On the street, Stewart heard a police officer explaining to a newspaper reporter, “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.” He personally witnessed the Up Stairs Lounge bartender spot and grab the soot-covered hustler, who’d only so recently been ejected from the Up Stairs Lounge threatening to “burn” the place down. Dragging the hustler toward a police officer holding back the gathering crowds, drawn to the spectacle of flames, the bartender demanded that the hustler be arrested and questioned as a suspect. Stewart stood aghast as the police officer feigned distraction and then told the Up Stairs Lounge bartender to “move along,” demanding the release of the restrained man.
Stewart watched that hustler, the primary suspect for an arson that would claim 32 lives, the deadliest fire on record in New Orleans history, melt into the crowds of the French Quarter and disappear, dead by suicide nearly a year later. Police would never question that hustler even though, at one point in their investigation, they held him in their custody. The fire, it became understood, was not a crime that Greater New Orleans demanded to be solved, as the victims were of a criminal class. This was a sordid example of deviants killing deviants, some justified, part of a broader community warning to install sprinkler systems in old buildings but not an occasion to prosecute an arsonist through the courts.
Up to that moment, Stewart had bought the line fed to New Orleans’ large, yet cowed queer population: Stay hidden, stay discreet, and you can revel alongside all the other vice-takers in our live and let live community. But where was “live and let live” in that panorama of death? Where was the reward for lifelong discretion? Where was the law’s protection when a likely killer stood before a police officer who could only see two criminal fairies having a scrape? What do you do when an entire society, and its people, will not hear you? Stewart asked himself these questions for nearly a decade, during which he rued the Up Stairs Lounge fire as a catastrophe “no good came of.”
Stewart eventually processed his grief with a personal answer. What do you do when people refuse to hear you? “Make them hear you, honey,” as he liked to say. Stewart defiantly entered the arena of politics, standing openly among the first-class citizens of New Orleans, though he had not yet be accepted as one of them.