When Skip Bailey was six years old, his parents divorced and his mother moved him and his siblings to Oakland, California, to live with one of her sisters and be closer to her other siblings. From this time comes Bailey's first vivid memory of his uncle Ferris LeBlanc, a middle-aged, gay, World War II vet “living the [high] life in San Francisco,” spending days working as a hairdresser in his own salon, and nights dancing his worries away at the Purple Onion in North Beach.
Just after Bailey’s family moved to Oakland, LeBlanc loaded his nephew into his flashy red MGTC sports car and they drove through the Bay Area's winding hills, up and down, up and down. Says Bailey, “It was just so cool.”
It was then that Bailey discovered a love for sports cars that has followed him into adulthood. But at six years old, he could only draw the cars on paper vs. driving and owning one like his beloved Uncle Ferris. So as a young artist, Bailey sketched cars and nothing else — until the fifth grade, that is, when his Uncle Ferris bought him a watercolor set.
Bailey remembers his uncle telling him, “'You really should look at art differently, as something special and real. You can still do your hot rods, but why don't you copy these paintings in your aunt’s house and try looking at art more creatively?'”
Bailey took that advice and, in high school, set his dreams on becoming a professional artist. His uncle happily supported him, purchasing all of Bailey’s art supplies and paying tuition for his first year in college.
After that, however, Bailey’s uncle disappeared. He had suffered through a series of toxic relationships, fled the West Coast, and lost touch with the family. Bailey didn't know what had happened to his beloved uncle.
But when Bailey's mother — who in large part had been raised by her older brother — came to spend Christmas with her son and his wife in Arizona, in 2015, she asked him to search for LeBlanc on the internet. What the family discovered was devastating.
“My mom was sitting at the dining room table. I walked in with tears rolling down my face," Bailey recalls for Teen Vogue. "'I found him,' I told her, ‘and it’s horrible.' It was page after page about the UpStairs Lounge fire. I said, ‘Ma, we got to find him and we got to bring him home to California.’”
Ferris LeBlanc was one of the 32 victims of the June 24, 1973, UpStairs Lounge fire in New Orleans, the deadliest attack on queer people in American history, until the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. New Orleans native Phillip Esteve had opened the UpStairs Lounge as a community space and bar for the working-class queer people of his city. At the time, the bar was among the only spaces in New Orleans to welcome individuals of all gender identities, sexual orientations, and races.
“It was this egalitarian, free space that, in many ways, was a forerunner to today's modern, queer, safe havens,” says Robert W. Fieseler, author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the UpStairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. “It was a unique space even for New Orleans, where you had working-class gay men who would often be using gay names or bar names… and gay Black men and gay white men would meet and drink and court there, which was not only totally unique for the South, but also totally unique for the rest of the country. It was for Christians and non-gay, non-Christians alike, and they would be side by side with people of gender minorities.”
The UpStairs bar became an almost regular meeting place for the New Orleans congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), the first gay-friendly church in the United States. Before the church secured its own permanent meeting spot, the congregation held services in a back room of the UpStairs Lounge. Even after finding its own location, the congregation established a weekly informal tradition when worshippers would go to the UpStairs Lounge after service for the Sunday “beer bust.”
Sunday, June 24, 1973 — coincidentally, the same weekend as New York City’s Pride parade — was no exception to this tradition. Members of the church migrated to the UpStairs Lounge after their weekly service, joining regular bar-goers and staff already there. There was nothing out of the ordinary that night, until Roger Dale Nunez began seeding aggression among the patrons present. Before being ejected from the bar, Nunez had started a bar fight with one of the UpStairs regulars, Michael Scarborough. Minutes before Nunez was thrown off the premises, he yelled what one patron heard as “I’m gonna burn you all out!”
About half an hour later, the building entrance was doused in lighter fluid and set aflame. The flames from the entry stairwell traveled through the chimney-like corridor up to the bar and ignited the highly flammable carpet, resulting in a massive fire that quickly made its way through the entirety of the UpStairs Lounge. Most of those who were able to escape did so through a little-known back exit in the third room of the lounge; others who remained perished in the fire. Among the 32 people killed were one-third of the New Orleans MCC congregation, including Reverend Bill Larson, pastor and leader of the church.
