Tinderbox

In Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, award-winning journalist Robert W. Fieseler investigates a defining but little-known event in LGBT history and the impact it had on the burgeoning gay rights movement. In 1973, an arsonist burnt down a gay bar in the New Orleans French Quarter and killed 31 men and one woman. Until the Pulse Massacre of 2016, the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge was the largest mass murder of LGBT people. But, as Fieseler points out, the tragedy only continued after the flames were out, with family members of the deceased, the city of New Orleans, the Catholic Church, and the larger world virtually ignoring what transpired. In 2019, Tinderbox won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.

The book opens with a listing of all the people involved in the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and its aftermath. From the bar patrons in attendance on that fateful night to the business owners, journalists, and hustlers of the French Quarter, from New Orleans city and community leaders to the family members of those who died, the size of this dramatis personæ illustrates the epic scale of the tragedy and its still-reverberating effects on a community and a nation.

In a preface, Fieseler discusses the similarities between the Pulse Massacre and the Up Stairs Lounge Fire, both watershed events that targeted LGBT people for no other reason than that they were LGBT. But he also addresses the differences between the two mass killings, especially in the public response to each tragedy. The Pulse Massacre was remembered with memorials and flags flown at half-mast. By contrast, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire was willfully forgotten, "hushed by a nation not ready to look."



An introduction follows, in which Fieseler muses on what it means to remember, particularly when it comes to the changing tide of public opinion on LGBT issues. He addresses some of the turning points in the LGBT movement, including the Stonewall Riots, the coming out of major celebrities, the AIDS crisis, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, and the passage of marriage equality. But save for Stonewall, which occurred in 1969, all of these turning points occurred after the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. At the time of the Fire, LGBT folks lived on the margins of society, their struggles ignored. But there are those who are working to bring the story of the Fire to a wider audience, including a Louisiana minister who wants to ensure the public remembers the Fire victims alongside their comrades at Stonewall, at the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The first part of the book covers the events of June 24, 1973, the day of the Fire. Fieseler profiles the wide variety of mostly closeted, mostly blue-collar men who had come to the bar to drink and socialize and unwind. Members of the nearby Metropolitan Community Church, one of the nation's first LGBT-affirming congregations, were there. So too were many celebrants from that weekend's gay pride celebration in New Orleans. Pianist David Gray was performing at the Up Stairs Lounge when, at about 8:00 in the evening, a wall of flames and the smell of lighter fluid engulfed the building. Around 20 people escaped, but the rest were inadvertently locked inside the blazing building. Bar patrons attempted to flee, but bars covered the windows. One man, on fire, squeezed through the bars but was unable to make it all the way; an image of his charred body dangling from the side of the building remains one of the few photographs widely published afterward.

The only suspect unearthed in the subsequent arson investigation was a local hustler named Rodger Dale Nunez. Despite a history of petty crime, mental illness, witnesses placing him at the scene of the Fire, and his own confessions to various people, police never formally charged or arrested Nunez in what amounted to a monumental miscarriage of justice and derelict of duty. Nunez committed suicide the year after the Fire, and the State closed the arson case in 1980.



The second part of the book deals with the fallout from the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. And the treatment of the victims and survivors only compounded the catastrophe. The City of New Orleans ignored the needs of the survivors. The Catholic Church refused to honor the dead with Christian burial rights. Even many families, reeling from the shame of having an LGBT relative, didn't show up to claim the bodies of their loved ones.

Yet there were those who rejected the notion that the Up Stairs Lounge Fire should be swept under the rug so quickly. In the third part of Tinderbox, the efforts of the local LGBT community come into focus as various people and organizations work to ensure the Fire is not forgotten, that the lives lost were not in vain, and that those who survived were treated with respect. Though these efforts mostly fell on deaf ears in 1973, the activists' work undoubtedly illuminated the brutal discrimination gay Americans faced and contributed to the changing attitudes toward the LGBT community and, ultimately, to more widespread acceptance.