An Arson Attack on a Gay Bar Killed 32

THE BAR UPSTAIRS

I don’t know why they came, really. But gay people used to come from all over the South to live in the French Quarter. Maybe they came from all over the country or even the whole world. But they came to New Orleans. It’s hard to imagine they were treated any better here. But still they came. I guess when you’re not really welcome anywhere everywhere to some degree is your home… or at least you could look at it like that. One might as well spend the time somewhere fun! But the truth is there was no safe place… no sanctuary… no refuge.

Of course, people didn’t call them “gays” or “faggots” so much back then. “Queers” is what people called them mostly. I don’t guess it matters much what you call them. Even if you called them Strawberryshortcake it would immediately become a cuss word too.

There’s lots of bars in the Quarter. The gay bars didn’t really stand out all that much between the strip joints, female impersonator joints, jazzrockdixieblueslandzydecodiscoepedia joints, prostitutes, hustlers, conartists, buskers, drunken pukin’ frat boys, thieves, musicians, tourists, crazy bag ladies, bookies, hot dog vendors, strippers, the Duck Lady, junkies, pimps, street dancing hustlers, pickpockets, street artists, beggars, artsy artists …. A few queers didn’t stick out all that much.

But somewhat routinely, the Vice Squad would single out the queers, pound down the doors, arrest the patrons, and momentarily close the occasional gay bar for their unseemly lapses of community standards of morality. The local morning newspaper, the Times Picayune, would run a special column on the front page for those occasions in which they would list the names of the arrested so that they could also be properly dealt with in their communities, families, residences, and places of employment as well as merely being prosecuted.

It was somewhat of a right of passage with the boys at my high school to occasionally go “roll some queers.” “Rolling queers.” You don’t hear that expression so much nowadays but it used to be fairly common. Everybody knew exactly what you meant. If you were bored, or horny, or needed some cash, or had something to prove… you might get some of your buddies to go down to the Quarter and hunt some queers for sport, fun, and profit. Lure some queer… or somebody you thought queer, to a dark place where your buddies waited to beat, rape, and rob him. It wasn’t exactly encouraged but a few disapproving clucks would be dismissed shortly with: “It’s just boys being boys. Not like it’s somebody that matters. Just damned queers anyway.”

And if anybody got hurt or the police got involved you could always play the “get out of jail free card.” All you had to do was say the queer came on to you sexually and all sentiments of possible criminality would immediately do a flip and all sympathies would belong with the perpetrators. What else but the queer’s blood could wash off such an assault on your human dignity much less your masculinity???!!!!

The authorities would agree, heads nodding, “Of course you had to kill him. But doncha know, I’m so straight I woulda prolly hadda kill him twice.!!”

At least that’s the way it was until they pulled the switcheroo on those cowboys who crucified that Shepard boy up in Wyoming. They beat him and raped him and robbed him and set him on fire and left him spread on a barbed wire fence to slowly bleed and freeze to death through the night. They found him hanging there the next morning like some horrible scarecrow.

I still remember how freely those boys were confessing but with growing incredulousness that people were still taking it so seriously. “Everybody knew he was queer.” “We said he was coming on to us.” “What’s the deal???!!!” “He was just a damned queer!!!”

It’s probably hard to tell with the Shepard boy still being dead and all… but this was actually an incident of things getting better for queers. They actually prosecuted and convicted the killers! Who’da thunk?… imagine that!!!

But mine is a story long before things got quite so good for gay people.

I used to work as a cashier at a parking lot on Iberville St. just off Bourbon St. It was the kind of place where you left your keys, were given a claim check, and a “Hiker” drove your car up into the building and parked it. When you came back, you presented your claim check and cash to me. I’d send a hiker with a locater ticket to retrieve your car. If you were a regular user of services in the French Quarter you would well know by now the wisdom of tipping your hiker heavily and regularly at this point.

Sometimes the hikers would wait for a ticket in a small ante room next to the cashier’s office.

There was one elderly hiker, Lionel… sometimes they called him “Train”, who used to stand just outside the window where I’d post the locater tickets. Lionel was a stone cold, life-long junkie. My Momma used to say, “God loves a drunk,” to describe the seeming immunity some seem to enjoy but if that was so… he must really have a fond spot for junkies. In Lionel’s case, God apparently suspended gravity.

Sometimes, as Lionel stood there waiting, he’d start to nod out. He’d fall down all inside himself while the blue smoke from the cigarette dangling from his lips circled around his head… and he’d begin to lean. He’d lean further… and further… and further, until surely you’d think he’d fall over. But no… he’d just hang there suspended in space, listening to some secret poppy music only he could hear and just ignore gravity. Sometimes I’d reach out through the small hole in the glass and touch him on the arm.

I’d tell him, “Lionel. Go sit down you’re scaring tourists.” Lionel would raise his eyebrows as much as he’d actually open his eyes and begin to saunter off in his inimitable style. Lionel had a way of walking that was as much levitation as ambulation. He had an ultra-cool, hip limped way of sliding through the world that only the less than gravity challenged could hope to emulate.

One night Lionel came slide-glide-levitating from under the ramp that led up into the building. Lionel always looked sharp… even for a junkie. His uniform shirt and pants were ironed and properly creased, his shoes were shined. Lionel was looking good! Except the side of his head was on fire.

