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A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections

"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs

...New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/theater/the-view-upstairs-review.html. The View UpStairs animates the real life Up Stairs Lounge gay bar environment on the eve of an arson attack on June 24,...

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References
1.	Excerpts taken from the following reviews found on Max Vernon's website: Lina Landstroem, "Queer History on Stage: A Review of The View UpStairs by Max Vernon," Public Seminar, March 1, 2017, https://publicseminar.org/2017/03/when-a-bar-was-your-home/; Zackary Stewart, "KPOP," TheaterMania, September 22, 2017, https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/kpop_82533.html; Elisabeth Vincentelli, "Review: A Gay Nightclub Tragedy, Decades Before Orlando, in 'The View UpStairs'," The New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/theater/the-view-upstairs-review.html.
2.	Robert W. Fieseler, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 227.
3.	Max Vernon, interview by author, September 8, 2017.
4.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, xix.
5.	See the front page spread of The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 25, 1973, Monday Morning Edition, 1.
6.	Vernon, interview by author; Fieseler, Tinderbox, 70.
7.	Clayton Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); Vernon, interview by author; see also Johnny Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire (Bangor, ME: BookLocker, 2011). Townsend's 1989–90 archival work informed Delery-Edwards's research.
8.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 2.
9.	Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn, vii.
10.	It is important to note that some inconsistencies exist in Delery-Edwards's text, as well. Today, Robert W. Fieseler's Tinderbox (2018) is considered a more thorough, accurate record of the fire.
11.	Max Vernon, The View UpStairs (New York: Samuel French, 2017), 45.
12.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 45.
13.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 10.
14.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 10.
15.	Although the most well-known, the Stonewall Uprising was not the first instance of LGBTQ+ resistance. The Cooper Do-Nuts Riot (1959) as well as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot (1966), both in California, precede Stonewall. Many have argued that Stonewall became central to the development of Gay Liberation largely as a result of practices of memory (organized activism) that arose to commemorate the event, such as the Christopher Street Liberation Day (1970), often cited as the first gay pride event in the country.
16.	Ryan Prechter, "Gay New Orleans: A History" (PhD diss, Georgia State University, 2017), https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_diss/60/.
17.	The three white Tulane murderers intended to "roll a queer," or assault a gay person, the night they killed Rios. Trial testimony revealed that the murderers bragged about the assault after they left Rios for dead. Clayton Delery-Edwards, Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 97.
18.	Delery-Edwards, Out for Queer Blood, 148.
19.	James Karst, "Halloween Cross-Dress Costumes Lead to 21 Arrests in 1952: Our Times," The Times-Picayune, October 18, 2015, https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_4522e6d7-b6bb-5143-a772-ee5712675293.html.
20.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.
21.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 21.
22.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 25, 31–32.
23.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 34.
24.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.
25.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 24–25.
26.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 25.
27.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 33.
28.	Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 160.
29.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 227.
30.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.
31.	Bryant Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again (Or Queer Theory as Drag Performance)," Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2–4 (2003): 351.
32.	Betty Luther Hillman, "'The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in': Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972," Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2011): 158.
33.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.
34.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.
35.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 227.
36.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 50 (ellipses original); See also Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn, 184–185.
37.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 71.
38.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 183.
39.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 187.
40.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 66.
41.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 191.
42.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 164.
43.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 164.
44.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 111–112.
45.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 63, 146–149.
46.	Delery-Edwards, 63, 146–149.
47.	Fieseler, Tinderbox, 228.
48.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 147.
49.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 146.
50.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 147.
51.	Ryan Prechter, "Gay New Orleans: A History."
52.	The View UpStairs, written and composed by Max Vernon, dir. Scott Ebersold, chor. Al Blackstone, performed by Jeremy Pope, Taylor Frey, Frenchie Davis, Benjamin Howes, Michael Longoria, Ben Mayne, Randy Red, Nancy Ticotin, Richard E. Waits, and Nathan Lee Graham, New York, Lynn Redgrave Theater, March 25, 2017.
53.	Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 20.
54.	Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); See especially "The Scale of Immersivity," 93–102.
55.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 7.
56.	Machon, Immersive Theatres, 98.
57.	Machon, Immersive Theatres, 99–100.
58.	Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51.
59.	Vernon cautions, "While it's important to carve out true emotional beats for the characters, never let the piece veer into melodrama." Vernon, The View UpStairs, 6.
60.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 9–11.
61.	The View UpStairs, 73; At the time of this publication, the former Up Stairs Lounge now houses office space and the kitchen for The Jimani sports bar.
62.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 8, 5; Vernon, interview by author.
63.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 5; For a rich discussion of performance theater that stages LGBT+ engagement in religious liturgy, see Lusie Cuskey, "The Liturgy that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Religious Engagement and Affective Memory as a Site of Queer Activism in Musical Theatre," Ecumenica: Performance and Religion 13, no. 1 (2020): 52–68.
64.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 8; Vernon, interview by author.
