On Sunday, June 24th, 1973, the 2nd floor bar room of the UpStairs Lounge burst into flames. "And so I thought: They're going to kill me.” “Even the earliest news reports described it as a known hangout for homosexuals," says Clayton. “And you say it was murder?” “I’m not going to say murder.I will say that what was done, was done intentionally.”
Its report stated, "Two eyewitnesses who would not allow their faces to be shown told WWL TV newsman Bill Elder it was arson. WWL TV had an anchor on, saying, "Police arson squads are investigating the ruins of a bar where a fire last night killed 29 persons and injured 15 others."
This is the news story Clayton watched at WWL TV: “The regular programming was preempted because there was this horrible fire in the Quarter.”
People’s perceptions of Clayton quickly turned his own confusion to fear, when he saw something on the evening news. He says he was small, had a high pitched voice, “just check, check, check on the stereotypes.” But other people were already picking up on the.I was, I fit a lot of stereotypes.” “I was fifteen years old, I had been gay bashed pretty relentlessly and I didn’t even know what gay was, you know. “You know by that point I figured out what it was, and I still wasn't sure how it was done, but I knew what it was.” In 1973, Clayton Delery-Edwards was living just outside New Orleans in Metairie, going to high school and- as he puts it - wrestling with "the G question." Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cafe Lafitte in Exile.Tripod New Orleans revisits the UpStairs Lounge Fire in the wake of last month’s Orlando Pulse Night Club shooting. Bubbly who pinches people on their rear ends. In the book Queer Hauntings, Ken Summers writes that bar patrons claim to have occasionally seen the ghosts of deceased individuals who were fond of the bar, as well as a "frisky" ghost named Mr. In 1954, author John Steinbeck wrote an article about Tom Caplinger and Cafe Lafitte for the Saturday Evening Post, describing Caplinger as "an uninhibited, unkempt scholar, whose laissez-faire policy of running a gin mill can only be termed unique." Ghost Stories At the grand reopening party in 1953, patrons arrived costumed as their favorite 'exile', including people like Oscar Wilde, Dante, and Napoleon. In the 1950s, during rising tension between the club and the landlord, manager Tom Caplinger moved the club to the building where it is now located. In its early days, the bar was managed by Mary Collins, a lesbian, and drew a mixed crowd of lesbians, homosexuals and heterosexuals. This building is now called Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. The original Cafe Lafitte in Exile opened in the building that had been the noted pirate Jean Lafitte's blacksmith business in the 18th century. Operating since the end of Prohibition (albeit in two different locations) the bar claims to be the oldest gay bar in operation in the United States.
The bar is open 24 hours a day and has had influential guests including Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. During the New Orleans Pride Parade, 2016