed men with the means to live in a gray space. In a pinch, they could bribe or influence their way out of trouble with law enforcement or the press. Homosexuality, for the affluent, was often something to be managed and concealed like a drug addiction, a “social tic” that would only read on the surface of the deranged or confused. It was still relatively common, for example, for the closeted rich to “keep a boy” in the Quarter, a young lover well maintained, at least temporarily, for the wealthy man’s own pleasure. “It was more of a class thing,” agreed Jane Place, who waitressed at a gay-friendly French Quarter diner. Upper-class gays could have their way in this world of complex graces. One gay fraternal order, for example, held a Mardi Gras ball at the luxurious Hotel Montelone in 1970, but no pictures appeared in the newspapers. “There were the high societies,” Place noted, “and then there were the derelicts, that you knew they weren’t going to live very long. It was very sad because you could almost pick their fate by the group they were in.”

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt one)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

The International Trade Mart building had been erected in the 1960s under the direction of Clay Shaw. A man of aristocratic bearing who wore seersucker suits and lived in a French Quarter mansion, Shaw had counted himself among the New Orleans elite. Years earlier, he had organized the 1953 sesquincentennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, an event that had attracted the newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower. Shaw’s position in the city seemed assured, having accompanied New Orleans mayors on trade missions. However, as only his close friends knew, Clay Shaw lived two lives: conservative businessman in public and homosexual bon vivant in private. His feat of compartmentalization had come crashing down when Jim Garrison, the Orleans Parish district attorney, bizarrely arrested him in 1967 and charged him with colluding to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

This would be the first and only trial brought against a living suspect for the killing of the president, and District Attorney Jim Garrison worked the limelight, as prosecutor, to his full advantage. Garrison postulated to the press, using defamatory tropes of the era, that Shaw’s involvement made the assassination a “homosexual thrill-killing.” The prosecutor loudly declared that an individual associated with the presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, named “Clay Bertrand” by the Warren Commission, was none other than New Orleans resident Clay Shaw. Garrison’s claim that Bertrand and Shaw were one and the same person, an apparent break in the case touted by the press as the final reveal of a “mystery man,” ultimately turned out to be a dubious connection, at best, and knowingly baseless one, at worst. In fact, Garrison happened to be a man with his own set of demons: during his crusade, Garrison was concurrently investigated by an Orleans Parish grand jury for allegedly molesting a thirteen-year-old boy at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt seven)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

They were minutes from the dorm, and Arlene wasn’t stopping. The dorm facilities occupied the upper two floors, of a square, rose-pink lunch box of a building that wore the adobe style façade like a too-big sombrero. Tonight the pink faded to a cornflower blue in the dark. Arlene tugged Regina all the way through the security gate, up the stairs and as soon as they were both inside their room, Arlene snatched off her wig and flung it behind her as if the wig was what she’d been pissed off at the whole time. Damn wigs. She aimed for her bed, but it landed on the lamp. The lamp’s bulb had been on for hours and was hot as the freckles that glowed on Arlene’s face.