Gen Z has long been known as the generation with the most LGBTQ+ members, but recent research reveals that it is also the generation most likely to embrace unspecific labels.
Among 18- to 26-year-olds, 26 percent said they identify as “something other than straight,” according to a new poll from Business Insider and YouGov. This compares to 15 percent of Millennials, 11 percent of Gen X, and 7 percent of Baby Boomers.
Gen Z is more likely to identify under the umbrella-term of “queer” rather than a specific label. 5 percent self-identify as queer, compared to just 1 percent of Millennials and Gen X, and less than 1 percent of Boomers.
Gen Z is also more likely to embrace the “bisexual” label, as opposed to “binary terms that suggest they like only one type of person,” such as “gay” or “lesbian.” 13 percent of Gen Z identifies as bisexual, compared to 7 percent of Millennials and 4 percent of Gen X. Only 1 percent of Boomers identify as bisexual.
However, researchers noted that this does not necessarily mean there are more bisexual people in today’s generation, and that the data could instead suggest that more youth today feel comfortable coming out, and being open about their sexuality.
The data nonetheless shows Gen Z’s embrace of the term, as well as their embrace of the label queer. Many respondents stated that they alternate between labels depending on the context, using the term queer in tandem with those such as lesbian or gay.
One 24-year-old respondent said that she primarily uses queer, but added that “I also think ‘lesbian’ has a political meaning, so I like that word as well.” Another 21-year-old said he uses both queer and gay, but tends to use queer because “some people like to miscategorize [gay] as excluding people.”
Researchers noted that the data and personal examples reflect the fluidity of sexuality, and the attitude among LGBTQ+ youth that, as one respondent put it, “change can be good, too.”
Officials overseeing the Conservative Political Action Conference knew about past accusations of sexual misconduct by chairman Matt Schlapp but failed to investigate or remove him from his powerful post, an amended sexual battery and defamation lawsuit claims.
In one alleged incident, during a fundraising trip to South Florida in early 2022, Schlapp was accused of stripping to his underwear and rubbing against another person without his consent, according to the filing. In 2017, at a CPAC after-party, Schlapp attempted to kiss an employee against his wishes, the lawsuit claims.
In both cases, according to the suit, the alleged victims reported the unwanted advances to staffers at CPAC’s parent organization, the American Conservative Union, but no action was taken against Schlapp, a longtime Republican power broker and prominent backer of former president Donald Trump.
A 24-year-old U.S.Senate staffer who is allegedly in a video showing two men having sex in a Senate hearing room has been fired. A video of the incident in a Senate hearing room was reported on Friday and quickly went viral online.
Maryland Democratic U.S. Senator Ben Cardin’s office released a statement about the legislative aide who was allegedly in the video’s employment.
“Aidan Maese-Czeropski is no longer employed by the U.S. Senate,” a spokesperson said. “We will have no further comment on this personnel matter.”
Maese-Czeropski’s LinkedIn profile shows he had worked for the 80-year-old senator since October 2021.
In his defense earlier on Friday, when allegations began to swirl that he was involved, Maese-Czeropski addressed the incident on the platform. He didn’t specifically deny the allegations. “This has been a difficult time for me, as I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda,” he wrote.
“While some of my actions in the past have shown poor judgement, I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace. Any attempts to characterize my actions otherwise are fabricated,” he said, adding that he would seek legal counsel to address false allegations against him.
The Advocate has attempted to contact Maese-Czeropski for additional comments but has not yet received a response.
The U.S. Capitol Police, in a statement to The Advocate Friday evening, confirmed that they are aware of the incident and are conducting an investigation. “We are aware and looking into this,” a spokesperson said.
The Advocate was first to confirm the incident with U.S. Capitol Police and Cardin’s office.
The footage in question, first released by the far-right outlet Daily Caller, founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, shows two men in a sexual act in what appears to be a Senate hearing room, a space typically reserved for legislative proceedings including confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Courtjustices.
The video has sparked widespread controversy and attention, highlighting concerns about conduct and security within government buildings.
The reaction online has been mixed but vigorous.
While many on the right are calling attention to the unprofessional behavior and complaining of depravity and sexual deviancy, others are pointing out the hypocrisy of conservatives glossing over their own sex-related scandals like RepublicanColorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s recent public groping scandal in a theater with children present or the Florida GOP chairman, Christian Ziegler and his wife, Sarasota County Public Schools board member and Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget, whose own sexual escapades recently came to the forefront after Christian Ziegler was accused of raping a woman with whom the married couple had a sexual relationship.
Christian Ziegler denies the allegations and has not been charged. Bridget Ziegler is not accused of any involvement in the sexual assault. Both have refused to resign from their positions. Bridget Ziegler’s involvement in a secret same-sex sexual relationship was condemned as hypocrisy as she had advocated for Florida’s “don’t say gay” law and promoting bans of books about LGBTQ+ people and topics in schools.
As anti-LGBTQ+ bills from politicians spike across the United States, support for gay and transgender people is also declining among the public.
While the majority of Americans still support marriage equality and anti-discrimination policies, support for LGBTQ+ rights has gone down “across the board” in the past few years, according to a recent report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
While around 72 percent of the public supported marriage equality in August 2021, just 66 percent said they support it in 2023. The PRRI cites “partisan dynamics” as a factor behind the shift, which has largely influenced Republican voters.
For example, support for policies requiring transgender people to use bathrooms based on their sex at birth nearly doubled among GOP voters in just seven years. Bathroom bills were supported by just 44 percent of Republicans in 2016, compared to 80 percent in 2023. Support for such policies among Democrats consistently remained low, with 31 percent in both years.
However, the PRRI notes “trends in opinions have not been uniform across the United States.” Opposition to policies like bathroom bans remains strong in traditionally blue states, whereas support for them has been increasing in red states. One trend that remained consistent across states is that fewer people responded with neutral stances such as “Don’t Know.”
The report states that “there is a very close relationship between opinions and policy,” and while it is unclear if “policy change occurred before or after opinion change … there are signals that the anti-LGBTQ turn is shifting norms.”
And while younger generations are more likely to support LGBTQ+ people — particularly transgender people — previous PRRI analysis demonstrates that “partisanship can overcome generational divides.”
“As partisan politicians began to clearly take opposing positions on transgender rights, so too have partisan members of the mass public,” the report states.
Three weeks before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan to deliver what was to be one of the final public speeches of his life. Hundreds of people packed the gymnasium at the local high school to hear the civil rights icon speak. In the audience that night was an 18-year-old boy named Jerry DeGrieck. DeGrieck, already a longtime supporter of the Civil Rights Movement from an early age, was defying an edict from his avowedly racist parents prohibiting him from attending.
DeGrieck’s presence that night, however, was not the only secret he was hiding. Jerry DeGrieck was also gay, and he knew it.
