From my pal, JOE (I had never heard of this horrific incident)---
Remembering the UpStairs Lounge: The U.S.A.’s Largest LGBT Massacre Happened 40 Years Ago Today (by Terry Firma)
The 24th of June in 1973 was a Sunday. For New Orleans’ gay
community, it was the last day of national Pride Weekend, as well as the
fourth anniversary of 1969′s Stonewall uprising.
You couldn’t really have an open celebration of those events — in ’73,
anti-gay slurs, discrimination, and even violence were still as common
as sin — but the revelers had few concerns. They had their own gathering
spots in the sweltering city, places where people tended to leave them
be, including a second-floor bar on the corner of Iberville and Chartres
Street called the UpStairs Lounge.
That Sunday, dozens of members of the Metropolitan Community Church
(MCC), the nation’s first gay church, founded in Los Angeles in
1969, got together there for drinks and conversation. It seems to have
been an amiable group. The atmosphere was welcoming enough that two gay
brothers, Eddie and Jim Warren, even brought their mom, Inez, and proudly introduced her to the other patrons. Beer flowed. Laughter filled the room.
Just before 8:00p, the doorbell rang insistently. To answer it, you
had to unlock a steel door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading
down to the ground floor.
Bartender Buddy Rasmussen, expecting a taxi driver, asked his friend Luther Boggs
to let the man in. Perhaps Boggs, after he pulled the door open, had
just enough time to smell the Ronsonol lighter fluid that the attacker
of the UpStairs Lounge had sprayed on the steps. In the next instant, he
found himself in unimaginable pain as the fireball exploded, pushing
upward and into the bar.The ensuing 15 minutes were the most horrific that any of the 65 or
so customers had ever endured — full of flames, smoke, panic, breaking
glass, and screams.
MCC assistant pastor George “Mitch” Mitchell escaped, but soon returned to try to rescue his boyfriend, Louis Broussard. Both died in the fire, their bodies clinging together in death, like a scene from the aftermath of Pompeii.
Metal bars on the UpStairs Lounge windows, meant to keep people from
falling out, were just 14 inches apart; while some managed to squeeze
through and jump, others got stuck. That’s how the MCC’s pastor, Rev. Bill Larson,
died, screaming, “Oh, God, no!” as the flames charred his flesh. When
police and firefighters surveyed and began clearing the scene, they left
Larson fused to the window frame until the next morning.
This news photo is among the most indelible I’ve ever seen:
Thirty-two people lost their lives that Sunday 40 years ago — Luther Boggs, Inez Warren, and Warren’s sons among them.
Homophobia being what it was, several families declined to claim the
bodies and one church after another refused to bury or memorialize the
dead. Three victims were never identified or claimed, and were interred
at the local
potter’s field.
When the
Rev. William Richardson, of St. George’s
Episcopal Church, agreed to hold a small prayer service for the victims,
about 80 people attended, but many more complained about Richardson to
Iveson Noland,
the Episcopalian bishop of New Orleans. Noland reportedly rebuked
Richardson for his kindness, and the latter received volumes of hate
mail.
The UpStairs Lounge arson was the deadliest fire in New Orleans
history and the largest massacre of gay people ever in the U.S. Yet it
didn’t make much of an impact news-wise. The few respectable news
organizations that deigned to cover the tragedy made little of the fact
that the majority of the victims had been gay, while talk-radio hosts
tended to take a jocular or sneering tone:
What do we bury them in? Fruit jars,
sniggered one, on the air, only a day after the massacre.
Other, smaller disasters resulted in City Hall press conferences or
statements of condolence from the governor, but no civil
authorities publicly spoke out about the fire, other than to mumble
about needed improvements to the city’s fire code.
Continuing this pattern of neglect, the New Orleans police
department appeared lackluster about the investigation (the officers
involved denied it). The detectives wouldn’t even acknowledge that it
was an arson case, saying the cause of the fire was of “undetermined
origin.”
No one was ever charged with the crime, although an itinerant
troublemaker with known mental problems,
Rogder Dale Nunez,
is said to have claimed responsibility multiple times. Nunez, a
sometime visitor to the UpStairs Lounge, committed suicide in 1974.
KRISTIN PERRY /SANDRA STIER & PAUL KATAMI /JEFF ZARILLO AGAINST PROP 8
