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    Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
    Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
    Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Robert W. Fieseler

    Narrated by Paul Heitsch

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 traumatic-families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors' needs-revealing 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. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 19, 2018
    ISBN9781684413096
    Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation

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    Reviews for Tinderbox

    4.5/5

    28 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Having not known of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire, this book was an excellent history which detailed the event, the context, and placed the fire within the larger story of gay rights. I also appreciated the characterization of New Orleans and the communities which call that city home (I visited New Orleans several years ago and loved the city). The comparison, at the beginning of the book, of the Up Stairs Fire and the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in 2016 are also striking. I know pieces of this story (elements touch on recent events), but this book provides a deeper historical context for events. A excellent read for those interested in the history of gay rights in the United States.
    • 4/5
      Almost all gay people who were alive in 1976 know of the horrific Up Stairs fire in New Orleans. This book recounts those terrible moments in great detail. The author even names a suspect (never convicted). The most amazing thing is the denial anything ever happened by the City of New Orleans (especially NOPD). They were just gays. We don't want to talk about it.
    • 5/5
      American LGBT history from prior to the AIDS crisis is getting more of its due in recent years, and this was an excellent contribution. Basically, New Orleans in the early 1970s was only tenuously welcoming to gay and trans people by virtue of being a large-ish city with many transplants; it was still heavily religious and without the large out community of San Francisco or New York. The book reviews where these people went for companionship, including not just the obvious bars but also a church congregation and relatively tolerant neighborhoods. The bar in the title was part of that, and its tragic end in 1973 is just part of this story.There was also more nuance than just the welcoming-niche-newtorks vs. disapproval-by-everyone-else dichotomy, which Fieseler told thoroughly. For example, the doctors in charge at Charity Hospital decided definitively to open a new ward early to treat the victims, and used that space to help shield some of the burn victims from the negative publicity about being found in a gay bar while they recovered.Part of the real tragedy is that some of the fire victims don't get much of their story told, because no one really knew who they were. The identity of one was finally confirmed almost 40 years after the fire, a small but important contribution to that LGBT history I mentioned at the start.