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“From the time I was eight years old, I knew that I was different,” he told LGBTQ Nation. “I didn’t even know what the word homosexual was, I never really heard it. But I knew that I was different.”
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700 miles away, in Levittown, New York, Nancy Wechsler’s parents were raising her in a much different way. As ardent socialists, they instilled in the young Nancy a deep commitment to the causes of social and economic justice, including aggressive support for the Civil Rights Movement. She was, as she described, a “red diaper baby.” And like Jerry DeGrieck, Nancy Wechsler knew early on in life that she was gay.
Despite the differences in their upbringings, the shared core values they acquired early in life made it inevitable that DeGrieck and Wechsler would eventually come to know each other as political compatriots when they both began attending the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. As student movement colleagues, they would eventually make history by being elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in April 1972 under the banner of the socialist Human Rights Party.
As members of the Ann Arbor City Council, the pair would spearhead a number of bold initiatives. Within their first few months, they were successful at pushing through several progressive policies that have since become standard in many areas across the country. From a formal declaration of Gay Pride Week, to eliminating local criminal penalties for possession of marijuana, to a Human Rights Ordinance which made Ann Arbor the first city in America to outlaw discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, DeGrieck and Wechsler’s influence was changing the game in Ann Arbor, as well as the entire United States.
Despite these accomplishments, it is also perhaps fitting that many LGBTQ+ Americans may never have heard the names Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler. They have both always believed that individual notoriety should take a back seat to a cause far more important than any one person. “Electoral politics is not about the individual” is a sentiment they both expressed during interviews with LGBTQ Nation. “I viewed electoral politics more as a platform to challenge people and raise issues,” Wechsler said.
It was in the process of raising one of these issues that both DeGrieck and Wechsler would unwittingly make history of their own.
On the night of October 14, 1973, the owner of a local straight bar known as The Rubaiyat had ejected several lesbian patrons for dancing together and kissing. Wechsler, who was part of the group that had been ejected, met the police when they arrived at the scene and attempted to explain that The Rubaiyat’s owner was in violation of Ann Arbor’s Human Rights Ordinance.
“He just looked dumbfounded,” she recalled, “like he actually hadn’t heard of it and didn’t know what to do with what I was saying. And he certainly didn’t inform [the owner] that he was going against the Ann Arbor city ordinance. So, he was not helpful. Police are rarely helpful.”
The police took no action against The Rubaiyat or its owner, Greg Fenerli. Indeed, this inaction fit a pattern of Ann Arbor city officials ignoring complaints of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Since the passage of the Human Rights Ordinance in July 1972, at least a dozen such complaints had been filed with the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission, with no action taken on any of them by the Ann Arbor City Attorney, Ed Pear. The ordinance was simply not being enforced.
The following day, October 15, the council was set to hear the annual report of Ann Arbor’s Chief of Police, Walter Krasny. Sensing an opportunity to pressure the city to finally enforce the Human Rights Ordinance, Wechsler and DeGrieck made the decision to finally, at long last, come out together during the council meeting.
It was a moment long in the making for DeGrieck.
“I was ready to come out, I really wanted to come out,” he recalled. “I remember going to the University of Michigan Health Services to see a counselor because I wanted help coming out, and I had a few sessions with the counselor and she said to me, ‘I will help you if you want to be straight, but I will not help you come out.’”
In a time before the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, coming out as gay was seen by many as unthinkable, much less for anyone serving in elected office.
Despite all this, in their statements before the council that day, both DeGrieck and Wechsler did the unthinkable. They came out. In so doing, they became the first openly LGBTQ+ elected officials in American history. Before Harvey Milk, Barney Frank, Danica Roem, or any of the other hundreds of openly LGBTQ+ elected officials that have come since, there was simply Jerry and Nancy, fighting for the enforcement of the historic ordinance they themselves had championed.
“I remember it feeling really good to just come out,” Nancy Wechsler recalled, “even though there was a lot of pushback and shock. I remember people on the city council could barely look at us, they just looked disgusted. It’s like it was bad enough that we were these lefty, socialist, union-supporting people who helped organize demonstrations that actually shut down city council meetings, but then we were queer, too?!”
Over the following months, in the face of both public and private backlash, Jerry and Nancy continued to advocate for proper enforcement of the Ann Arbor Human Rights Ordinance, sharply criticizing both Chief of Police Walter Krasny and City Attorney Ed Pear for their inaction. By the time their terms were up the following April, however, they both nonetheless had come to realize it was time to move on.
“Before I was on the City Council I used to walk around Ann Arbor by myself a lot and just relax and walk. After I was on the City Council I didn’t have that kind of privacy…” Wechsler recollected. Following the death of her mother that December, the decision to move on from Ann Arbor and political life was an easy one.
DeGrieck, meanwhile, was initially keen on running for a second term, but eventually realized, as he and Nancy had always sought to stress, “Electoral politics is not about the individual.” He also decided not to run again in April 1974. The following month, the City of Ann Arbor undertook its first ever enforcement action under the Human Rights Ordinance for an act of anti-gay discrimination, with City Attorney Ed Pear filing suit against the owner of a local motel for firing a gay employee.
In the fifty years since, both Wechsler and DeGrieck have laid down roots worlds away from the Michigan college town where they both humbly etched their names into history. DeGrieck has since relocated to Seattle, where he went to work for the King County Department of Public Health, recently retiring after helping to lead the county’s COVID-19 response. Wechsler has since settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has continued to be involved in a number of social and economic justice causes.
Of their contributions to the movement and their importance to LGBTQ+ elected officials across the United States over the past fifty years, Speaker pro tempore of the Michigan House of Representatives Laurie Pohutsky — herself openly bisexual — had the following to say:
“It’s hard to overstate just what Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler coming out means for all of us openly LGBTQ elected officials who have served since. Being the first of anything comes with great responsibility, anxiety, and fear, and all of that was of course compounded by the time during which Jerry and Nancy came out. All of us who have followed in their footsteps owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for their courage, and while barriers of bigotry and hatred still exist for LGBTQ elected officials, we can draw from the example that Jerry and Nancy set by knocking down the very first one.”
Reflecting on the current challenges confronting the LGBTQ+ community, DeGrieck reserved specific ire for members of the community who refuse to support the rights of transgender people.
“I can’t stand it when some gay people, particularly gay men, don’t see trans issues as their issue. I think that that is really pathetic,” DeGrieck said. “Trans people are some of the most marginalized folks in this country and are scapegoated. How a young person who is trans feels and is impacted by all of the marginalization, hate and dismissiveness is just something we cannot tolerate.”
He singled out Montana State Representative Zooey Zephyr for special praise.
“We need trans leaders like Zooey Zephyr of Montana to be out there. To know us is to love us. A lot of people used to not know that there were lesbians and gays in their midst. I think the more out people are, the more other people know them, and I think that makes a difference.”
