The family of a second world war veteran who was killed in one of the deadliest attacks on the LGBTQ+ community in the US is still trying to recover his remains 50 years later and provide him what they consider to be a proper burial.
Ferris LeBlanc, who grew up in California and helped the American military defeat Nazi forces at the Battle of the Bulge, died alongside 31 other people after an arsonist set fire to a second-floor gay bar in New Orleans’s French Quarter neighborhood on 24 June 1973. LeBlanc had gone to the bar, which was named the UpStairs Lounge, two days after his 50th birthday.
Authorities identified LeBlanc by a ring on his finger. After no one came forward to claim his body, he was buried in a field behind a cemetery which New Orleans’s government once contracted to inter the city’s indigent and unclaimed, according to reports from ABC and the local Times-Picayune newspaper.
It wasn’t until 2015 that relatives of LeBlanc learned that he had been killed in the UpStairs Lounge blaze. The discovery came about when a family member searched his name on Google after years of wondering whether something happened to him to explain his loss of contact.
“Ferris … was … just dumped in a hole basically,” LeBlanc’s nephew Skip Bailey told New Orleans television station WWL in an interview published Sunday. “And he never had a service.”
Bailey subsequently helped his family find information meant to identify the location of the unmarked grave where Ferris’s remains had been buried.
Unfortunately, officials with the city government and the cemetery told LeBlanc’s relatives that records and maps of the burial ground which could help them find his grave were destroyed. They were lost in the flood that occurred when the federal levees protecting New Orleans failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The city and cemetery were also ensnared in litigation over finances that all but ruled out their working together to help Bailey’s family recover his uncle’s remains.
New Orleans at-large city council representative JP Morrell is among those who have since tried to help Bailey’s family recoup the remains of LeBlanc. In a statement to the Guardian on Monday, Morrell said his office’s staff contacted renowned firms and individual specialists in the field of archaeology to see if they could help Skip Bailey and his mother, Marilyn LeBlanc-Downey.
Morrell’s statement on Monday said his office is hopeful that an organization known as the Statewide Cemetery Recovery Taskforce could eventually help LeBlanc receive “a funeral befitting for someone who fought overseas” in the second world war.
The council member said the group “has successfully recovered lost remains in recent years, [and] we are excited to work with the task force to finally bring this veteran home after 50 years”.
“We will not stop looking for Ferris until he is returned to his family, who have nothing but love and fond memories of their uncle Ferris,” Morrell’s statement added.
Meanwhile, as locals observed the 50th anniversary of the UpStairs Lounge arson, the city’s deadliest fire, Skip Bailey told WWL, “Our quest is: just bring him home. We want to bring him home and that’s all we’ve been fighting for since 2015.
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“I just gotta find him. That’s my whole goal. I don’t want my mom to die … not knowing that we got him.”
Film-maker Royd Anderson, who produced a documentary about the UpStairs Lounge fire and assisted Bailey, went on the New Orleans public affairs show Informed Sources on Friday and discussed the circumstances of the arson. He recounted how a gay man named Roger Dale Nunez had been causing problems at the lounge, got his jaw broken in a fight and was being kicked out of the establishment when he yelled, “I’m going to burn this place to the … ground.”
The UpStairs Lounge caught fire minutes later, said Anderson, who helped Bailey’s family’s search for LeBlanc’s grave.
Nunez was never arrested despite falling under intense suspicion. He died by suicide in 1974.
Scholars have long maintained that the apathetic reaction in many parts of New Orleans to the UpStairs Lounge fire vividly illustrated contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ bias. Royd Anderson’s movie The UpStairs Lounge Fire contained a clip of a man describing how – while the blaze smoldered – he overheard a remark from someone walking away from the scene: “That will teach the motherfuckers.”
It’s unclear whether that man was simply a passerby or involved.
Additionally, Anderson said only one church in the city (which internationally, for the most part, enjoys a libertine reputation) hosted a memorial service for the UpStairs Lounge’s dead.
That blaze was the deadliest attack at an LGBTQ+ establishment in US history until Orlando’s 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting left 49 victims dead.
The killings at Pulse were also carried out during June, which is also Pride month – an annual celebration of LGBTQ+ achievements and commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising in New York, a key moment in the community’s civil rights movement.
New Orleans’s observance of the UpStairs Lounge fire’s 50th anniversary came two days before the person who killed five people at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ nightclub in November pleaded guilty to five charges of murder and six charges of attempted murder. Anderson Lee Aldrich, 23, also pleaded no contest to charges of bias-motivated crimes and faces life in prison as part of a plea agreement.
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