Look and Listen

Biography

Johnny Townsend grew up in New Orleans, where he witnessed tragedies such as the Destrehan-Luling ferry disaster which killed 85 people, and the UpStairs Lounge fire in the French Quarter, which killed 32. He served as a Mormon missionary in Italy for two years, and has worked in the years since as a librarian, nursing assistant, college English instructor, mail carrier, lab assistant in a Physiology lab, bank teller, and insulation installer. He earned an MFA in fiction writing from Louisiana State University, and he has published stories and essays in Newsday, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Humanist, The Progressive, Glimmer Train, The Massachusetts Review, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and in many other publications. He is the author of 12 books, including "Mormon Underwear," "Zombies for Jesus," "The Abominable Gayman," "Sex among the Saints," "The Golem of Rabbi Loew," and "Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire."

Inspiration

My mother taught me to read before I started school, and she gave me a love of books. I wrote my first story as a present for my third-grade teacher's birthday, and I've been writing ever since. I learned as a teenager that Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" while still a teenager, so I committed myself to writing my first novel when I was 16. (It has thankfully been destroyed.) But my real conversion to mature writing came as a result of my experiences in Italy as a Mormon missionary. Mission life was not as spiritual and wonderful as we'd been led to believe. In fact, many of the other missionaries, especially the leaders, were downright horrid people, and when I returned home, I decided to write about the true nature of missionary life. This turned into "The Abominable Gayman." Another incident in my life which inspired me was the UpStairs Lounge fire. An arsonist set fire to a French Quarter gay bar on Gay Pride Day in 1973 and killed 32 people. I wanted to read more about it, but there was nothing written, so I decided I would write about it myself. I tracked down survivors of the fire and friends and relatives of those killed and told the story of what happened that dreadful day.