It is a sentiment which harkens back to that fateful evening in the gymnasium at Grosse Pointe South High School. It was the night DeGrieck defied the prejudice of his own family to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the overwhelming moral authority with which he spoke for what would prove to be one of the last times.
In the midst of his speech at Grosse Pointe, Dr. King uttered a simple yet profound truth, which rings out across all backgrounds, and across all struggles for justice and human dignity: “I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
When the GLAAD Media Institute (GMI) visited Kansas City, Missouri on Oct. 14 to facilitate a multimedia workshop called Telling Your Story: Messaging & Media Tools for Today’s Activist Justice Horn said something that had the room snapping in agreement.
“National organizations don’t visit cities like Kansas City or Tulsa, so for GLAAD to be here means a lot to the LGBTQ community of Missouri,” said Horn, the chair for the LGBTQ Commission of Kansas City. Horn said that because states like Missouri and Oklahoma are fully locked anti-LGBTQ states, they’re over looked.
It’s true. The “Show-Me” state introduced the highest quantity of anti-equality laws (48) this year next to Texas (54), according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“I think at the basis it’s ensuring that both youth to adult, members of our community, aren’t going to be bullied; that’s with slurs to legislation, to policy. What we are doing here in Kansas City is making an environment where none of that is welcome, that everyone is affirmed and accepted here in Kansas City,” Horn said. “I think this sets a tone of what’s important, and that’s ensuring everyone is welcome here in our community.”
However, no matter what’s at stake, Kansas City’s LGBTQ advocates and public officials will continue to organize for the LGBTQ people of their state and beyond. For instance, this May, Kansas City Council declared itself a “Sanctuary State” for transgender medical care, before the state’s trans medical ban for youth under 18 took effect in late August. The state also legalized discrimination against trans athletes’ participation in school sports.
Both laws would have directly affected GLAAD Media Institute Alum Atlas Mallams, a first-year Computer Science major at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), if not for the city’s actions. He came to the media workshop to learn how to better tell xey story.
“When I first came out as a transgender man, I didn’t really know that much about the LGBTQ community as a whole. I didn’t really know the strife, the things that they go through on a day-to-day basis, the things they have to watch out for when they are walking down the street,” said Mallams.
Mallams says they were surprised when he first experienced discrimination for being trans, he did not expect it. That’s when they started to realize the lack of news coverage on the day-to-day harms that LGBTQ people experience.
“I wanted to gain the resources to know how to speak that and make sure I can make an impact, and put my view points out there and what I want to say out there, and what I want people to know about my own story out there in a way that’s going to help people understand,” Mallams continued.
Other advocates, parents, teachers, and city officials expressed this concern about how the news media in Missouri amplify the discrimination against people in a time where stories like Atlas’ are important for other trans and queer youth.
People said they look to local news stations like ABC 9 and KSHB, and alternative news like the Kansas City Beacon, Kansas Public Radio, Kansas Reflector, and Missouri Independent.
“You can’t trust any of the media [in Missouri],” one participant could be heard saying in the back of the room.
This statement about distrust in the media speaks to the concerns of Alvaro Ontiveros Aguilar – an advisor to the city on the LGBTQ Commission of Kansas City.
“My biggest concern for LGBTQ equality in Kansas City and Missouri overall is having legislative protection for my community,” said Ontiveros Aguilar to GLAAD after the training. “My first task on the commission has been to try and spearhead a movement to get a hate crime ordinance added on to our municipal codes. That is one of my biggest passions and largest concerns.”
Ontiveros Aguilar says the ordinance would define “hate crime” and “gives prosecutors the tools to enforce municipal law to protect victims of hate crimes,” reported KCTV CBS 5.
Overall, the more people shared their stories, the more they told GLAAD that they are doing what the state refuses to do, create safety and equality for not just the LGBTQ community, but the many communities that make up the LGBTQ community too.
In the last six years alone, Kansas City’s City Council has established practices and policies that keep people safe like banning conversion therapy (2019), establishing an LGBTQ employee resource group (2018), establishing an all-gender restroom policy for city buildings (2021), and so much more.
More on the GLAAD Media Institute: Using the best practices, tools, and techniques we’ve perfected over the past 30 years, the GLAAD Media Institute turns education into armor for today’s culture war—transforming individuals into compelling storytellers, media-savvy navigators, and mighty ambassadors whose voices break through the noise and incite real change.
It’s a time to remember the history that is often forgotten and honor the many strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in recent decades. As a queer young person myself, I wanted to better understand the rich history that came before me to gain a deeper appreciation of what it means to be a queer American at this moment in time.
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I spoke with Victor Basile, a long-time LGBTQ+ rights advocate and the first executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest queer rights advocacy group. Basile was also the co-founder of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ+ political candidates. This year, he released his memoir Bending Toward Justice, about the history of HRC.
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In our conversation, I was looking for context: I needed something to help me understand the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks we’ve seen in recent years.
Together, we sat down virtually to look at where we stand and where we go from here.
LGBTQ Nation: Can you provide an overview of the current landscape of LGBTQ+ rights for queer youth in the US today?
Victor Basile: It’s pretty rough. We’re facing an onslaught of bills against queer youth, with more than 420 anti-LGBTQ bills having been introduced into state/local legislatures this year. They come mostly from red states and queer youth are largely the ones targeted. Until recently we’ve made some great progress. And it’s only in recent years that have we seen — what I call “emboldened behavior — because anti-gay politicians see a political advantage. I see this as a fairly recent development. And it may get rougher before it gets better.
LGBTQ Nation: What do you mean by ‘get rougher’?
VB: In red states, little will get in the way of the passage of many of these anti-LGBTQ bills, try as we might. There are just too many states and too many legislators to successfully fight. But just as we did in the 80s and early 90s when things were so bad, we did learn how to fight and we did learn how to win. And the same is true now: We’re eventually going to beat these attacks back if we stay focused and organized. We’ve been down this road before.
LGBTQ Nation: Tell me more about the period of time when you served as the head of the Human Rights Campaign
VB: There were frequent ‘gay bashings’ directed mostly at gay men [like Matthew Shepard]. The police would do little to help, they would say the victim got what they deserved for being gay and the courts would agree.
The government also turned its back on us when AIDS came around as we watched thousands of people die, which started around 1983. It took Ronald Reagan until 1987, when he made a speech about it. Every year up until then, his administration zeroed out any funding for AIDS research. It wasn’t until 1983 that Congress put money on the books to fight AIDS. But queer youth today don’t know much about that history. Through telling these stories, it may give some hope to today’s youth that we may overcome.
LGBTQ Nation: What’s on your mind this LGBTQ History Month?
