Stories of Pride: Before Pulse, There Was The UpStairs Lounge

Forty-six years ago today, four years after Stonewall, the 24th of June, 1973 was a Sunday in New Orleans and the last day of that city’s Pride Weekend. Of course, even in those days after Stonewall, you couldn’t really have an open celebration of Pride because there was still an ignorance of the LGBTQ community and it wasn’t safe, sometimes, even in New Orleans, to be openly gay. Still, there were places to gather and party and celebrate and be gay, like the second-floor bar on the corner of Iberville and Chartres Street; the UpStairs Lounge.

That day, members of the Metropolitan Community Church [MCC], the nation’s first gay church, founded in Los Angeles in 1969, gathered at the UpStairs for drinks and conversation. It seems to have been a welcoming, accepting, open, group; two attendees, gay brothers, Eddie and Jim Warren, even brought their mom, Inez, and proudly introduced her to the other patrons.

It was a party until … just before 8PM, 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. Buddy Rasmussen, an UpStairs bartender, was expecting a taxi driver and asked his friend Luther Boggs to let the driver in.

But it wasn’t a taxi driver at the door; it was an attacker, who had sprayed lighter fluid on the stairs and set ablaze as Boggs opened the door. A fireball pushed into the stairwell, and up towards the bar, engulfing the room and those gathered in flames.

MCC assistant pastor George “Mitch” Mitchell escaped, but came back in hopes of rescuing his boyfriend, Louis Broussard. Both men died in the fire, their bodies clinging together in death. The metal bars on the windows, meant to keep people from falling out, were just 14 inches apart, and most men and women were unable to squeeze through. That’s how MCC pastor, Bill Larson, died that night, screaming “Oh, God, no!”  After the fire, when police and firefighters surveyed the damage and began clearing the scene, they left Larson fused to the window frame until the next morning.

Thirty-two people lost their lives that Sunday 40 years ago—Luther Boggs, Inez Warren and her two sons, among them. And yet, even more sad, and disgusting, was that homophobia was so rampant in those days, families of some of those who died that night refused to claim the bodies, and local churches would not perform burials for the dead, or allow memorials to take place within their walls. Three victims were never identified or claimed, and were interred at the local potter’s field.

Three people considered unworthy of even a burial or a marker or recognition that they had ever lived, or died, at all.

When the Reverend William Richardson, of St. George’s Episcopal Church, held a small prayer service for the dead, about 80 people attended; but many more complained about Richardson to Iveson Noland, the Episcopalian bishop of New Orleans, who rebuked Richardson for his kindness.

Until Pulse nightclub, the UpStairs Lounge arson was the largest massacre of LGBTQ people ever in this country and yet it wasn’t even considered newsworthy; after all, it was just queers who died, so who really cared? And the few news organizations that covered the fire barely mentioned that those who died were gay, and this being in the decades and decades before Hate Crimes, it was never treated as such. A local radio DJ, when asked where they would bury the dead suggested “fruit” jars to his listeners.

And while other, smaller disasters resulted in City Hall press conferences or statements of condolence from the governor, not one civil authority spoke out about the fire or those murdered. In addition, the New Orleans police department wasn’t so interested about investigating the fire, of finding the culprit, or culprits. 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 UpStairs Lounge fire, and the murders, though a local man with known mental problems, Rogder Dale Nunez, claimed responsibility multiple times. Nunez, a sometime visitor to the UpStairs Lounge, committed suicide in 1974.

Times have changed since 1973, but not by much … I'd never heard this story and now like Pulse, and others, I will never forget.

The Friendly Atheist