Observations

In memory of those who died forty years ago in the UpStairs Lounge fire I described yesterday.

Duane George Mitchell had escaped to the roof with a group led by bartender Douglas Rasmussen. He ran back into the burning building trying to save his partner, Louis Horace Broussard. Their bodies were discovered lying together. Also Adam Roland Fontenot who was survived by his partner, bartender Douglas Rasmussen.

Mrs. Willie Inez Warren died in the hospital two weeks later from burns suffered in the fire. Her two sons died inside the bar, Eddie Hosea Warren and James Curtis Warren.

Luther Boggs, a teacher who died two weeks later and who was notified in the hospital that he had been fired.

Rev. William R. Larson, a former Methodist minister.
Dr. Perry Lane Waters
Douglas Maxwell Williams
Leon Richard Maples
George Steven Matyi
Larry Stratton
Reginald Adams Jr.
James Walls Hambrick
Horace Getchell
Joseph Henry Adams
Herbert Dean Cooley
David Stuart Gary
Guy Anderson
Donald Walter Dunbar
John Thomas Golding
Gerald Hoyt Gordon
Kenneth Paul Harrington
Glenn Richard Green
Robert Lumpkin
Ferris LeBlanc

Three bodies were never identified.

Observations on Queer History 6.25

Lately I've been reading a lot of gay history, not the easiest subject considering most of it was hidden. While I spend another morning waiting for SCOTUS to announce the fate of the dreams of millions of Americans I thought I would give you a short history lesson.

UpStairs Lounge
from the collection of Johnny Townsend

Forty years ago there was a gay bar at the corner of Iberville and Chartres Street in New Orleans. It was called the UpStairs Lounge.

June 24, 1973 was a Sunday, the final day of one of the first Pride weekends, and the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Not that there was an open Pride celebration in New Orleans. Gay life in the city was lived deeply underground and most gay bars in the city were located in derelict waterfront buildings to keep it that way. On that Sunday night sixty people were celebrating in the bar when somebody soaked the stairwell with lighter fluid, lit it, and rang the buzzer. Thirty two people died in the ensuing fire storm, the largest murder of LGBT people in American history. The second floor bar had no emergency exit and the windows were barred to keep people from falling, some were later found burned to death pressed against the bars. Many of the survivors owed their lives to the bartender who led them to the roof through a back exit until it was blocked by flames. Nobody was ever charged with what was never considered an outright hate crime so it is a bit lost in American history.

To me what is most important historically is what happened after the fire. At the time New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu and the Governor of Louisiana had no comment. Two days after the fire the story disappeared from the local headlines, something that would have been unimaginable had the victims been straight. Many churches in the city (Catholic, Episcopal, Baptist and Lutheran) refused to allow memorial services in the facilities or allow the dead to be buried in their cemeteries. The refusal to allow burial in Catholic cemeteries reportedly came from Archbishop Philip Hannan himself but he never publicly commented on the fire. The dead were gays after all and deserved what they got. Some remains weren't claimed by 'embarrassed' family members and three of the dead were never identified at all. Many gay men in the city carried false papers in case they were arrested in one of the frequent NOPD perversion sweeps.

A few days after the fire a New Orleans detective, Henry Morris, was quoted in the New Orleans States-Item. "We don't even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar."

But looking back, horrific as it was, the UpStairs fire marked a turning point as important for New Orleans as the Stonewall Riots were to New York. On July 1^st, a week after the fire, a memorial service was finally held at St. Mark's Methodist Church in the French Quarter. After the service the 300 attendees had the option of leaving through a side door to avoid the cameras of the media and police. For the first time in city history most choose to walk out the front door.

That happened in America just forty years ago.

notes - One of the attendees at the St. Mark's memorial service was Louisiana's Methodist bishop, Finis Crutchfield, who would die of AIDS fourteen years later at age 70. Eventually New Orleans became the first city in the South in extend full civil rights to gay city employees.

Observations from the Window 1.12

In 1972 Jeanne Manford's openly gay son Morty was beaten as he and others where beaten as they handed out fliers outside an annual dinner for politicians and reporters in New York. Two months later she marched with him in the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day march carrying her hand made sign that said simply "Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children." The Christopher Street march became the annual Gay Pride parade and Jeanne Manford became the founder of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a group now 40 years old with 350 chapters in 11 countries (including the People's Republic of China) and over 200,000 members.

Ten years ago she explained in an interview a letter she had written to The New York Post after her son's beating, "I mentioned in my letter that my son was gay and that the police stood by and watched these young gays being beaten up and did nothing about it, and it was printed. Then Morty called me up and said, ‘You can’t believe how everybody’s talking about your letter!’ I didn't think anything of it, but I guess it was the first time a mother ever sat down and very publicly said, ‘Yes, I have a homosexual son.’"

In a 2009 speech to the Human Rights Campaign President Obama praised Manford. Her work was the "story of America, of ordinary citizens organizing, agitating and advocating for change, of hope stronger than hate, of love more powerful than any insult or injury." Than he told a story of the Stonewall Riots during which her son Morty, who died of AIDS in 1992, was arrested. After coming to her door and explaining the arrest one of the officers added "and you know, your son is a homosexual." Manford's answer was "Yes I know, why are you bothering him?"

"She was just a mom, walking with her son in a parade," said Terry DeCrescenzo, a gay and lesbian teen advocate in Los Angeles. "That was what made her so compelling. She was simply standing with her son, bearing witness to the truth of his life."