VB: To know us is to love us; the more visibility, the better life is. Do you know how National Coming Out Day started? It grew from the War Conference held in 1988, which was a gathering of about 275 activists around the country to address the government’s handling of the AIDS epidemic. It was called this way because we felt, back then, that the government was at war with us. And the overwhelming conclusion, despite all our disagreements, was the need for people to be “out” in public and that would eventually change people’s minds about our community.
I was there. It brought together older and younger activists, and women made up a third of the activists. Where it fell short was people of color because it was overwhelmingly white. That was a failure of the War Conference.
LGBTQ Nation: How would you say the conversations surrounding the LGBTQ+ community have evolved since the 1988 conference?
VB: The term ‘transgender’ was not at all on the boilerplate during my time at the HRC so there was this general unawareness of the trans community. The attacks directed at the lesbian and gay community back then are now being directed to the trans community today; it’s repeating itself.
And back then, it was so hard to get the mainstream media to cover the LGBTQ community. But turn on the TV now and you’ll see there are LGBTQ characters. The public is now on our side, the polls are still favorable to same-sex marriage even in red states. It’s why this month is so important.
LGBTQ Nation: We’ve talked a lot about the past, but where do we go from here? The future’s looking bleak to me.
VB: There is little doubt in my mind that we will overcome this. How much time that takes, I don’t know. We have not faced this type of political repression before and just need to figure out how to fight here. It’s a battle we may win state by state, and we have to take care of our own.
Given everything going on, we’ve come a long way. This is just a setback.
Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile.
Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on fire as neighbors raced to pour pitchers of water onto them. Rasmussen began tapping patrons on the shoulder to follow him toward the fire exit at the back of the bar, but many were too shocked by the exploding blaze to move.
The June 24, 1973, conflagration, likely set by a sex worker ejected from the New Orleans bar earlier that night, killed 32 people and injured at least 15 others.
Yet the reaction to the catastrophe hardly matched the immense suffering the fire caused, and the tragedy was compounded by multiple denials: Public officials refused to issue statements about the fire, and Catholic churches refused to hold funeral services for the victims, whom they saw as unrepentant sinners. The media only reported on the fire briefly or not at all, and some families refused to claim their relatives’ bodies because they didn’t want to acknowledge that they were gay. Three of the victims ended up buried in unmarked graves — two remain unidentified.
To this day, the arson remains unsolved.
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Hate crimes reverberate through communities, intimidating an entire class of people. The Up Stairs Lounge had been a safe space in the gay-friendly, tourist-heavy French Quarter. But as bar patrons feared a similar attack on other gathering spots, still others worried that police might start raiding gay bars more often and arresting more men in the name of public safety. Bar owners believed talking too much about the fire could hurt business. And locals just wanted to move on from the horror.
As a result, to this day, even many queer New Orleanians aren’t aware of the most devastating fire in their city’s history, the deadliest massacre of gay men in the U.S. before the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
This year, half a century later, there’s considerable important work being done to ensure that the arson and its aftermath are remembered and the deaths memorialized. For the tragedy’s anniversary, a group of community activists, religious leaders, and queer historians partnered with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and the Historic New Orleans Collection to organize a weekend of commemorative events at the end of June.
The weekend, attended by LGBTQ Nation, featured discussions with religious leaders and activists who lent a hand in the fire’s aftermath, artists who have made documentaries and theatrical works based on the event, church leaders concerned with the tragedy’s spiritual legacy, and podcasters and archivists dedicated to preserving its terrible memory. The weekend events also included art exhibitions, film screenings, a memorial service, and a “second line” jazz funeral through the city’s streets to the now defunct bar’s front entrance.
Their work is especially important considering the current backlash against remembering the atrocities America has committed against its most vulnerable communities. Extreme right-wingers are busy denying our guilt over slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the effect these traumas have on minority communities to this day.
But those committed to preserving history aren’t just making artworks and public speeches about the tragedy; they’re also working to ensure that the victims and their families finally get the recognition and empathy they deserve for their loss.
The fire occurred when New Orleans author Johnny Townsend was only 11 years old. Though he saw horrific photos of the aftermath on TV news at the time, as he grew up, he could find little background on what happened. So in 1989 — 16 years after the fire — he began tracking down the bar’s survivors and former patrons with the help of Rasmussen, the lounge’s surviving bartender.
Through interviews and research, Townsend published the first historical account of what happened as well as profiles for each victim in his 2011 book Let the Faggots Burn. The amateur historian struggled to find a publisher, so he eventually published it himself via BookLocker.com. After the 333-page book was released, a son of one of the fire’s victims approached him after Townsend spoke publicly about the book and said that all he had ever known of his father was what his mother had told him: “Your father was a drunk, and he died at a bar.”
Townsend’s book had given his dad back to him. Today, the historical amnesia is finally being addressed. There are three books about the fire — including Clayton Delery-Edwards’ comprehensive 2014 account, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, and Robert W. Fieseler’s 2018 nonfiction narrative, Tinderbox.
Three documentaries have been made about the arson, with a fourth in production, as well as one play, a stage musical, four unproduced screenplays, a dance piece, various podcasts, and a permanent art installation.
One of the documentaries, a 2013 short by Royd Anderson, helped the estranged family of World War II veteran Ferris LeBlanc realize that he was one of three “unidentified white males” who perished in the blaze. The city buried his corpse in an unmarked plot within Resthaven Memorial Park, a potter’s field located near the city’s northeastern coast.
Anderson is now working on a documentary called Saving Ferris and pressuring government officials to exhume LeBlanc and give him the proper military burial that he deserved.
Max Vernon’s 2017 stage musical, The View UpStairs, depicts a snarky gay fashionista millennial who buys the dilapidated Up Stairs Lounge to launch his flagship store but is then magically transported to 1973, just before the fire. Despite its tragic content, it has been seen by over 100,000 people — Off-Broadway, in multiple U.S. cities, as well as in England and Australia — and has been translated into Japanese and seen by 20,000 theatergoers. Drag legend RuPaul called the musical “fantastic.”
None of these things would’ve been possible without Townsend’s first book. Delery-Edwards and Fieseler agreed on this point as the three book authors spoke at an opening-night panel during the 50th-anniversary commemorative weekend.
Fieseler said that people still contact him regularly with new information about the fire. At speaking engagements, attendees will often approach him, tears in their eyes, to confess their estrangement from their own queer family members.
“It can change minds,” Fieseler said of the history. “It can melt hearts when they learn the inhumanity of how these people were treated.”
Many of the weekend panelists said they wanted to ensure that the history is never forgotten and that it never happens again — but it already is happening again.
“New Orleans is renowned internationally for being a welcoming, open city. And part of us continuing to promote that narrative requires us to acknowledge a time when we were not an open, welcoming city.”City Council Vice President J.P. Morell
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Eleven states have laws censoring discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in public school classrooms. Thirty-three states have banned LGBTQ+-inclusive books from schools and public libraries, according to the free speech organization PEN America. Meanwhile, recent reports show that the LGBTQ+ community has increasingly been targeted by legislation banning drag shows and gender-affirming care, as well as by hate speech, threats, and violence from white supremacist, neo-fascist, parental rights, and Christian nationalist groups.
