In the early 1970s, on the edge of the historic French Quarter and the bustling downtown business district, New Orleans’ UpStairs Lounge was a destination left intentionally obscure. An oasis for the city’s sizeable but, for the most part, strictly closeted gay male population, a lack of visibility was in many ways its most valuable commodity.
But in 1973 when the club was set ablaze in an act of arson that cost a staggering 32 lives, that lack of attention endured, the news barely making it into the papers or, it seemed, even into the consciousness of the local community.
“An ordinary reaction in New Orleans society would have been effusive sympathies and a large outpouring,” said Robert Fieseler, whose new book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the UpStairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, chronicles the blaze and its aftermath. This is, after all, the city that invented the second line funeral, with dancing, parasol-twirling mourners and brass band musicians – perhaps the most ostentatious remembrance ritual America knows.
Instead, Fieseler discovered mostly a studied apathy. “Homosexuality was not supposed to be talked about openly, and when it was thrust into the open it made a lot of people panic,” he told the Guardian in an interview.
At the time, New Orleans was a place of strange duality for LGBT people. On the one hand, the city’s long-standing social permissiveness and liberalism made it a haven in the conservative and traditional south.
“It was the queer capital of the south in 1973,” said Fieseler. “A gay man could, in 1973, live a very full life that he might not be able to enjoy in other places.”
But the city was also still mired in the sexually repressive dogma of the heavily Catholic population.
According to Fieseler, undercover police would regularly conduct sting operations to catch gay men soliciting for sex in public spaces, and if caught and arrested on a dreaded “crimes against nature” charge, the ramifications in the wider world were absolute. “Your name would be associated with what was considered a despicable, morally licentious behavior and you would become a pariah in the society you loved. You’d lose your job, your home, everything,” Fieseler said.
At the time, a residence occupied by two suspected gay men (or two “spinsters”) could be declared a house of ill-repute and seized with little to no due process.
Enter the relatively safe space of the UpStairs lounge, a quietly well-known place where gay men (Fieseler notes that during this era, the lesbian scene was politically and socially isolated from the gay scene) could openly be themselves. That safety came crashing down violently on 24 June 1973 when the lounge, which only had one public entrance/exit became a fiery tomb for 32. It was the deadliest US incident of violence against an LGBT population until the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
The likely perpetrator: a troubled and violent patron who had been ejected from the bar moments earlier after a fight. As he was dragged out, his jaw broken, Roger Dale Nunez is reported to have yelled: “I’m going to burn you all out.”
Within minutes, the entrance had been doused in lighter fluid bought from a nearby pharmacy and sparked into flames.
“That’s part of the more complex and really terrible and fascinating nature of the fire,” Fieseler notes. “It almost highlights even more the degree of oppression that many homosexuals lived in in this time period.”
Despite copious physical and circumstantial evidence, Nunez was never arrested for the crime. He died by suicide the following year.
Two years into Fieseler’s research for the book, the Pulse shooting inspired a brief public re-examination of the UpStairs inferno. “Evidence of it was resuscitated suddenly, and in a lot of publications that for decades wouldn’t publish a word about the fire.” Fieseler said.
There were reports in 2016 that, like Nunez, the Pulse shooter was a sexually conflicted man who may have been engaged in gay relationships prior to his rampage. For Fieseler, though, the two incidents don’t easily fall into a historical trajectory with one another.
“The parallels start to fray at a certain point,” Fieseler said.
And as far as releasing the book now, Fieseler said it is a timely examination given the threat of progress rolling back for LGBT people under Donald Trump’s administration. “We exist in a time where queer Americans are profoundly out of power – out of power – who represents us in this administration?”
He continued: “I think there’s a need for anything that can serve as a kind of counter-narrative to that pure invisibility in the the upper echelons of power today.”