65.	Vernon explains, "And so, I think in many ways, where they have these anti-sodomy laws in the South, and where regularly, if a gay bar was raided and they took your ID, your name could be printed in the paper, and you could lose your job. You could lose housing. I think they didn't have the same freedoms as New York to be as visible, so they had a different mode of survival of how they had to exist in these spaces like the Up Stairs Lounge." Vernon, interview by author.
66.	Robert W. Fieseler, "The UpStairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People. Its Legacy Still Haunts Black Gay New Orleans," The Daily Beast, May 13, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-upstairs-lounge-fire-killed-32-people-its-legacy-still-haunts-black-gay-ne.
67.	Fieseler, "The UpStairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People."
68.	Regina Adams quoted in Fieseler, "The Up Stairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People."
69.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 7.
70.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 5.
71.	José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.
72.	Muñoz, Disidentifications, xiv.
73.	Vernon, interview by author.
74.	Goldberg, Melodrama, 21.
75.	Goldberg, Melodrama, 156.
76.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 58.
77.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 39–42.
78.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 49.
79.	Mélissa Bertrand, "Performative Theatre: A Queer Theatre?" Whatever 3 (2020): 229. This staging evinces Mélissa Bertrand's concept of "trans-theatre," which I develop more thoroughly later in this essay. Here, Bertrand's emphasis on the body in queer performance implicates not just the performer, but the audience: "the body is given a major role . . . For the audience, it also implies to question the way we position ourselves as viewers of the show. The power of the gaze must be redefined, and queer sequences of theater can help rethink it."
80.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 52.
81.	Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 351.
82.	Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 349.
83.	Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 349–50.
84.	"Gone with the Window." RuPaul's Drag Race, season 2, episode 1, "Gone with the Window," produced and hosted by RuPaul, aired February 1, 2010, on Logo.
85.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 50.
86.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 66.
87.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 67.
88.	The performativity of Aurora Whorealis's manifold, evolving identifications might also be read through Bertrand: "At the crossroads between the notions of an actor•tress carrying a character's fictional identity through its own body, and that of a performer assuming their personal history and using it as a creative material, a new dynamic emerges, a more dialectical and complex positioning. In shows integrating queer themes, physical identity is located on a breach, on a border. This type of event includes what I would call 'bodies in trans-' or a 'theatre in trans-'." This is understood through the multiple terms that the prefix suggests, "'trance (transe in French), transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…" Bertrand, "Performative Theatre," 215, (ellipses original).
89.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 53.
90.	Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness': Drag and the Making of Two Cultures," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (2013): 303–326.
91.	Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness,'" 311.
92.	Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness,'" 312.
93.	Bertrand, "Performative Theatre," 216.
94.	Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (New York: Avon Books, 1986), 535, 513; Sam Killerman, "Vocabulary Extravaganza," The Safe Zone Project, accessed February 3, 2019, https://thesafezoneproject.com/activities/vocab-extravaganza/; My use of "drag" to characterize Scarlett's performance in the green velvet dress is intentional. As Killermann defines, the term "drag queen" indicates "someone who performs femininity theatrically." Scarlett's embodiment, before donning Mammy's green dress, is marked by hard labor, starvation, and poverty, all which manifest on her body: "breasts . . . so small," a "scrawny neck and hungry cat eyes and raggedy dress" (Mitchell, 534 and 525). In order to seduce Rhett into giving her the money, she must perform a specific form of femininity, the carefree southern belle who is so "bored" from a life of leisure that she decided "to take a trip and have a good time" (Mitchell, 565). This is, of course, a complete lie, and she must conceal the truth by suppressing her fury at him, feigning tears, and hiding her eyes when she feels she has triumphantly hooked him (Mitchell, 564–571). When Rhett discovers the deception, he says, "You wanted something from me and you wanted it badly enough to put on quite a show" (Mitchell, 570). In the same way that drag queens perform a wide range of femininity across race, class, age, and culture, so too does Scarlett perform drag southern belle.
95.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 47.
96.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 82.
97.	Vernon, interview by author.
98.	Taraneh, "Pop-Culturalist Chats with Max Vernon," Pop-Culturalist, September 18, 2018, http://pop-culturalist.com/pop-culturalist-chats-with-max-vernon/?fbclid=IwAR2EbOmNg5fbr_MtK_sVsnrKuIWRH0_kSHncmNtBrhnxCw4_K6botNev9Dc.
99.	Max Vernon, "I do not know," Facebook, December 1, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/MaxVernonMusic/posts/101.
100.	During Reagan's two-term presidency, nearly 253,000 new cases were diagnosed, and 230,000 or 91% of those diagnosed died as a result of the disease between 1981 and 1992, "HIV and AIDS---United States, 1981--2000," Morbid and Mortality Weekly Report 50, no. 21 (Atlanta, GA: Center for Disease Control and Prevention, June 1, 2001): 430–434.. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm.
101.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 58.
102.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 92.
103.	The first directly anti-LGBTQ policy was announced that following July in 2017, when Trump tweet-announced the so-called "Trans Ban" in the US military that "the Administration began implementing . . . on April 12, 2019." "Transgender Military Service," Human Rights Campaign, last modified October 1, 2019, https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-military-service.
104.	The home page of the It Gets Better Project reads, "The It Gets Better Project inspires people across the globe to share their stories and remind the next generation of LGBTQ+ youth that hope is out there, and it will get better" (emphasis mine); It Gets Better Project, accessed June 25, 2020, https://itgetsbetter.org.
105.	The homophobic policies of Trump and Reagan are outlined above. Importantly, anti-LGBTQ+ policy has been enacted by conservative and liberal administrations; President Bill Clinton instituted the discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy in 1993 forcibly closeting LGBTQ+ service people and signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996, prohibiting federal recognition of gay marriage. Eisenhower famously authorized the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare that terrorized homosexual Americans under anti-communist pretenses.
106.	Goldberg, Melodrama, 160.
107.	Goldberg, Melodrama, 4, xv.
108.	Vernon, The View UpStairs, 48.

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