“New Orleans is renowned internationally for being a welcoming, open city,” City Council Vice President J.P. Morell told attendees at the opening reception of the 50th anniversary commemoration. “And part of us continuing to promote that narrative requires us to acknowledge a time when we were not an open, welcoming city.”
Morell spearheaded an official apology from the city, delivered in 2022, for its “botched and callous response” to the arson. He said that the city and media had made an “active effort” to bury the massacre and shield the politically powerful from any guilt for neglecting its victims. That same year, Louisiana state Rep. Alonzo Knox (D) passed a resolution apologizing for the state’s response.
A growing community has emerged to preserve the arson’s memory and counter those who wish to keep it buried. To understand what drives them, one must first know a little about the bar, the community it created, and the fire that ravaged both.
“When I try to explain [the arson] to people not in the queer community,” Morell told the reception attendees, “I tell them the Up Stairs Lounge is like the [1921] Tulsa Massacre for those in the African American community … The fact that we didn’t know about it as a country tells you how successful the government and the media can be in erasing history if we don’t fight for it.”
How a refuge turned into a deadly nightmare
Gay life during the early 1970s was nothing like today. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness, the best-known depiction across America was the hillbilly rape scene from the film Deliverance, and some closeted men got married and had children just to avoid persecution.
While some of New Orleans’ queer community joined invite-only dinner clubs and Mardi Gras krewes to socialize privately, others frequented public cruising spots and bars. In the late-night hours, police would sometimes raid these establishments, beating up and arresting patrons on vague “obscenities” charges for actions as simple as hugging. Arrestees had their names published in the newspaper, resulting in firings, divorces, and even taking their own lives.
In 1970, gay entrepreneur Philip Esteve opened the Up Stairs Lounge and hired Rasmussen, a friendly man who had been dishonorably discharged from the military for being gay.
The bar didn’t get much business when it first opened, but then Rasmussen had the idea for a Sunday evening Beer Bust from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. when customers could pay $1 for all-you-can-drink beer. He figured, accurately, that Beer Bust customers would become bar regulars.
As the crowds grew, the lounge became a refuge for its patrons, some of whom were out among gay friends but closeted at work. The bar held annual parties for Mardi Gras and Halloween and also community fundraisers for children’s hospitals and other causes. On a small stage, patrons performed plays and lighthearted “Nellydramas” where men played women’s roles, and the audience threw popcorn at cartoonish villains.
The bar also hired a pianist to play singalongs. At the end of every Beer Bust, he’d play the 1970 Brotherhood of Man song “United We Stand,” and patrons would sing together: “There’s nowhere in the world that I would rather be / Than with you my love / And there’s nothing in the world that I would rather see / Than your smile my love / For united we stand / Divided we fall / And if our backs should ever be against the wall / We’ll be together, together, you and I.”
The bar also hosted Sunday morning services for the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a gay-affirming church started in Los Angeles in 1968. William “Bill” Larson, New Orleans’ MCC minister, temporarily held Sunday services in the bar’s intimate theater. Even after moving the gatherings into his own home, church members still patronized the bar after services, often staying for the Beer Bust.
According to accounts in the aforementioned books and an ABC News featureabout the arson, during one Beer Bust on June 24, 1973, 26-year-old sex worker Roger Dale Nunez was reportedly sexually harassing patrons. One patron punched him, and the bartender threw him out. But before leaving, Nunez allegedly said, “I’m gonna burn you all out!”
It’s believed that Nunez then went to a nearby Walgreens, purchased a 7-ounce canister of Ronsonol lighter fluid, emptied it onto the bar entrance’s bottom steps, and ignited it. The small fire quickly blazed up the carpeted stairway and swept into the bar, engulfing its wallpaper, window drapes, wood paneling, posters, and decorations.
Rasmussen, who received fire training in the military, helped 22 people safely exit from a fire door behind the stage, but others were too intoxicated or stunned to follow. Some of the 42 people who remained in the bar escaped through another fire door; others ran down the fiery stairwell and emerged downstairs severely burned.
Twelve escaped by miraculously squeezing through the 10-inch gaps in the metal safety bars guarding the lounge’s large floor-to-ceiling windows. One such person was Rusty Quinton, a man who would soon after be photographed while looking at the fiery bar and crying, “My friends are up there!”
Others weren’t so lucky. Larson, the MCC pastor, squeezed his head and arm through the bars before catching flame and burning alive. Some people feared the windows’ 12-foot drop to the sidewalk and blocked others from escaping through them.
Though firefighters extinguished the blaze barely 20 minutes after it began, when they entered the bar, they discovered that nearly 17 corpses had piled atop one another while trying to escape through the windows. Firefighters vomited from the stench and cried at the horrific sights. Larson’s charred corpse remained visible in the window for nearly four hours before being removed.
Fifteen injured survivors went to Charity Hospital, forcing it to prematurely open its new burn unit. Three of those admitted died from their injuries.
One survivor with burned hands asked for help dialing his boyfriend on a pay phone. When his lover answered, he looked at the floor and said, “Hello, David? Listen, I’ve had a sort of accident. Yes … Please come quick. Please come. I hurt.”
Heroes from the ashes
Throughout history, some haven’t considered the fire a hate crime because it was committed by someone from the LGBTQ+ community. But, as one commemoration panelist, Metropolitan Community Church minister Paul Breton, said, the real hate crime happened afterward with the inhuman response of the city, state, and church.
The indignities began almost immediately. As journalists arrived at the scene, Rasmussen found Nunez in the crowd and dragged him to a police officer for arrest. The cop, possibly more concerned with crowd control, told Rasmussen to move along. The officer’s negligence characterized the police’s handling of the case. While investigators often use victims’ clothing, jewelry, birthmarks, and IDs to identify the dead, the fire had rendered them unidentifiable. Police officials told reporters from then newspaper The States-Item that they had trouble identifying people because “some thieves hung out” at the bar, and it was “not uncommon for homosexuals to carry false identification.”
Reggie Adams, Adam Fontenot, Horace “Skip” Hetchell, Ken Harrington, Rev. William “Bill” Larson, Ferris LeBlanc, Robert Lumpkin, Leon Richard Maples, Bud Matyi, Duane George “Mitch” Mitchell, and Perry Lane Waters, Jr. were among the victims on June 27, 1973. Photos courtesy of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.
Police concluded their investigation about two months later without ever questioning or arresting Nunez. The fire marshal’s more thorough investigation subjected Nunez to a psychological stress evaluation (PSE) that detected dishonesty in Nunez’s denials. PSEs, however, are subjective and often inadmissible as court evidence.