Buddy Rasmussen, a bartender working the night of the fire who led survivors through the bar’s back door, informed authorities of Nunez’s actions and his direct threat to patrons. According to testimony in a later investigation, shortly after the fire Nunez was questioned briefly by two plainclothes police officers, though nothing came of it.
But in the months following the tragedy, Nunez drunkenly admitted to starting the fire. He was later detained by sheriffs and questioned by the Louisiana State Fire Marshal’s office, but he was never charged for any crime. He committed suicide a year and a half after the tragedy, in November 1974. To this day the fire remains classified as unsolved.
“While [the arson attack] wasn’t a hate crime, per se, what became a hate crime was the community’s reaction to it,” says Johnny Townsend, author of Inferno in the French Quarter: The UpStairs Lounge Fire. “Especially some of the horrific jokes that were made. Folks were saying, ‘Did you hear about the weenie roast in the French Quarter the other day?’ or fire patrol, who said, ‘Let the f*ggots burn,’ as one survivor told me he heard.”
Following the fire, not a single elected official made a public statement about the tragedy, including then governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards and then mayor of New Orleans Moon Landrieu, who had offered condolences and days of mourning for six victims of an apartment fire that had happened a few months before. Local and national media refused to acknowledge the fire had happened in a gay bar, if they acknowledged the fire at all, with one radio commentator going so far as to propose the victims’ bodies be buried in “fruit jars.” In the documentary Upstairs Inferno, survivors of the fire recount how patrons of the bars were called “aliens,” “thieves,” “molesters,” and “perverts.”
“A lot of people I talked to would say things like, ‘I knew people who died in the fire’ or 'I was at the bar and escaped, but I couldn't tell anybody at work,'” says Townsend. “'I couldn't tell my other friends or family. I had to suffer with all this by myself because if I told anybody, I might lose my job, or my family might never talk to me again.'”
In June 2022, 49 years after the fire, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to formally apologize for its response to the fire. Fieseler wrote the apology resolution and delivered an hour-long presentation to the City Council that outlined the city’s wrongdoings and blatant practices of prejudice, including grievances against New Orleans' Times-Picayune for its reporting on the tragedy.
“When the whole presentation was over," Fieseler recalls, "I said, 'Now's your opportunity to do the right thing….' [The resolution] passed unanimously. It was one of the most emotional things I had ever been a part of.”
He continues, “You can't raise the dead, you can't go back and undo what happened in the past, but the way we remember the UpStairs Lounge fire is this ongoing, continuous, malleable process. The gestures that we make toward remembering it in a way that restores dignity, honor, and respect are incredibly meaningful to the present.”
According to Mariah Moore, codirector and cofounder of House of Tulip New Orleans, a nonprofit collective creating housing solutions for transgender and gender-nonconforming people in New Orleans, “New Orleans certainly isn’t the city it was 50 years ago in terms of how it treats its LGBTQ community. We are much more inclusive.” Still, she does see similarities in how the LGBTQ+ community remains under attack.
“You had folks using language like ‘predator’ and ‘pervert,’ who were calling these victims ‘things’ and ‘objects,’ rather than ‘people’ who were brothers, sons, daughters, and cousins who lost their lives," Moore says. "They disregarded all of that. That language is also reflected in the legislation we see today, when we think about the fact that drag is being framed as a grooming tool or trans kids in sports are being painted as something that's harmful when there's nothing that supports those claims.”
In May, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit school employees from mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom. Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has promised to veto the bill, which recently passed the Senate, though the GOP-dominated state legislature could override his veto. Meanwhile, the mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, issued a statement denouncing the legislation and had already joined a renewed effort, in August, to find the remains of four victims of the UpStairs Lounge fire who had never been identified — including those of Bailey’s uncle, Ferris LeBlanc.
“In 2018, we went down to New Orleans for the 45-year memorial service at the church," Bailey says. "As soon as the service was over, the mayor, who had been newly elected, came right up to my mom and said, ‘I know about your problem of trying to find your brother. I’ve organized a task force that is aimed at finding where your brother is buried.’”
But it’s been five years since that conversation and Bailey is worried time might be running out: “My mother’s 93. She’s got cancer. She’s not in great health. In 2018, I almost lost my life to double pneumonia. Time is becoming of the essence. I promised my mother we’d find him before she dies,” Bailey says. “We just want to cremate him, bring him back to California and give him the ceremony that he deserves. He’s a World War II vet and a beloved member of our family. He deserves to rest with dignity.”
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