Bill Rushton: Journalist and Activist, Part Two
September 2023In the ‘70s, a young journalist writing for a small French Quarter newspaper broke one of the city’s most startling stories and helped organize one of the first gay protests in the South. This story includes a series of never-before-published images of the 1977 rally by Owen Murphy.
– by Frank Perez
Recap: The Vieux Carre Courier occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of French Quarter history. From 1961 to 1978, the Courier was the voice of the French Quarter community and helped shape much public policy in New Orleans. In the 1970s, its managing editor was Bill Rushton. Several times during his tenure there, his callings as a journalist and a gay activist intertwined, as in his coverage of the Up Stairs Lounge fire in 1973 (read about this and Rushton’s early background in Part One).
This column is made possible by the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana
A year after the Up Stairs Lounge fire, Bill Rushton published a blockbuster expose of a faculty member and his strange experiments at Tulane University. In 1977, Rushton was pivotal in organizing one of the first gay protests in the South.
Gay Conversion and Deep Brain Stimulation
One of Rushton’s landmark investigations centered on Dr. Robert Heath, a controversial figure who founded Tulane University’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1949 and chaired the department until 1980.
According to a colleague who was close to Rushton at the time, the journalist stumbled onto the story one night when he was dancing at Pete’s Bar on Bourbon Street (now a club named Oz). Also dancing at Pete’s that night was a young man whose head was covered with an “electronic stimulator.” Rushton asked him about the hardware and discovered the young man was one of Dr. Heath’s patients. The young man told Rushton he had to have his “gay fun” before he was turned straight.
Rushton was amazed and immediately thought of his friend Todd Ochs, a member of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, who had recently alerted Rushton to a 1972 national report that criticized psychosurgery in general and Heath in particular.
Rushton began asking questions. He was astounded to learn that Heath was also hiring female sex workers from the French Quarter to sleep with these gay men in an effort to cure them.
Rushton began digging into Heath’s past and eventually confirmed that the doctor had obtained permission from the Louisiana Attorney General, as well as state funding, to hire a twenty-one-year-old female sex worker from the French Quarter to have intercourse with experiment subjects while Heath monitored their brain activity.
Heath had already made a name for himself in medical circles by bucking the prevailing wisdom that schizophrenia was a psychological phenomenon, arguing instead the disease was biologically based (which ensuing research later proved).
In 1949, Heath moved to New Orleans to establish the psychiatry department at Tulane. Heath’s treatment for schizophrenics involved drilling holes in the skull to reach the septal region of the brain and inserting electrodes which delivered jolts of electrical stimulation. These medical experiments resulted in intense emotional reactions in patients, usually fear and rage. By 1955, Heath abandoned his “cure” for schizophrenia, concluding, “the lasting beneficial effects in the patient group … have not been significant.”
But Heath did not abandon his methods. By the late 1960s, he turned his attention to gay men. Might electrical stimulation of the septal area in gay men’s brains cure them of their homosexuality? Heath was determined to find out.
Cover art for the August 29 issue of the Vieux Carré Courier where Ruston’s exposé about Dr. Heath appeared. Illustration by Bob Babb, who was art director of VCC at the time.
Rushton was equally determined to bring the experiments to light. He eventually pitched the story idea to Courier publisher Philip Carter (son of Hodding Carter and grandson of Elizabeth Werlein), who rejected the idea out of hand. But Rushton persisted and Carter finally told him he would publish the story if Rushton could find an eyewitness, meaning the sex worker. Rushton scoured the French Quarter and found her.
The resulting article, “The Bizarre Experiments of Dr. Heath In Which We Wonder Who is Crazy & Who is Sane” (August 29, 1974), summarized the controversies that marked Heath’s career, namely his ineffective and deplorable treatment methods and his use of prison inmates and patients at Charity Hospital as subjects for his experiments – whether they were willing or not. Rushton reported that nurses at Charity would sometimes hide patients when Heath came looking for subjects.
Another patient Heath found was a twenty-four year old gay man who had been arrested in Lake Charles on drug charges and had agreed to psychiatric observation at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in order to have the charges dismissed. This man was transferred to Heath’s lab at Tulane, despite his and his therapist’s objections.
Heath implanted several electrodes in patient B-19’s brain and monitored his brain activity as he viewed a heterosexual pornographic movie. In later sessions, a sex worker was wired to have sex with B-19.
Heath wrote about his experiments on B-19 in two papers that were published in 1972: “Septal Stimulation for the Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male,” co-written with his colleague Charles E. Moan, and “Pleasure and Brain Activity in Man.”
Jim Meadows, a social worker and the executive director of New Orleans Advocates for LGBTQ+ Elders, has recently led an effort to raise awareness about Heath’s bizarre medical experimentation. Meadows learned of Heath at a geriatric hospital where he was working after treating one of Heath’s former patients who survived a brain infection caused by one of the experiments. Meadows says at least two people died as a result of one of Heath’s experiments on schizophrenics, as stated in this detailed article by Robert Colvile, published in 2016.
Click on the image above to access a PDF with the full Ruston exposé published in the Vieux Carré Courier, 1974. It’s a large file and may take longer than usual to load.
Meadows, and other researchers in the past, have wondered how many other patients there were like B-19. Questions concerning the extent of Heath’s DBS experiments could be answered by examining Heath’s unpublished papers and laboratory notes but those records are not available.
Mary Holt, history librarian of the Matas Library of the Health Sciences at the Tulane School of Medicine states, “Unfortunately neither the Matas Library nor Tulane University Archives have the correspondence, letters, or laboratory notes belonging to Dr. Health. We believe that his papers were in his possession in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time of his death in 1999. I do not have any further contact information for his family. The Matas Library and University Archives have had prior inquiries as to the location of Dr. Health’s papers. If you discover their availability we would very much like to know where they are located.”