Nunez drunkenly confessed to three people — his lover, a nun, and a drag queen — that he had started the fire, only to deny it when sober. None of them told the police. The drag queen, Miss Fury, said Nunez confessed to her on Christmas Eve 1973 that “He’d only meant to cause a little fire and smoke. He’d only meant to scare everybody. He didn’t realize the whole place would go up in flames.” The 27-year-old arsonist died by suicide on November 15, 1974, by overdosing on beer and painkillers.
Even though the fire marshal concluded that Nunez was guilty, the Orleans Parish District Attorney refused to sign off on the conclusion. With no fingerprints on the lighter fluid can, witnesses to the fire setting, or confession, there was no proof and no conviction — the case remains officially unsolved to this day.
The local paper, The Times-Picayune, printed the names of the deceased and the survivors, outing some of them. Closeted survivors who avoided the press still couldn’t mention the tragedy at their workplaces. According to Delery-Edwards’ and Townsend’s research, tasteless jokes began circulating among New Orleans locals about “flaming queens,” how the dead homos should be buried in fruit jars, and how the real tragedy was that more f**gots didn’t die.
When a 1972 fire at New Orleans’ Rault Center killed six people, then-Mayor Moon Landrieu, then-Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, and then-Catholic Archbishop Philip Hannan issued sympathetic statements to the victims and their families. However, after the Up Stairs Lounge fire killed 32, the officials said nothing for weeks. Hannan reportedly told local Catholic churches not to hold funerals or burials for any of the fire’s non-Catholic victims.
An appeals court blocked 19 different lawsuits suing city and state agencies for failing to inspect the bar for fire hazards for over two years before the blaze. With no one else to hold accountable, the litigants sued the bar’s owner for $80,000, a paltry sum to split among them all.
But even amid this coldness, heroes rose from the ashes.
Three MCC leaders — MCC founder Troy Perry of Los Angeles, Reverend John Gill of Atlanta, and Minister Paul Breton of Washington D.C. — quickly met in New Orleans to begin organizing memorials and press conferences, shaming the media and government for sweeping victims’ ashes under the rug.
These men helped establish The National New Orleans Memorial Fund, which raised $18,000 (worth about $125,000 today). The fund covered burial costs and aided survivors with medical bills and lost wages. It was the first-ever national fundraiser for a gay cause, and it provided a blueprint for similar fundraisers during the soon-to-come AIDS epidemic.
Breton, who is now 83, recalled the unkindness of churches that refused to host memorials for homosexuals.
“Church is not necessarily found in a community of people who adhere to a creed,” Breton said during a 50th anniversary panel about the fire’s spiritual legacy. “The Beer Bust was a church. You had people of like mind and like interest coming together every Sunday at a specified time, and they did something that people in church should do and often that people in churches don’t do — they were friends with each other.”
The three MCC leaders eventually convinced Father Bill Richardson of St. George’s Episcopal Church to host a June 25 memorial in the church’s small chapel. Only 50 people attended since it wasn’t well publicized and victims were still being identified. But afterward, 100 parishioners complained to the local bishop and demanded Richardson’s resignation.
In response, Richardson wrote a June 28 letter to congregants stating, “St. George’s is not a private club but the House of God … Would Jesus have barred these grief-stricken people from His church, or would He have welcomed them?” If congregants felt that the church should only minister to a select few, he wrote, he’d consider resigning. He never resigned, but the Episcopalian bishop of New Orleans, Iveson Nolan, told Richardson and other local Episcopal churches not to host future memorials.
A second memorial was held at St. Mark’s Methodist Church on Sunday, July 1. Its organizers printed 3,000 flyers to advertise it, and about 300 people attended, including the Methodist Bishop of Louisiana — a big deal considering the church officially sees homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The mourners then sang “United We Stand,” the same song that bar patrons sang at the end of every Beer Bust.
That same day, 46 MCC branches in the U.S. and Europe held memorial services, and several gay bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses in eight major U.S. cities also closed for an hour to commemorate the victims.
“I’m not ashamed of who I am or who my friends are. I came in the front door, and I’m going out that way.”An attendee at a memorial event for the Up Stairs Lounge fire, circa 1973.
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Though the organizers of the New Orleans memorial had asked the press not to attend, TheTimes-Picayune and the local NBC TV affiliate arrived with cameras, waiting to record departing attendees and potentially out them. Perry notified the mourners and offered a backdoor exit. But an unidentified butch lesbian reportedly shouted, “I’m not ashamed of who I am or who my friends are. I came in the front door, and I’m going out that way.”
Recounts differ on what happened next. Some say the mourners left through the front door. Some say a few exited out the back. Others say the TV cameras had already departed by the time the memorial ended. Perry told one historian it didn’t matter if the cameras were there or not — what mattered was that the gay mourners faced them.
A reckoning 50 years in the making
Contrary to widespread belief, the Up Stairs Lounge fire wasn’t New Orleans’ Stonewall moment. The fire wasn’t a victory against oppression, and it didn’t rouse the local gay community to start fighting for their rights. In fact, the LGBTQ+ community rarely discussed the fire, and some opposed the efforts of the visiting MCC ministers.
The ministers were referred to as “fairy carpetbaggers,” borrowing a post–Civil War term for Northerners who profited off of Southern suffering. Up Stairs Lounge bar owner Esteve and other local gay business owners blamed the out-of-state activists for interfering in local matters, divisively politicizing a tragedy, and attracting unwanted government attention to gay establishments and their patrons.
Though the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders six months after the fire, it wouldn’t be until six years later that the city’s queer community would unite to oppose a force that bears an eerie resemblance to the threat LGBTQ+ people face today.
In 1977, the leaders of seven local gay and lesbian groups organized a 2,000-person protest against hate group leader Anita Bryant — it was the city’s largest-ever gay rights demonstration. That same year, a gay and lesbian newspaper Impact began publication, and the mayor appointed gays and lesbians to his city hall committee. Throughout the 1980s, various gay political and HIV advocacy groups evolved, including the New Orleans Chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).
Despite this progress, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire remained mostly forgotten, and it was even excluded from a 1991 Louisiana State Museum exhibit about the city’s historic fires. However, on the arson’s 30th anniversary in 2003, the New Orleans MCC and others placed a bronze memorial plaque with the names of the fire’s 32 victims in front of the bar’s original entrance. By the arson’s 40th anniversary, the city’s then-mayor Mitch Landrieu (son of the mayor who had served during the fire) issued a statement formally recognizing the fire, and then Catholic Archbishop Gregory Aymond apologized for the archdiocese not issuing a statement when the blaze occurred.
Many of the fire’s survivors are dead, and the victims’ families have grown older and largely moved away. But local MCC Rev. Lonnie Cheramie, a queer group called the Crescent City Leathermen, and others have helped organize annual memorials, including a 2023 recreation of the 1973 memorial service that occurred at St. Marks.
