GAY BAR NEW ORLEANS FRENCH QUARTER PROFESSIONAL
They sang the song that evening, with David Gary on the piano, a professional pianist who played regularly in the lounge of the Marriott Hotel across the street. Members would pray and sing in this room, and every Sunday night, they gathered around the piano for a song they had adopted as their anthem, United We Stand, by The Brotherhood of Man.Īnd if our backs should ever be against the wall, There was a piano in one of the bar’s three rooms, and a cabaret stage. But the bar was still a spiritual gathering place. Original site of the UpStairs Lounge at 141 Chartres Street as it looked in Spring, 2008.īefore moving worship services to their pastor’s home earlier in June, congregation members had been holding services at the UpStairs on Sundays.
GAY BAR NEW ORLEANS FRENCH QUARTER FREE
After the free beer ran out, about 60 stayed, mostly members of the MCC congregation. Nearly 125 regulars had jammed the bar earlier that afternoon for a free beer and all you could eat special. Located on the second floor of a three-story building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets, the UpStairs Lounge had only one entrance, up a wooden flight of stairs. Almost two dozen gay bars dotted the French Quarter, but gay life in the city remained largely underground. Yet there was still no Gay Pride Parade in New Orleans. That Sunday was the final day of Pride Weekend, the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Supreme Court announced its momentous decision in the case of Roe v.
The church’s Los Angeles headquarters was destroyed on January 27, five days after the U.S. It was the third fire at a MCC church during the first half of 1973, following earlier arsons in Nashville and Los Angeles.
Founded in Los Angeles in 1968, the MCC was the nation’s first gay church. At the time, the bar had recently served as the temporary home for the fledgling New Orleans congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church. On the last Sunday in June, 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans called the UpStairs Lounge was firebombed, and the resulting blaze killed 32 people.