Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation [Hardcover]

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumaticfamilies ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors needsrevealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement.Winner Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime) It's indescribably moving to learn in a final author's note that survivors hesitant to speak on the record for In his impressive, meticulously reported debut as a nonfiction author, Robert Fieseler vividly re-creates the world that produced a galvanizing tragedy, a fire at a New Orleans bar in the summer of 1973 that took thirty-two lives. In reminding us of the furtiveness of gay life even in a tolerant city, and of the official cultures hostility to it, Tinderbox is riveting and unforgettable. Fieseler handles contradictions with finesse, parsing the closets long shadow over gay life in New Orleans, one reason the [Up Stairs Lounge] tragedy did not catalyze the kind of outrage and activism that followed the Stonewall rebellion.... The book is loving, sensitive, and diligent. Very moving.... Eloquent... haunting. The structure reminds one of Thornton Wilders classic novel This vital book chronicles one of the worst outrages against gay people in modern America, and it does so with fantastic vividness. It restores a forgotten chaptelC,