Slate: “That queer agitator, that provocateur, was none other than New Orleans’ “political animal” Stewart Butler.
Perhaps the most important person in the history of queer Louisiana politics never held elected office. He was an old, bald, gay, white hippie whose friends had burned to death, who wore dashiki hats and was once arrested at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport for the possession of 22 joints. He did not hold rallies or give rousing speeches, nor did he present himself as a moral example. Rather, he was a gay Gandalf character who enjoyed the company of wayward young men, some of barely legal age. In style and in substance, Stewart P. Butler was not a member of the American “political class.” No, they who honed debate skills at Princeton and spent their lives plotting the perfect résumés never found their way to the dining-room table of Stewart’s home at 1308 Esplanade Ave. in New Orleans. At that den, dubbed the “Faerie Playhouse” by its sundry tenants, Stewart toiled for decades. He proclaimed himself a “political animal,” a relentless organizer engaged in the daily trench work of social change.
I first met Stewart Butler in 2014 while researching my debut book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. Tinderbox is a nonfiction account of a notoriously unsolved arson at a gay bar that Stewart had lived through in the early 1970s. My book-in-progress demanded that I speak to the few remaining survivors and witnesses of said calamity. I was so nervous when I first called Stewart, feeling so much of the weight of history, that I spoke unintelligibly fast into his answering machine. He couldn’t make out my phone number, though he tried and tried by replaying the message, so he personally called around town to track me down. When I first heard his puckish voice over the line, it was the sound of Stewart chiding me for talking too fast while simultaneously agreeing to help me as much as I needed.”