In 2019, Danish filmmaker, Pernille Rose Grønkjær, released a documentary about Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) called “Hunting for Hedonia.” The film contrasts Heath’s early experiments with ones that are currently taking place, procedures that could radically alter the medical landscape.
The IMDb summary says the film asks some of the same questions that Rushton asked decades ago:
“And will the nifty electrodes move on from correcting abnormal activity in disease to perhaps 'correcting' unwanted but in fact normal activity? In other words: How far should - and would - the surgeons go in modulating our emotions and personal characteristics?”
Meadows and others who have called for a reconsideration of Heath owe Bill Rushton a debt of gratitude. Were it not for his investigative report in the Courier, Heath’s surgical gay conversion experiments would have gone unnoticed in New Orleans.
Anita Bryant Comes to Town
Rushton cemented his mark on local LGBT+ history in 1977 when Anita Bryant came to New Orleans.
The popular homophobic singer and former Miss Oklahoma had made quite a splash in Miami earlier in the year when she led a campaign to repeal Dade County’s recently passed anti-discrimination ordinance that granted legal protection to gays and lesbians.
She called her campaign, “Save Our Children” and argued, “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life. I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.”
She was also quoted as saying, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children” and “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.” Bryant went on to found Anita Bryant Ministries, which claimed to “cure” homosexuals by “deprogramming” them.
At the time, Bryant was something of a celebrity as well as the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission. When it was announced Bryant was coming to New Orleans to perform a concert at the Municipal Auditorium, the local lesbian and gay bars in the French Quarter responded by boycotting Florida orange juice.
The queer community was angry and ready to mobilize. Rushton and fellow activist Alan Robinson spearheaded a protest rally.
Robinson, who was a gay activist while studying at the University of Illinois, had arrived in New Orleans two years earlier. He met Rushton while volunteering at the Gay Services Center, a community outreach facility in the Marigny that had been founded by former Baptist minister Mike Stark in the wake of the Up Stairs Lounge fire. The two activists began dating and one night over dinner, they, along with Ann Gallmeyer, founded the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, which eventually became the Gertrude Stein Society.
Upon learning that Bryant was coming to town, the Gertrude Stein Society reached out to several local gay organizations and progressive groups and formed HERE (Human Equal Rights for Everyone). The group’s purpose was to plan a protest against Bryant’s concerts. HERE eventually grew into a coalition of fifteen different groups. Rushton turned the Vieux Carre Courier offices on Decatur Street into a de facto HERE headquarters to plan the demonstration.
A photograph of the 1977 rally that appeared in the Vieux Carré Courier 1977, by Owen Murphy
HERE contacted Rod Wagner, a board member of the New Orleans chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and impressed upon him Bryant’s virulent opposition to gay rights. The New Orleans Board of AFTRA then unanimously passed a resolution asking its members to not air the Bryant concerts.
Wagner is quoted as saying, “They were afraid, and our board agreed, that her appearance could set up even more of a climate for violence here than we’re already experiencing. And we are having our troubles. For instance, several older gay men have been stabbed to death in the French Quarter in the past few weeks, and I understand the suspect has said, ‘Jesus doesn’t like gay people.’ What also concerns us are the reports of violence in the Miami area.”
Wagner goes on to cite a bumper sticker popular in Miami at the time that read, “Kill a Queen for Christ.”
The second prong of HERE’s attack was a rally to be held at Jackson Square followed by a march through the French Quarter to the Municipal Auditorium where Bryant was scheduled to perform. In the weeks before that rally, Robinson and Rushton flooded the French Quarter with flyers announcing the rally.
A fund-raising card published in 1977, the year of the protest in New Orleans, public domain.
On the day of the rally, June 18, Robinson, Rushton and the other organizers were astonished and delighted by the turnout. They had hoped a few hundred people would show up. Crowd estimates at the time pegged the attendance at 2,500 to 3,000 people. After the speechmaking, the crowd sang “We Shall Overcome” and began marching from the Square along St. Ann Street before turning right onto Bourbon and left onto Dumaine.
In his landmark book Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South, James Sears describes the march:
“Supporters on wrought iron balconies wrapped with banners cheered. The march extended four blocks from sidewalk to sidewalk . . . Marking one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in the city’s history, thousands of protestors arrived at the North Rampart Street Municipal Auditorium Entrance. [The] Gertrude Stein [Society] was elated: ‘The reaction within the ranks was explosive, euphoric, and pure; the silence of the past is ended.’”
Photographs of the rally by New Orleans photographer Owen Murphy
Murphy worked for the Vieux Carré Courier at the time. These photographs are published here for the first time courtesy the photographer, copyright Owen Murphy.
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The 1977 rally, photograph by Owen Murphy
The success of the rally energized the LGBT+ community in New Orleans and also served as a harbinger of the shift in public attitudes toward homosexuality. Rushton attended similar protests which were held in other cities where Bryant performed. This backlash against Bryant’s bigotry caused the Florida Citrus Commission to drop her as its spokesperson.
The Gertrude Stein Society evolved into the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus (LAGPAC) in 1980. For twenty-five years, LAGPAC advocated for queer rights and counted among its achievements the 1991 passage in New Orleans of a non-discrimination ordinance that afforded protections to queer folk.
Rushton eventually left New Orleans for New York City. Although his obituary lists “a long bout of liver trouble” as his cause of death there on June 26, 1987, his full name, William Faulkner Rushton is part of the New Orleans AIDS memorial in Washington Square Park. He is buried in Kentucky.
A brick honoring William Faulkner Rushton in the AIDS Memorial, Washinton Square Park, New Orleans. Photo by Ellis Anderson
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