Jeanne Manford passed away Tuesday, she was 92.

The family requests that any donations be made to the Jeanne Manford Legacy Fund to support the ongoing work of PFLAG National: 1828 L Street, NW, Suite 660, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Observations 9.20

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
September 20, 2012

Statement by the President on the One Year Anniversary of the Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell

A year ago today, we upheld the fundamental American values of fairness and equality by finally and formally repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’   Gay and lesbian Americans now no longer need to hide who they love in order to serve the country they love.  It is a testament to the professionalism of our men and women in uniform that this change was implemented in an orderly manner, preserving unit cohesion, recruitment, retention and military effectiveness.   As Commander in Chief, I’ve seen that our national security has been strengthened because we are no longer denied the skills and talents of those patriotic Americans who happen to be gay or lesbian.  The ability of service members to be open and honest about their families and the people they love honors the integrity of the individuals who serve, strengthens the institutions they serve, and is one of the many reasons why our military remains the finest in the world.

Obervations from the Village 6.28

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin (or sexual orientation) but by the content of their character."
Martin Luther King Jr.

This is the 42nd anniversary of the Stonewall riots that took place after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in the Village. I was born over a dozen years after the riots and I never really knew that much about them. I did know it was the moment when the modern gay civil rights movement was born but honestly it was as far away from my life as the Vietnam War was from my hate of our current wars. As a teenager I had my own battles to fight and didn't realize that I could do so only because of something that happened years before at a spot only blocks from where I now live.

I stood outside the Stonewall a couple nights ago, my minor celebration of the passing of New York's gay marriage law, and decided I needed to know more. If I felt the need to be there shouldn't I know why? I'm not going to get into the whole story of the riots, there is plenty to read online, but a maybe a little background. In the scheme of history it isn't all that long ago but at the time gays were classified as subversives by the U.S. government. The names of people arrested for public indecency, which included men holding hands or women wearing men's suits, were published in newspapers. Being gay was actually considered a mental illness.

On June 27, 1969, the NYC police force raided a popular Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. Raids on gay bars were commonplace, the Stonewall itself was raided just a week before, but this night something was very different. For whatever reason the subversive, indecent, psychopathic gays fought back and a movement was born. The city was stunned that the normally docile gays had turned into what the Village Voice called the "forces of faggotry." In the days that followed a pamphlet was printed and handed out on Christopher Street that in ways could be considered the first gay declaration of equality. Rather than add it here I posted it separately just before this post along with a link to the full episode of PBS's recent "American Experience, Stonewall Uprising" which is well worth watching even if it is at times disturbing as hell. (link)

Nicholas Edsall wrote "Stonewall has been compared to any number of acts of radical protest and defiance in American history from the Boston Tea Party on. But the best and certainly a more nearly contemporary analogy is with Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, which sparked the modern civil rights movement."

In the end it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter why it started, it probably doesn’t matter what really happened those nights. All that matters is that it happened.

Observations

Here is a link to watch the complete episode of PBS's "American Experience, Stonewall Riots" which aired not too long ago. The American Experience site says, “The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world.”

Below is the text of a flyer handed out on Christopher Street in the days following the Stonewall Riots:

"Get The Mafia and Cops Out of the Gay Bars

The nights of Friday, June 27, 1969 and Saturday, June 28, 1969 will go down in history as the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest the intolerable situation which has existed in New York City for many years --- namely, the Mafia (or syndicate) control of this of this city's Gay bars in collusion with certain elements in the Police Dept. of the City of New York. The demonstrations were triggered by a Police raid on the Stonewall Inn late Friday night, June 27th. The purported reason for the raid was the Stonewall's lack of a liquor license.- Who's 'kidding whom here? Can anybody really-believe that an operation as big as the Stonewall could continue for almost three years just a few blocks from the 6th Precinct house without having a liquor license? No! The Police have know about the Stonewall operation all along. What's happened is the presence of new "brass" in 6th Precinct which has vowed to "drive the fags out of the Village."

Many of you have noticed one of the signs which the "management" of the Stonewall has placed outside stating "Legalize Gay bars and lick the problem. Judge Kenneth Keating (a former US Senator) ruled in January, 1968 that even close dancing between Homosexuals is legal. Since that date there has been nothing legal, per se, about a Gay bar. What is illegal about New York City's Gay bars today is the Mafia (or syndicate) stranglehold on them. Legitimate Gay businessmen are afraid to open decent Gay bars with a healthy social atmosphere (as opposed to the hell-hole atmosphere of places typified by the Stonewall) because of fear of pressure from the unholy alliance of the Mafia and elements in the Police Dept. who accept payoffs and protect the Mafia monopoly.

We at the Homophile Youth Movement (HYMN) believe that the only way this monopoly can be broken is through the action of Homosexual men and women themselves. We obviously cannot rely on the various agencies of government who for years have known about this situation but who have refused to do anything about it. Therefore we urge the following:

1) That Gay businessmen step forward and open Gay bars that will be run legally with competitive pricing and a healthy social atmosphere.
2) That Homosexual men and women boycott places like the Stonewall. The only way, it seems, that we can get the criminal elements out of gay bars is simply to make it unprofitable for them.
3) That the Homosexual citizens of New York City, and concerned Heterosexuals, write to mayor Lindsay demanding a thorough investigation and effective action to correct this intolerable situation."