There was another hiker sitting there, Curtiss. Curtiss was a big, round-faced, friendly guy who always had a smile on his face. He looked up and saw Lionel’s head flaming and immediately jumped up and started slapping the side of Lionel’s head with his ball cap trying to put out the fire. Lionel, not being someone you could casually or readily insult, immediately pulled a razor from his pocket and began to slice the air wildly at Curtiss.

“I’ll cut you, muthafucker.” he said.

Not in the least deterred, Curtiss, with amazing agility for a man his size, expertly dodged the blade and continued to slap Lionel up the side of his head putting out the fire.

These two men danced around each other there in the middle of the entrance to the parking lot long enough for a small group of pedestrian citizens to gather and watch from the sidewalk. But I guess that’s part of what brings people to the French Quarter in the first place. Where else can you so routinely see something like flaming Negro knife fights?… but I digress.
Lionel’s head burning wasn’t really the fire I wanted to talk about. It’s just easier, I guess.

I was working a double shift one Sunday. It was early in my second shift when the first of the fire trucks came screaming down Iberville Street. The volume and intensity of an emergency vehicle’s siren in those skinny little French Quarter streets amplified by the empty cement caverns of the parking lot building was knock you off your chair loud and attention grabbing. In a very short while the entire street was full of emergency vehicles and the streets coming and going were blocked with fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars.
There wasn’t much else we could do so a couple of the hikers and I walked down to the end of the block to see what was happening under all those red and blue strobing lights.

There was a bar up a narrow wooden enclosed stair case. It was a gay bar. Given the nature and number of this kind of establishment in the Quarter it was easy to not even know it was there… until it burned.

We learned later that somebody had thrown a Molotov cocktail made of cigarette lighter fluid on the stairs, rang the doorbell, and ran away. I guess it was the shape of the stairwell that turned the flames into a kind of focused furnace or flue. Maybe it was more like a giant Bunsen burner but by the time the bartender answered the doorbell the flames were so focused and ferocious when he opened that door most everyone in the room was incinerated. A handful of people escaped onto the roof but everyone else died.

By the time we got there, you could see a man with his head and arms sticking through the security bars of an upstairs window Given the amount of flames and smoke coming out behind him, it was a pretty sure thing he was dead already. But he sure was moving around a lot for a dead guy. Maybe it was the heat contorting his body. Maybe it was steam escaping his flesh as his body fluids boiled. But it sure was disconcerting to watch him jerk and twitch and wiggle like that! It would be several hours before anyone could get up there and pull him back through the window.

You didn’t really notice at first. It didn’t take long to put the fire out but after that the firemen mostly just stood around and watched. It wasn’t real obvious but gradually it dawned on me that it was citizens carrying out the bodies. I don’t know or remember where I got the notion but I think it was some of the folks that escaped the fire onto the roof. Maybe as word spread through the Quarter other queers came down to help too… I don’t know. I’m sure it’s pretty gross and the most horrible of duties to have to carry out dead, burned up bodies but I guess carrying out dead, burned up queers was just a line too far for the firemen. Why would anybody touch a queer if they didn’t have to anyway? Near as I could tell… the queers had to carry out their own dead.

There was lots of bodies!

There was a horrible smell in the air. Given the amount of humanity that had been up in that room you really, really, really didn’t want to know, acknowledge, comprehend, or in any way allow what that smell really was. That smell would haunt that end of the Quarter for a long time. I’d smell it every time I went to work. A good rain eventually helped some.

The next day the newspaper ran their usual vice squad bust column on the front page wherein they listed the dead as if it was just the cops instead of flames that had come busting through that door. I think they got some of the names of the survivors too. Sometimes you may escape the flames but you can’t escape the fire. I remember some discussion about officials having difficulty identifying some of the bodies. Evidently many of them were not carrying any identification. You’ll have to ask and answer for yourself why so many grown men would be walking around the French Quarter at night without ID.

The bodies went to the morgue. Not only did many remain unidentified, the families of many of the dead declined to come and claim them. They didn’t want them. It became a matter of some conversation, humor, and entertainment in the community.

I remember hearing a couple of popular, local radio DJ personalities having great fun with it on air.

“Hey, did you hear the one about how many queers does it take to make barbeque?”

and,

“How many queers does it take to light a campfire?”

There was a good one about fruit flies dying at the bottom of a jar.

There was mention of the Lucky Dog hot dog vendor carts throughout the Quarter and the wienie roast down on Chartres Street.

I won’t be remembering the punch lines for you.

Eventually it was suggested perhaps one of the local churches should step up and take the bodies but the response was:

“What about the good people already buried there?”

they said,

“What about the families and friends of the good people already buried there?”

they said,

“What about God?”

they said.

The churches didn’t want the queers any more than God did.

The bodies remained in the morgue.

Eventually folks quit talking about it. Thirty two people died in that fire and another eighteen were injured. As far as I know when the Upstairs Lounge was torched it was one of the most lethal urban fires in USA history until the Twin Towers. It was the most lethal attack on a gay bar till Orlando but unlike that event… folks didn’t even pay lip service to the tragedy.

I never heard what eventually happened to the bodies. I guess it wasn’t all that newsworthy, funny, or entertaining by the time it happened. After all, it’s not like it was somebody who mattered. It was just damned queers anyway.