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“The racial politics, for lack of a better word, were terrible,” recalled Michael Hickerson, a lifelong New Orleanian who is black as well as gay. None of the gay Mardi Gras krewes, or fraternal orders that hosted theatrical masque balls during Carnival season, had black membership in the early 1970s.
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In keeping with Damron code, to protect gay travelers from criminal exposure, the UpStairs Lounge received “(*)” status to signify “Very Popular.” In fact, the Up Stairs Lounge was so popular that summer that it attracted a black visitor from Atlanta named Reginald Tubbs. The UpStairs Lounge culture had proven so attractive to open-minded gays, such a queer change of pace for New Orleans, that it received special mention in Bob Damron’s Address Book, an annual travel guide for the discreet gay vacationer. The crew of the UpStairs Lounge had an anthem they liked to sing at the piano that summed up their unique outlook: “United we stand, divided we fall.” So went the chorus.
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Such terminology had been appropriated from national gay culture-appearing throughout queer literature such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Larry Kramer's Faggots-but given new context in the racial dynamics of the Creole South.įor example, two black longshoremen who crossed racial lines to frequent the UpStairs Lounge, which served mostly working-class white patrons on the border of the French Quarter, went by the nicknames Smokie and Cocoa as reference to their skin tones.īuddy Rasmussen, the white bartender and manager of the UpStairs Lounge, was known to be especially friendly to all comers, even letting women into the bar at a time when gays and lesbians were strictly separated. “Snow,” by contrast, meant white and referenced antiquated notions of pureness in an era that eroticized race. “Dinge” was slang for black homosexuals, reference to dirt-language now pejorative and offensive but then considered to be street-speak, a crude but commonplace descriptor. That was unspoken law in the gay subterranean of New Orleans in the 1970s.
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“Dinge” did not mix with “snow” openly, especially not on Bourbon Street.