“There are growing numbers of people across our country who want to erase our history and our very existence. Your very existence and participation today is, in fact, a political act.”Apostle Shelly Planellas of New Covenant Church, host of the Up Stairs Lounge 50th anniversary commemoration
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In front of the crowded sanctuary stood 32 small black banners, each with the name of a different victim sewn in gold lettering. After the New Orleans Gay Men’s Chorus sang “United We Stand,” various leathermen, drag nuns with the Big Easy Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and others carried the banners through the French Quarter for a “second line” jazz funeral procession to the entrance of the former Up Stairs Lounge. (The street-level bar, The Jimani, has occupied the space since 1972, with building records dating back as far back as 1848.)
There, people left flowers and bouquets on the plaque as Regina Adams observed the proceedings. Her husband, Reginald “Reggie” Adams, died in the fire. When she returned to the bar after going home to retrieve her checkbook, she saw the fire and stood in the middle of Iberville Street, screaming. Every day of the following week, she laid out her husband’s work clothes as if awaiting his return. She has rarely ever attended these memorial events, one local filmmaker noted.
“We still have a lot of work left to do,” said the event’s emcee, Apostle Shelly Planellas of New Covenant Church, through a loudspeaker in front of the 32 black banners. “Seven years ago, we lost 49 lives at Pulse in Orlando. Last year, we lost five at Club Q in Colorado Springs. And we have lost countless members of our beloved trans community to bigotry and hatred. And our work does not end here. Our work and our mission do not end ever. Homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, and hatred are still a part of our daily reality. There are growing numbers of people across our country who want to erase our history and our very existence. Many would say that we should never politicize a tragedy like this. Your very existence and participation today is, in fact, a political act.”
Most of the memorial’s attendees skewed older, Tim Reynolds of the Crescent City Leathermen said, because the older generation is more invested in preserving history. His group helps organize the memorials, he said, to keep the memory alive for the next generation.
In a recently released podcast about the arson, The Fire UpStairs, activist, drag performer, and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum BenDeLaCreme said that many younger queer people and allies don’t understand why gay life is so centered around bars.
“These were the spaces that [homophobic society] pushed us into,” BenDeLaCreme told the podcast’s co-creator Joey Gray. But now — with more hookup apps and civil rights — even queer spaces are disappearing, she said.
This disappearance of queer spaces makes it more urgent to convey this history, Gray said, especially at a time when bigots are fighting to actively erase it. The AIDS epidemic silenced an entire generation of queer elders from passing down our community’s legacy. Because of this, more young people have grown up in an unprecedented era of acceptance and find themselves shaken and unprepared to face the current threat to our progress, not aware of similar historical threats and actions.
“In order to fight these battles and to stand up for what’s historically our culture, you have to have some kind of a foundation, a base knowledge,” said Gray about why he started the podcast.
Another guest of Gray’s podcast — Brian Derrick, founder of the progressive political engagement site Oath — noted that the cost of LGBTQ+ progress has been paid with career sacrifices, lives, and emotional labor.
“So now we have this fight in front of us,” Derrick said. “It’s also going to be expensive, and it’s going to cost a lot of time, money, careers, and all of these massive inputs in order to again move equality forward so that the next generation doesn’t have the same fight that we have right now. So we are leaving our kids — both literal and metaphorical — in a better place.”
Additional research by Billy McEntee and Kelly Suzan Waggoner.
On November 2, 1979, a group of three arrived at Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Dannemore, New York sometime between one and four pm. Their IDs were checked at a nearby state school so they could visit an inmate in South Hall, a maximum security wing of the prison.
During the guard-sanctioned trip to South Hall, the three visitors took over the prison van transporting them to the unit. In a November 3, 1979 New York Times article, Captain Gordon Hector of the state police revealed, “They came in with guns at the guards’ heads. They got the drop on the guard inside the unit.”
Kuwasi Balagoon, a bisexual New Afrikan Anarchist and member of the Black Liberation Army, is alleged to have been among these three visitors, there to assist in the escape of prisoner Assata Shakur, the alleged “mother hen” of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The revolutionaries who helped her escape were a sub-group of the BLA known as “The Family,” radicals committed to underground life, guerilla warfare, and bank robberies to bolster their cause for Black liberation. Their escape plan for Assata Shakur was successful.
For example, Black & Pink, an organization started in 2005 to abolish the prison system and mitigate its effects on LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV/AIDS, honors the community with the Kuwasi Balagoon Award. The award is designed to “ honor everyday people thriving with HIV/AIDS.”
To the revolutionaries closest to him, Balagoon represented many things. To Sekou Odinga (as quoted in A Solidier’s Story: Revolutionary Writings by Kuwasi Balagoon), Balagoon was a living “contradiction” in the best way – a hardened warrior for the Black Panther Party and BLA who also loved to help children and the elderly.
Becoming a queer, Black radical
Kuwasi Balagoon was born Donald Weems on December 22, 1946. During his Maryland upbringing, Balagoon was radicalized by the Cambridge civil rights movement of the early 1960s, as well as by his uncle’s escape from prison after being charged with sexual assault. While serving in the U.S. Army, Balagoon became a part of a radical anti-racist group, Da Legislators, and learned more about Afrocentrism while traveling in London.
“While standing on a corner one morning, rapping to some West Indian, African, Asian, and South American brothers, it occurred to me,” Balagoon wrote in his autobiography, Look For Me In The Whirlwind, “Like through the flow and substance of the conversation and their mannerisms, that we were really brothers. Among them and the beautiful Black sisters, I was home.”
Balagoon became a committed member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 and within a year would be arrested alongside 20 other Black Panthers (the group became known as the Panther 21) on conspiracy charges related to alleged planned killings of police officers and bombings of police stations, as well as other buildings in New York City. Charges against all 21 people were ultimately dropped. Although acquitted, Balagoon would plead guilty to a separate case – one of bank robbery in New Jersey. While he was incarcerated, the tension between the East and West coast branches of the Black Panther Party escalated, eventually leading to ousted Black Panther Party members creating the Black Liberation Army sometime in 1970.
All of this led Balagoon to study anarchists like Emma Goldman while incarcerated and to eventually escape prison in September 1973. Just a year later, Balagoon was back in prison for a failed attempt to help another BLA member escape. After four more years of incarceration in Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, Balagoon escaped again, cementing his status as “the Maroon.”
New Afrikan Anarchism & Afrocentrism
One of the ways that Balagoon was most admired was his ardent commitment to guerilla politics, partially stemming from his affinity for Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, who sought political exile numerous times in his life and escaped Italian prison in 1899. On a basic level, Balagoon savored Malatesta’s logic of a revolutionary life that “consists of more deeds than words.”
Like other New Afrikan Anarchists, Balagoon believed in a kind of Afrocentric nationalism that viewed Black Americans as a “subjugated nation” within the United States of America that deserved to resist the racist and economic conditions forced onto them.
In July 1983, Balagoon spoke about his political praxis while on trial for the 1981 attempted robbery charges of a Brinks armored truck, which resulted in the deaths of two police officers and one security guard:
We say the U.S. has no right to confine New Afrikan people to redlined reservations and that We have a right to live on our own terms on a common land area and to govern ourselves…
LGBTQ+ erasure
On December 16, 1986, Kuwasi Balagoon passed away at 39 from AIDS-related complications after four years in jail for robbery and murder. Many of the obituaries written on Balagoon by the groups he was involved in both omit his sexuality and the cause of his death; a consequence of the LGBTQ+ erasure that came with mainstream denial of the AIDS crisis’ impact on poor, Black, and LGBTQ+ communities, all of which Balagoon embodied.
Today, Balagoon’s legacy lives on. In 2005, The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement dedicated their Black August celebration to Kuwasi Balagoon. Since 2014, Cooperation Jackson, a collective of revolutionary co-operatives, has operated in Jackson, Mississippi, even aiding in the 2017 election of Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a New Afrikan Anarchist, as the city’s new mayor. The cooperative’s base is known as The Balagoon Center.
Balagoon continues to serve as a beacon for the queer Black revolutionaries fighting today.
Some cold cases linger for decades without any leads. But in one unique case out of Utah, a prime suspect was identified in the murder of 24 year-old Douglas Ray Coleman and all but admitted to the killing – but was never charged.
Coleman was an openly gay man who was shot dead less than a month after Anthony Adams, a black gay activist and member of the Salt Lake City Socialist Workers Party was found stabbed to death in his apartment. Friends and colleagues of Adams called his death an “assassination” and claimed he was killed for his political beliefs and sexuality.
While Coleman and Adams reportedly didn’t know each other, their murders marked a spate of killings that targeted the gay community in Salt Lake City. While the Salt Lake City city council now consists mainly of LGBTQ+ representatives, it’s long been a religiously conservative town, and in the late 1970s that made it especially deadly for its openly queer residents. It also made it extremely difficult for gay people to find justice from law enforcement due to dangerous stereotypes they weren’t credible witnesses due to their “lifestyles.”
Image: Kris Robinette via Salt Lake Tribune
Who was Doug Coleman?
Accounts of Coleman’s life portray him as a relatively quiet artist who, per his obituary, “had received awards on Peach Days [an annual harvest celebration and fair in Utah] for his oil paintings.”
Coleman reportedly was recognized at gay bars but didn’t have a penchant for being ostentatious or flamboyant – the Salt Lake Tribune noted in a 2023 reportthat Coleman was “a regular” in the local gay scene but “also kept to himself.”
Before his death at age 26, Coleman had battled mental health challenges, including paranoid schizophrenia. He was reportedly “cycling in and out of mental health facilities,” per the Salt Lake Tribune, not long before he was killed. His brother, Dennis Coleman, told the Tribune Doug “was just a normal kid from a normal family that had the unfortunate experience of having a disease.” Doug was survived by his parents, four brothers and one sister. Some members of the Coleman family were active members of the Mormon church.
Image: Kris Robinette via Salt Lake Tribune
The Advocate’s attempts to reach Dennis Coleman were unsuccessful.
During the workday, Doug Coleman worked as a produce manager at a Brigham City Safeway store. He also reportedly worked at Rastskeller Pizza in downtown Salt Lake City and lived with a coworker and his girlfriend – next door to the man who’d end up being a prime suspect in the murder, a 62-year-old retiree named Bruce Hughes.
Coleman was last seen at Salt Lake City’s Sun Tavern bar on Nov. 30, 1978. That same night, his body was found in a boxcar along a stretch of railroad tracks not far from the city’s Pacific Union rail depot. Shell casings from a .22 pistol were found near his body. Coleman had been fatally shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest.
The main suspect
The evidence against Hughes seems damning and all but conclusive. Cases are considered cold if there isn’t sufficient evidence to charge a suspect, but in Coleman’s case, it’s striking how much information police had and still failed to make an arrest.
A ballistics expert determined Hughes’ gun was likely the one used to kill Coleman. The casings found at the scene matched a weapon Hughes had sold to a pawn shop.
Hughes was a longtime firearm owner and pawned all of his weapons shortly after the murder. Per the Tribune, when asked why he sold the guns, Hughes said he “didn’t want them to be misused.” And when asked how he’d account for his gun matching the crime scene, Hughes glibly said “oh gee, I had no explanation for it.” He reportedly also told police that unless someone had broken into his home, stolen the gun from its hiding place under his mattress, killed Coleman and returned it, there wasn’t any other explanation for his weapon being used for the shooting.
This wasn’t all. Hughes was Coleman’s neighbor, and he had a fascination with Coleman’s female roommate. One time, the woman complained to Hughes about Coleman and Hughes openly threatened to kill him. Hughes even admitted this to police, confessing that he threatened Coleman “because he was ignorant.” Further, the Tribune reported Hughes claimed he would shoot Coleman and make it look like a burglary gone wrong.
Images: Salt Lake City PD
Hughes had also worked in the same railyard where Coleman’s body was found. He admitted to police that he’d seen Coleman the day of the murder, but said he was there “looking for scrap metal.”
The Tribune viewed Coleman’s police report, which noted Hughes told police the name of a friend who might know where his guns were kept – but officers never followed up.
Finally, although witnesses found it difficult to conclusively identify Hughes, a worker at the railyard described the suspect as having similar hair as Hughes and neighbors noted he owned a jacket similar to that of the reported suspect’s.
Dangerous stereotypes
So why wasn’t Hughes charged? Former U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber toldthe Utah Investigative Journalism Project that prosecutors likely weren’t confident in spite of all the evidence they had because the main witnesses were “colorful characters” – members of the gay community or sex workers.
And there was another suspect – Perry Stanger, a religious man who left Salt Lake City the day Coleman was killed. Stanger’s own mother said he had a penchant for acting violent in the name of God and noted she thought he could have killed Coleman. Stanger was arrested and institutionalized for mental health issues, but he was never charged because he reportedly never had access to a firearm.
Still, it’s difficult to reconcile the evidence and borderline confession from Hughes with police’s hesitancy to arrest him. Salt Lake police didn’t immediately return The Advocate’s request for comment.
It’s not clear exactly why there was a spike in murders against the gay community in Salt Lake City at this time. But what is certain is that the gay community was sent reeling from both murders, and it took years for many of Salt Lake City’s queer residents to feel safe again.
Hughes was elderly when questioned about the killing and consequently not around to answer any more. Unfortunately for Coleman’s loved ones, the trail stopped with Hughes and the case remains cold.
Have a tip about this case to share with law enforcement? Contact the Salt Lake City Police Department at 801-799-3000.